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Date submitted

30 June 2026

Submitted by

Interested party

The Home Office plan to use a Crown Development Order to expand Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre (IRC) 1. On 29 June, I attended a briefing and Q&A with Calum Miller, the Bicester & Woodstock Member of Parliament, about the Home Office Consultation plan to expand Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre in his constituency. 2. The expansion of Campsfield House IRC would be 1) wrong and 2) ineffective in various ways. 3. Better, more humane and more effective solutions, community-based and case-led solutions, have been trialled, and shown to be more effective, and these types of solution should be developed by the Home Office. Sir Stephen Shaw’s exhaustive national inquiry concluded that as well as being harmful, detention is wasteful and ineffective. It led to a policy by the then government of reducing the use of detention and testing alternative, community-based approaches. Campsfield was one of four centres closed as a result. The community-based approaches were shown to work and to be better value for money. 4. If I understood correctly, Mr Miller told us that the Home Office intended Campsfield House to detain three categories of foreign nationals: 1) asylum seekers whose appeals have been denied; 2) people who entered the UK without a visa, or whose visas are no longer valid; 3) foreign nationals who served custodial sentences of 12 months or more. 5. It is difficult to understand why any of these people should be locked up. Asylum seekers may only seek asylum from within the UK. Denying asylum seekers safe passage leaving them unable to enter the UK except by undocumented and more hazardous routes is a choice the Home Office has made, using the 2022 Nationality and Borders Act and the 2023 Illegal Migration Act, for instance. Criminalising UK asylum seekers in this way is a contravention of the 1951 Refugee Convention, to which the UK was a key signatory. When the only way to enter is undocumented, it is entirely reprehensible of the UK state to put asylum seekers into an illegal status. 6. In the past, people were locked up in Campsfield House IRC who were still fighting for refugee status, and some of them won their cases. Locking up people who are found to have valid asylum claims is a terrible injustice by the state. Apparently, the majority of people who left detention in 2025 – up to 56% – remained in the UK, thus raising the question of why they were detained in the first place, as noted by former Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, David Neal. 7. Also, recent changes to work visa and leave to remain rules implemented or announced by the UK state has changed / is changing the system for people who came to this country in good faith, throwing some into illegal status if they try to remain. That is unjust, and should not lead to people being locked up. 8. Even deportations of the third category of people, foreign nationals who have served custodial sentences of 12 months or more, is illogical. First, if they have served their time, what justification is there for locking them up beyond that time? Second, if the UK state needs to deport time-served foreign national custodial convicts, for the public good, where does that leave time-served domestic custodial convicts? If custody has not rehabilitated foreign national custodial convicts, why would the effect be any different for domestic custodial convicts? Why are time-served domestic convicts less dangerous to the public good than time-served foreign national custodial convicts? It makes no sense. If the Home Office believes a certain individual to still be a grave danger to the public, the state has an existing (criminal) custodial system, and there is no good rationale for bypassing it. 9. It is extremely disturbing to read at GOV.UK that the current government plainly states its intention to push through a Sentencing Bill, with a review led by David Gauke, to deport more foreign national offenders (FNOs) expressly to reduce overcrowding in the UK prison system. “This Sentencing Bill measure will allow FNOs in prison to be eligible for removal for the purpose of immediate deportation at any point after sentencing, allowing for deportations to happen earlier.” It is difficult not to see a shameful connection between a push for this proposed new Sentencing Bill, with its plan to speed up and increase deportations of FNOs – for the convenience of the managers of the UK prison estate – and the push by the Home Office to expand Campsfield House IRC. 10. One of the most horrifying facts about detentions at Campsfield House IRC is that people were detained without trial for indefinite – and often unreasonably extended – periods of time, in contravention of the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights. This practice was standard until the centre closed in 2018. Where is the guarantee that this practice will not occur again? 11. Detention of people should be the last, not the first solution. What is needed, beyond stopping the expansion of Campsfield House IRC, is a decision to close Campsfield House IRC and all other immigrant detention centres. The decision to re-open Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre, with its history of injustice and human suffering, was in itself ethically inexcusable. The fact that the centre was closed by a Conservative government and reopened by a Labour government should be doubly shameful for all involved. 12. As to the route being used by the Home Office to implement this plan of expansion, it can only be seen by local residents as outrageous that the Home Office plans to use a Crown Development Order to bypass democratic accountability and push through this expansion plan in the face of democratically arrived at opposition by local government bodies at every level, from Parish, District Council, County Council, to constituency MP. As long ago as October 2024, Cherwell District Council passed a motion opposing the re-opening of Campsfield House IRC, and the position of the constituency MP, Mr Miller, against the use of Campsfield House IRC is a matter of public record. 13. As for the demonstration of level of care by the Home Office, for the health and well-being of those imprisoned inside Campsfield House IRC, is shown by their choice of care management company. The decision to use Mitie, a company with such a catastrophically bad record of care in the past, including hunger strikes, breakouts, disturbances, arson and suicides, and also very recently in at least one other detention centre, in reports by inspectors, shows a complete lack of care and is deeply irresponsible. Like Campsfield, Harmondsworth detention centre, near Heathrow, is run by Mitie on a for-profit basis. Mitie’s performance there was described in a 2025 Prison Inspectorate report as ‘Drugs, despair and decrepit conditions’ providing ‘the worst conditions they had seen in immigration detention’. 14. I am not advocating a NIMBY solution. There should be no immigration removal centres anywhere, bar perhaps a small temporary waiting room at an international airport. However, an immigration detention centre is especially inappropriate in extremely close proximity to 1) a residential street and 2) an area assigned for innovation, science and technology development, as is the case with Campsfield House IRC. 15. On the second of these locational inappropriacies, the expansion of Campsfield House IRC conflicts with local and national visions of this area as part of a thriving science, innovation and business district within the Oxford-Cambridge ‘corridor’. The adjoining land was released from the Green Belt in the Cherwell District Local Plan Partial Review 2020 with a rationale of facilitating “high-value employment” and economic growth, particularly through the development of the Oxford Technology Park. The Campsfield expansion would be located in the heart of an area designated for high-value employment in the digital, life sciences, and engineering sectors. That is not the type of employment that would be offered by a high security custodial institution like this. Former local MP Nicola Blackwood wrote: “I cannot see how this Local Plan Policy, calling for “higher value employment uses such as high technology industries in the research and development sector”, could possibly be interpreted to include employment at an Immigration Removal facility.”