Crowborough residents will get no chance to comment on Home Office plans to keep up to 540 asylum seekers at the town’s Army camp until 2030, ministers have confirmed.
The Home Office’s own planning papers show the normal route, which includes a public comment period, would have reached a decision by the end of this month.
Housing minister Matthew Pennycook told Conservative MP Chris Philp in a written answer published on Thursday: “There will be no public representation period for this Urgent Crown Development application.” Only Wealden District Council and statutory bodies have been consulted, in a window that ran from 4 to 12 November. It closed on the day the answer was published.
The Home Office wants full planning permission to keep using Crowborough Training Camp as non-detained asylum accommodation for up to 540 residents until 22 January 2030. It would also keep the floodlights, CCTV, generators and security fencing put in under emergency powers. One government department has applied. Another, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, will decide.
The camp has housed mainly newly arrived men since 22 January this year. It has done so under a 12-month emergency right for Crown land, which needed no planning application and expires on 22 January 2027. If the new application succeeds, the town will have had no formal public say on a site that could be in use for four years.
Crowborough was told something different at the start. Wealden council says the Ministry of Defence offered the site “for a maximum of 12 months”, and a Home Office deputy director told its scrutiny committee in November 2025 that it was “offered on a 12 month fixed period”. Court papers in a judicial review brought by residents’ group Crowborough Shield later showed the Home Office asked the MoD on 16 April 2026 to extend its stay. The MoD agreed on 30 April.
That timing matters, because the fast-track route is meant for development that is both nationally important and “needed as a matter of urgency”. Under the ordinary Crown development route, the public get at least 21 days to comment.
The Home Office’s own statement on urgency sets out why it chose the faster route. It says the ordinary route takes about 12 weeks, so an application made at the beginning of September would have reached a decision “to the end of November 2026”. That, it argues, would leave “no/limited scope” to plan moving people out if permission were refused, since new arrivals would have to stop several weeks before the January deadline.
Wealden council does not accept that. In a letter of 3 September its Director of Place, Chris Bending, said “any urgency that is self-induced through the Home Office’s delay in seeking further planning permission cannot reasonably be treated as demonstrating necessity”. The council had warned the Home Office in June that a fresh permission would be needed. As late as July, the department said it was still “considering the appropriate planning route”.
On 7 October the Secretary of State accepted that the plan was nationally important and urgent. The council says no reasons were given, and it “expressly reserves its position” on whether that decision was lawful.
Parliament created the urgent route in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023, under the Conservatives. But Labour is now the Government. Its ministers wrote the policy test for using it in February 2025, brought it into force that May, and are now both applicant and decision-maker at Crowborough.
The Home Office says the application “does not predetermine the outcome” and that the decision is being made independently by the housing department. Its statement argues the camp is more controlled than hotels in town centres, and points to the Government’s pledge to end the use of asylum hotels by the end of this Parliament. At the end of March, 97,519 people were on asylum support, 20,885 of them in hotels.
Sussex Weald MP Nusrat Ghani said: “In effect, the Government is marking its own homework and is avoiding full and proper scrutiny through the usual channels.”
The questions for ministers come from their own papers. If the Home Office knew in April that it wanted to stay until 2030, why did it not start the ordinary route, with a public comment period, then? Why will ministers not publish their reasons for calling it urgent? And what were Crowborough residents meant to make of the promise of 12 months?
Residents can still write to the housing department or the council, which must pass letters on. But there is no formal comment period, and the emergency permission runs out on 22 January.
