The Village That Voted to Leave the Union Just Found Out What Labour Thinks of Its Vote
Three thousand, one hundred and seventy-seven objections. Just one letter of support.
That is the verdict of the official record on the plan to house up to 1,256 male asylum seekers beside the Oxfordshire village of Piddington, and it did not stop the Labour Government for a single day. On Thursday 12 November, Angela Rayner, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, granted full planning permission for the temporary, phased use of the former MOD Bicester storage site, as the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government confirmed and the BBC reported, with the Government’s own decision report recording 3,177 representations against and exactly one in favour.
Piddington has around 350 residents. The camp approved beside it would hold more than three times that number. The objections came not only from the village but from the surrounding area and beyond: the campaign group Wrong Plan Wrong Site says it speaks for 50,000 residents in and around Bicester.
The villagers understood the arithmetic well enough. In September they held a symbolic referendum on leaving the United Kingdom altogether: 285 voted for independence, 26 against, one ballot spoiled. Parish council chairman Tim McNally declared the village the Principality of Piddington. It was a protest, not a policy, and everyone involved knew it. What it actually measured was the fury of a small rural community at having 1,256 men imposed on its doorstep without consent, without consultation worth the name and, now, without even the ordinary planning process.
The district council objected. The local NHS objected. The police and crime commissioner objected. The Government’s answer was to bypass them all.
The Power Rayner Used, and Why It Matters
Here is what makes this decision extraordinary, and it is not the camp itself. It is the route taken to approve it.
Under section 293B of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, as applied through the Urgent Crown Development procedure, a minister can grant planning permission for Crown land directly, skipping the local council entirely, where a project is deemed urgently needed and of national importance. This is a statutory fast-track procedure, not an emergency declaration. The Home Office applied as developer. Cherwell District Council was consulted, but never given the decision it would have held under the ordinary planning process. The application went in on 2 September. The permission came out ten weeks later, covering ten years of temporary use, new modular accommodation, demolition of existing buildings and even the site’s own wastewater treatment plant.
The Government’s published application file does contain a Statement of National Importance, and that document sets out the department’s case. What the public has not been given is a clear, testable explanation of why this project met the bar for urgent, nationally important development, or why the ordinary planning process was inadequate. The justification offered in public amounts to one sentence: “national demand for asylum accommodation remains high”. A fast-track power intended for qualifying urgent Crown development of national importance has been used to settle an argument the Government was losing with one village in Oxfordshire.
And here is the sting in the tail. The Home Office itself concedes that a final decision to proceed is yet to be taken. Ministers may have found a legal route around local opposition. That does not mean they have made a convincing political case for using it. They have spent their political capital, torching their relationship with every locally elected body in the area, to win a planning permission they have not even committed to using.
The Prime Minister’s Promise, Delivered to One Village
In August, Andy Burnham said that more affluent areas of the country must “play their part” in housing asylum seekers. The Prime Minister’s message was aimed at comfortable suburbs that, in his view, had dodged their share of a national duty.
Piddington now knows exactly what playing their part means. It means a fast-track Crown power. It means a council cut out of the loop. It means 3,177 objections read and dismissed, and a village that organised through every legitimate channel available to it discovering that the system was never listening in the first place.
The MOD Bicester scheme is one of three former military sites the Home Office announced in June it was exploring for asylum accommodation, alongside MOD Barnham and Linton-on-Ouse, while extending the use of Crowborough to 2030 and Wethersfield beyond 2027. Other communities should read the Piddington decision carefully, because it shows precisely how this Government intends to treat local opposition from here on.
Wrong Plan, Wrong Site, Wrong Process
Calum Miller, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bicester and Woodstock, did not mince his words. “It is the wrong plan and the wrong site for local communities, asylum seekers and taxpayers,” he said, telling ITV News Meridian that he was deeply disappointed.
His charge sheet is the Government’s own paperwork read back to it. The Government’s assessment accepts that problems with transport, community cohesion and pressure on local services will remain. The NHS has warned that nearby GP practices have no spare capacity. Crucial details of site access and sewage disposal have been left for later approval. The site itself carries asbestos and unexploded ordnance, and Miller argues the environmental objections underpinning a High Court challenge have simply been brushed aside in favour of the original, flawed assessment. This, he says, is a site that has never previously had accommodation, and ministers have blundered ahead regardless.
He is right, and the detail is worse than the summary. The Government’s own application file includes a preliminary ecological appraisal, a Habitats Regulations Assessment and an unexploded ordnance risk assessment. Ministers knew what was on this land before they signed.
The legal challenge is real and already under way, though it targets an earlier decision rather than this week’s permission. In August the Government concluded that an environmental assessment was unnecessary for the development. In October the campaign group Wrong Plan Wrong Site, which says it represents 50,000 residents in and around Bicester, launched a legal challenge against that refusal, seeking judicial review on the grounds that there are “credible concerns about potential significant environmental effects”. The claim is at an early stage, and the reporting cited does not establish whether the court has yet granted permission for it to proceed. Opponents of the planning permission itself now have six weeks from the decision to mount their own High Court challenge, though no such challenge has been confirmed as filed. The Government notes any challenge must show the decision is legally flawed, not merely that the planning arguments were weighed badly.
The environmental stakes are not academic. A former Ministry of Defence police officer has described badgers, bats and great crested newts living at the site, and the campaign group says protected species including barbastelle bats, otters and the black hairstreak, one of Britain’s rarest butterflies, are present. Barbastelles are on the endangered red list; last year Norfolk county council scrapped a £274 million road scheme after a colony was discovered on its route. These concerns have been raised by campaigners and form part of the wider dispute over the site’s environmental assessment. The relevant statutory protections remain applicable, and ministers must demonstrate that the development complies with them.
A Bomb Disposal Regiment Next Door
Then there is a question that sits with the Ministry of Defence.
The site sits beside the Defence Explosive Ordnance Disposal, Munitions and Search unit, which operates from a £100 million training centre at the barracks near Bicester. It trains British and overseas military personnel in maritime bomb disposal, counter-IED work and search techniques. Jenny Lamont, chairman of Wrong Plan Wrong Site, put the contradiction squarely in comments reported by The Telegraph.
“The Government’s own strategic defence review calls for Britain to strengthen military readiness in an increasingly dangerous world,” she said. “Yet the Home Office is proposing to open an asylum centre on ground used to train an internationally recognised specialist military training unit, and whose headquarters sit next door to the proposed asylum site.”
The Government’s response, as reported in the same Telegraph account, is that the unit will relocate its training operations away from the proposed asylum site, and that this will have no effect on the services it provides. That assurance exists. The evidence behind it does not, at least not anywhere the public can inspect. Ministers should publish the assessment showing how the relocation will work and why it will not degrade Britain’s bomb disposal training capability. Britain is asking its bomb disposal specialists to train for the wars of the 2020s from a campus being reshuffled to make room for an asylum camp, and the public is expected to take the no-impact claim on trust.
The NHS Question Nobody Will Answer in Writing
Tim McNally, chairman of Piddington parish council, told The Telegraph he has been trying for months to get straight answers about what happens to local services when the camp opens.
“We have received information that three Bicester GP practices have been asked to prepare for approximately 400 additional patients each. That needs a clear public response from the NHS and Home Office,” he said. “If local services are expected to absorb substantial additional demand, residents deserve to know the staffing, funding and capacity arrangements before the site opens.”
The 400-per-practice figure has not been officially confirmed. It comes from information the parish council says it has received through its own inquiries with local health bodies. But note what has happened here: residents of an English village, facing the arrival of a population larger than their own, must trade in informal figures about their own GP surgeries. The available reporting does not identify any published capacity plan from either department, and the Government has yet to provide a clear public explanation of the numbers. Miller’s account of the Government’s own assessment confirms the pressure is documented at the highest level; what has not been published is the plan for meeting it.
What the Government Says
A Home Office spokesman said: “The Government is working on a fairer distribution of asylum accommodation across the country, with over £1 billion saved in costs since the election. This includes closing all asylum hotels and moving to alternative accommodation, including former military sites. These are designed to be self-contained, with 24/7 security and CCTV, to minimise the impact on the local community.”
That £1 billion is the department’s own assertion. Neither the department’s statements nor the reporting cited sets out the baseline, period or methodology behind the figure, and no published breakdown or independent audit of it has been identified in the material cited here. The costs nobody is counting in public are the ones falling on the NHS, on rural GP practices, on a bomb disposal training estate and on communities handed the consequences of a decision made in Whitehall.
Opposition politicians put it more bluntly. Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: “Angela Rayner and the Labour Government have betrayed the people of Piddington and Bicester by abusing their emergency powers in this way” (ITV News Meridian). Katie Lam, the shadow housing secretary, said Rayner “has told the people of Piddington that their voices count for nothing” (The Guardian). Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s home affairs spokesman, claimed “over 1,200 unvetted illegal migrant men are being dumped in Piddington” (BBC News). Readers should be clear about the boundary here: the words “illegal” and “unvetted” are those politicians’ own allegations about people whose immigration status is not independently established in the reporting. What is established is the number, the process, and the scale of the opposition. On those facts, every one of those critics is right to demand answers.
GREAT BRITISH PAC REACTION
Claire Bullivant, Chief Executive Officer of Great British PAC, said:
“3,177 objections. ONE letter of support. And Labour’s response? To bulldoze ahead regardless. What an absolutely staggering display of arrogance and contempt for the British people.
“Angela Rayner has effectively told an entire community that their opinions count for nothing. Their concerns about local services, their countryside, their safety and their future have all been brushed aside because Labour thinks it knows best.
“And the sheer hypocrisy is breathtaking. This is a Government that lectures everyone about democracy, fairness and listening to communities, while using extraordinary planning powers to ride roughshod over the very people it is supposed to represent.
“Labour isn’t listening to Britain. It’s dictating to Britain.
“If 3,177 objections cannot make this Government reconsider, what on earth is the point of public consultation? Is democracy now just a performance where ordinary people are allowed to speak, provided ministers can completely disregard what they say?
“British villages are not Labour’s dumping grounds, and British taxpayers are not blank cheques for its disastrous decisions.
“Angela Rayner and her colleagues need to get something through their heads. They are public servants, not our masters. They were elected to serve the British people, not steamroller them into submission.
“This decision absolutely reeks of a Government drunk on its own power. And if Labour thinks it can treat communities across Britain with this level of contempt without consequences, it has another thing coming.”
Great British PAC’s assessment is as follows.
This is no way to govern a country that believes in its own communities. A statutory power written for nationally important and urgent projects has been used to override one village and the wider Bicester area, against 3,177 objections and a single letter of support, with the district council, the NHS and the police and crime commissioner all set aside. British communities do their duty for the nation every day, in war graves and village halls and Territorial Army centres. What they will not accept is a Government that treats their consent as an obstacle to be designed around. If Labour believes that is fair, its ministers should walk into the House of Commons and say so in their own words, instead of hiding behind a single sentence about national demand.
The Prime Minister owns this decision. Andy Burnham told the country that affluent areas must play their part. Angela Rayner signed the order. Neither has explained why the community that organised against the scheme was bypassed rather than persuaded, or what criteria determined that Piddington was the right place and this was the right moment. That is not the conduct of a Government that trusts the British people; it is the conduct of one that hopes they will not notice.
The questions the Government has yet to answer in public are now a list. How many patients will the three Bicester GP practices be asked to absorb, and who pays for it? What is the plan, and the cost, for removing asbestos and unexploded ordnance from the site? Where exactly does bomb disposal training relocate to, and where is the evidence that Britain’s capability will not be degraded? What is the baseline behind the claimed £1 billion of savings, and what auditor has checked it? Why grant planning permission, spend political capital and antagonise an entire community, when the Home Office still will not say whether the camp will open at all? Every British taxpayer is entitled to those answers, and Labour ministers are obliged to give them.
The courts must be left alone to do their work. A legal challenge to the environmental assessment decision has been launched. The Government must respect the judicial process and allow the courts to consider the case independently.
GREAT BRITISH PAC DEMANDS
Great British PAC demands that Labour ministers:
- Publish the full NHS and local services impact assessment. Before any asylum seeker arrives, ministers must lay before the public exactly how many patients the three Bicester GP practices have been asked to absorb, the staffing and funding attached to that demand, and the mental health provision plan for the site.
- Release the asbestos, unexploded ordnance and site safety plans. Communities are entitled to the full remediation plans, the total cost to the taxpayer and the timetable for the deferred decisions on site access and sewage disposal before a single person moves in, not after.
- Explain how military training and Britain’s defence readiness will be protected.Ministers must come to the despatch box and provide the evidence that relocating Defence Explosive Ordnance Disposal, Munitions and Search training will not reduce Britain’s bomb disposal training capability. The defence of the realm is not a planning detail to be managed away.
- Publish the full costs and evidence behind the Government’s claimed savings. The baseline, period and methodology behind the claimed £1 billion of savings since the election, together with the full projected costs of the MOD Bicester scheme across its ten-year permission, belong in the public domain. Taxpayers are owed the arithmetic, not the headline.
- Confirm whether the Home Office intends to proceed with the site. Given the department’s own admission that no final decision has been taken, ministers must say, before the High Court proceedings are determined, whether this camp will open, and confirm that any judicial review will be met with full disclosure of the underlying documents.
A village voted to leave the Union rather than accept this camp. Its district council, its health service and its police and crime commissioner publicly opposed the scheme, and the planning record carries 3,177 formal representations against it, from the village, the wider Bicester area and respondents beyond. The Government’s answer was a fast-track Crown power, a skipped planning process and a savings claim nobody has been allowed to audit. Planning permission is now granted, but the Home Office still says no final decision has been taken to open the site. That decision remains with ministers, and so does the choice to think again. Until they account for how this decision was made and answer the questions above, the people of Piddington and Bicester will keep asking, and this time the country will be listening.
