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Police officers escort protesters near the Bell Hotel in Epping, London, Sunday, Aug. 31, 2025 after a temporary injunction that would have blocked asylum seekers from being housed at the hotel was overturned.The government intends to move hundreds migrants from asylum hotels to disused army barracks next month, according to reports.It’s part of Labour’s drive to completely end the use of asylum hotels by the end of the current parliament (expected in 2029) and comes after anti-migrant protests over the use of such accommodation.Two sites will be used – Cameron Barracks in Inverness and the Crowborough army training camp in East Sussex – to house the migrants from the end of next month, according to The Times.The Home Office is reportedly looking to work with the Ministry of Defence to house up to 10,000 migrants on other disused military sites.Officials hope this will also act as a further deterrent to those crossing the Channel in small boats.Pre-fabricated, modular units much like Portakabins may also be built to accommodate the current 32,000 asylum seekers in the UK.A Home Office spokesperson said: “We are furious at the level of illegal migrants and asylum hotels.“This government will close every asylum hotel. Work is well under way, with more suitable sites being brought forward to ease pressure on communities and cut asylum costs.”The use of military sites is allegedly temporary as the government looks to use more industrial locations and other stop-gap accommodation which might be cheaper and more “appropriate” than hotels.The news broke after prime minister Keir Starmer said he was “frustrated and angry” about the climbing cost of the asylum system on Monday.His words followed a brutal report from a cross-bench panel of MPs on the Home Affairs committee which accused the Home Office mismanagement of “squandering” billions on using hotels for migrants.However, it’s worth remembering that, only earlier this year, the government insisted it was not going to focus on such “large and novel sites” for housing migrants.In August, Labour said it would end the use of large military sites to house asylum seekers and would instead scatter them around the UK to reduce pressure on local services.The government told The Times it wanted to stop using sites like former RAF Wethersfield ad RAF Scampton, and instead focus on empty homes or former student blocks with self-catering facilities.And in February, then-permanent secretary at the Home Office Matthew Rycroft said that the government were not going to go down the same route as the Tories had done.“The previous government had a policy of exiting hotels partly by acquiring some large and novel sites, such as barges, former military land and so on,” he told the Home Affairs committee almost nine months ago.“The current government’s policy is also to exit hotels but to do it in a different way, with a large number of smaller sites. Some of those will be acquired by the Home Office, but to the extent possible, we will be going more back into the private rental market, which is where we were before we got into hotels in the first place.”He added that the new strategy “has a greater emphasis on smaller sites, local buy-in and – learning the lessons from our previous experiences – greater engagement with local authorities, communities and others.”Evidently, Labour have moved its focus away from that strategy amid the soaring popularity of Reform UK, who have the most hardline immigration policies.It may also have been influenced by the violent disorder outside Epping’s Bell Hotel over asylum seekers seen earlier this year, and the appointment of a new home secretary, Shabana Mahmood.Related...Keir Starmer s Asylum Seeker Woes Just Keep Getting WorseLabour Condemned As A Moral Void As Starmer Vows To Remove Asylum Golden Ticket Starmer Vows To End Asylum Golden Ticket In New Immigration Crackdown

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