Suella Braverman to claim small boats crisis is ‘national emergency’

Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, is to claim the small boats crisis is a “national emergency” in a legal attempt on Wednesday to override planning laws and turn a former RAF base in Essex into a camp for asylum-seekers.

On Wednesday, Home Office lawyers will be in the High Court to face a legal challenge by Braintree District Council, which is seeking an injunction to prevent RAF Wethersfield being turned into a camp to house up to 1,700 asylum seekers.

Acting on behalf of the Home Secretary, they will argue that the asylum crisis is so serious – with 51,000 migrants being housed in 400 hotels at a cost of £6 million a day – that they can exercise Class Q powers to ignore local planning rules and set up the camp near Braintree.

Class Q powers permit indefinite developments on Crown land without local authority planning approval if they are needed to prevent, reduce, control or mitigate the effects of an emergency.

The council’s lawyers will challenge the Government’s claim that it is a national emergency on the basis that the Home Office has known about the emerging crisis for at least four years.

As far back as 2018, Sajid Javid, the then Home Secretary, declared the surge in Channel crossings to be a “critical incident” that merited the deployment of Royal Navy ships.

“A national emergency would be an earthquake, where you had to house 20,000 homeless people as a result,” said a council source. “The small boats have been known about and existed for years. 

“Now, it is about taking people out of hotels to save money. You save money with a lot of services, but it doesn’t make it a national emergency. If that was the case, we would be in a national emergency 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year.”

An emergency in the Town and Country Planning Act of 2015 is defined as loss of human life, illness or injury, homelessness, damage to property, or disruption to vital services such as water, energy, transport, health and communications.

RAF Wethersfield is one of five big sites identified by the Home Office for asylum seekers. The others are RAF Scampton, the former Dambusters base; RAF Catterick, in Rishi Sunak’s North Yorkshire constituency ; HMP Northeye, a former prison in Bexhill, East Sussex, and a barge in Portland Port, near Weymouth, Dorset.

Councils or residents in all these areas have begun or threatened legal action, but RAF Wethersfield is the first to be heard in the high court.

The Wethersfield plans have been opposed by James Cleverly, the local MP and Foreign Secretary, and the neighbouring MP, Priti Patel, the former home secretary. They say the former RAF base is inappropriate because of the poor infrastructure, lack of services and small roads.

Thirteen local parish councils have united to set up a scrutiny committee to challenge the plans. An environmental report on the site has identified potentially dangerous pollutants, including hydrocarbons, radioactive material, unexploded ordnance and firefighting foam.

A judicial review is being considered by a local resident, who claims the failure of the Home Office to carry out an environmental impact assessment means it will have missed the potential health risks and that it is an inappropriate site.

A Government source defended the definition of the crisis as an emergency, pointing to the fact that 85,000 migrants have crossed the Channel since 2018, along with the £6 million-a-day cost of housing asylum seekers in hotels and the £3 billion a year being spent on the asylum backlog.

More than 5,000 migrants have crossed the Channel by small boat this year, according to official government figures. Data released by the Home Office shows 5,049 people have made the perilous journey in 121 boats so far this year – an average of 42 people per vessel.