Home Office pays police force £2m to monitor asylum camp with no migrants
Documents released by the Home Office show it paid Lincolnshire Police £1,936,531 to protect and oversee policing of RAF Scampton, which was once the Dambusters squadron's wartime air base.
The camp was developed by the Tories to house migrants but never used.
Labour decided to abandon the scheme, which had already cost £60 million to prepare, because the final £122 million cost by the end of its use in 2027 was deemed to not be value for money.
However, in a note quietly published on its website, the Home Office has revealed the net policing costs were £1.8 million for 2023/24 and an additional £136,531 for the year afterwards.
This comes on top of £1,014,457 for the policing of the Bibby Stockholm barge in Portland Port, Dorset, which has also now been shut down, and RAF Wethersfield in Essex, which has received about 700 migrants.
A National Audit Office report found housing migrants on the Bibby barge and the two former RAF bases would cost the taxpayer £46 million more than if they had remained in hotels.
The money for Lincolnshire is understood to have paid for the force to oversee security of the site and deploy officers where necessary.
However, this would have meant that front-line police were diverted from fighting crime.
It comes after Lincolnshire Police drew up plans to cut 200 officers from its 1,200-strong force, as well as a further 200 police staff to cover a £14 million funding gap. It also cancelled a new intake of officers for March.
The Dambusters' 617 squadron was formed at RAF Scampton. It was from there that 19 Lancaster bombers departed for the raid in 1943 to destroy three dams in the Ruhr valley in Germany's industrial heartlands with 'bouncing bombs' designed by the renowned engineer Barnes Wallis.
Rishi Sunak's government envisaged turning it into a camp for 2,000 asylum seekers despite opposition from local politicians, the council, and historians.
Forty historians – including Sir Antony Beevor, Sir Max Hastings and Dan Snow – wrote to the Home Office, describing plans to use the historic site as an asylum camp as an act of 'cultural desecration'.
However, in September, Labour announced it was abandoning the plan and handing it over to West Lindsey council which has £300 million plans to turn the base and its historic runway into an operational aviation and aerospace hub and national heritage site.
On Friday, the High Court found that Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, acted unlawfully in accommodating three victims of trafficking and torture at RAF Wethersfield because of the effect the conditions had on their mental health.
A Home Office spokesman said: 'This Government inherited an asylum system under exceptional strain, but we are determined to cut the unacceptably high costs of asylum accommodation to the British taxpayer, which is why we ended the use of the costly Scampton and Bibby Stockholm sites.
'We also remain committed to ending the use of hotels over time, and continue to explore a range of options to deliver better value for money to the taxpayer.
'Where asylum accommodation continues to be required, protecting the safety and security of the local community, the staff and those staying in that accommodation remains of paramount importance, and the Home Office has worked closely to that end over a number of years with local forces across the country, especially those with large sites in their areas.'
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