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Date submitted

23 September 2026

Submitted by

Interested party

Dear Crown Development Case Team, I am resending this as although you responded as if I (on behalf of Refugee Resource, Oxford) had sent this, you did not appear to have received it: Subject: Objection to Campsfield House IRC expansion, CROWN/2026/0000004 September 1st 2026 Dear Planning Inspectorate, Refugee Resource is an Oxfordshire-based therapeutic charity with a very good reputation, working with refugees, asylum seekers, victims and survivors of modern slavery, and other vulnerable migrants. We work with statutory and charitable partners to provide the best input and outcomes for our clients, working in a trauma-informed and flexible way, and we receive referrals from the NHS, solicitors, our Local Authorities and schools, among others. We are highly concerned at the Government’s intention to reopen and expand Campsfield Detention Centre. Imprisoning people for indefinite periods, who have escaped from war, injustice and torture, amounts to another torture, and does a great deal of harm to often already seriously traumatised people. It makes our work, which is already underfunded, so much harder. The application does not address the harm and the costs in both resources and human damage that results from indefinite imprisonment in a country that was believed to operate according to the highest standards of legal justice. Humanitarian concerns should be a top priority for an intelligent government. Expanding Campsfield would have very deep and serious human and community consequences. When people flee across the world they do not do so lightly. Leaving home, language, qualifications, loved ones and all that is known, is something people will only do when life is under serious and desperate threat. The journeys across the world that many of our clients have taken are further traumatising, and may take months or years. To add to that imprisonment, without charge and without time limit, is risking suicide or permanent psychological damage to people. At Refugee Resource we support people to pick up the pieces of their lives and themselves after they have survived horrors which are unimaginable to most of us in the UK. Please do not make our jobs harder than they already are. For these reasons, we ask that the application is refused. If it is not refused at this stage, we ask that it is examined through a full and open public inquiry.