RAF Scampton: MP calls for Home Office to release 'entire site' for investment

The MP representing the RAF Scampton area has called on the Home Office to release “the entire site” and allow for £300 million of investment to proceed at the former home of the Dambusters. Current plans will see asylum seekers held at the former RAF base from later this year.

Sir Edward Leigh, Conservative MP for Gainsborough, spoke in the House of Commons on Wednesday, May 1. His comments come 15 months after the government first unveiled its plans to house up to 2,000 asylum seekers at the site of the ex-RAF Scampton.

Local authority West Lindsey District Council has since managed to strike a “compromise” with the Home Office. This has seen the number of people who will be held at the base down to 800, but that doesn’t go far enough according to Sir Edward.

Addressing the Commons, he said: “Fifteen months after the government announced they were taking over the whole of RAF Scampton and putting 2,000 migrants there, not a single one has arrived.

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“We have fought the Home Office to a complete standstill, and everything we’ve said has been proved correct. Costs are rising exponentially, the buildings are decaying, the runway’s decaying.”

He asked for a “laser-like focus” from the government to prioritise freeing up this site for Scampton Holdings Ltd’s £300 million regeneration plans, in what the Lincolnshire MP said would be the “biggest and best levelling up we’ve ever had on a former RAF base.”

Tom Pursglove MP, minister for legal migration and the border, called Sir Edward a “tireless campaigner” and said the government is “working intensively” with him and West Lindsey District Council to realise “regeneration ambitions” as quickly as possible.

However, he also said the government “needs to realise our accomodation ambitions for that site in the short term.”