BREAKING: Home Office drops plan to house asylum seekers at Cameron Barracks after months of controversy, secrecy, protests, indecision and divisions - EUROPE SAYS
Home Office drops plan to house asylum seekers at Cameron Barracks after asylum minister Alex Norris (pictured) indicates they faltered when Highland Council insisted on an HMO license. The Home Office has. . .
Home Office drops plan to house asylum seekers at Cameron Barracks after asylum minister Alex Norris (pictured) indicates they faltered when Highland Council insisted on an HMO license. The Home Office has ditched its costly and divisive plan tohouse 300 single male asylum seekers at Cameron Barracks in Inverness. Multiple sources confirmed to The Inverness Courier that the proposal would not go-ahead apparently due to the need for an HMO license. Subsequently, reports south of the border also confirmed that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood had abandoned the idea. There was political opposition and disquiet about the plans since they were announced in October but support for the plans was publicly decidedly muted. Very few people were able to fully back the proposal outside of the Labour party due to the overwhelming degree of secrecy on the part of the Home Office. But ultimately the idea appears to have faltered on legality and theHighland Council’s insistence that the Home Office required a licence for a House in Multiple Occupation (HMO). There were also concernsvoiced by former MSPs Fergus Ewing and Edward Mountain that the barracks may only be used for six months at a timewithout planning permission. In March,Highland Council’s chief legal officer Stewart Fraser set out chapter and verse of the Housing (Scotland) Act 2006defining HMO use. Then two weeks agoasylum minister Alex Norris told Westminster’s Home Affairs Committeethat the issue of an HMO license was the sticking point. He said that “we are in disagreement with the local authority” over the barracks as it had already been used for “broadly the same purpose” to house Afghan families. At this point relations with statutory partners like the council or NHS Highland had become strained due to the lack of information coming from the Home Office. Mr Norris claimed that security meant the government could not be fully open about the plans but that convinced no one as local bodies were left in the lurch. The writing had been on the wall since soon after the announcement about the planned use of the barracks when the council publicly rebuked the government. The local authorityvoted unanimously against the plan despite more than half the political groups on Highland Council being left-of-centreand pro-migrant. It warned the Home Office about the dangers of an information vacuum on everything from location to safety and security was leading to misinformation. That misinformation continues as The Inverness Courier can attest having been privy to sometimes gruesome and wholly false claims asylum seekers being on the site. The Inverness Courier received the same stock response to media inquiries for months on end – itself a fairly unprecedented tack from a government. What emerged carried echoes of what has been seen elsewhere in the UK – division, racism, demonstrations and public disillusionment with politics. The decision to target Cameron Barracks may have impacted the Scottish Parliament election as the Highlands did not return one Labour MSP. And now the plan has been abandoned, along with the Prime Minister whose government introduced it in the first place. So questions must once again be asked – not least why the legal position in Scotland was not considered given the different systems on either side of the border. Do you want to respond to this article? If so, clickhereto submit your thoughts and they may be published in print.