Letter to Beverley Hughes following visit to Bicester
Ms Beverley Hughes, MP,Minister of State,
Home Office,
50 Queen Anne's Gate,
London. SW1H 9AT
27 June 2002
Proposed Accommodation Centre for Asylum Seekerson the Outskirts of Bicester
Thank you for having come to Bicester on Wednesday. May I reinforce some of the points that I made when we met which were also reiterated at the Public Meeting. This is a remote site. As I am sure you will have seen for yourself when driving around the local villages there are few local facilities and thus if this project were to go ahead the centre is going to have to be able to provide all the necessary facilities for the residents from launderettes to recreational facilities. However I think people are going to find such accommodation, after a comparatively short period of time, extremely frustrating and for young men I suspect extremely boring.
When your predecessor Jeff Rooker telephoned me to tell me that Bicester had been selected as one of the “trial” sites he said (I suspect somewhat tongue in cheek) that it would be good news for the local area as it would mean between 200 and 300 new jobs.
There is already effectively zero unemployment locally. This morning I attended a meeting of the Bicester Business Breakfast at which the Chief Executive of the Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Milton Keynes Learning and Skills Council spoke. Her talk was all about the extreme tightness of the local labour market and the fact that there is zero unemployment locally. There are not two to three hundred people in the local area looking for the sorts of jobs that you and or the contractors for this accommodation centre will have on offer. If you doubt my word on that then I suggest your officials talk to the local Learning and Skills Council or even more immediately talk to the Governor at Bullingdon Prison about the difficulties which Bullingdon have in recruiting and retaining staff.
Many of the staff that you will need to contract will also require specialist schools such as teachers and health service providers. As I understand Dr Galuska, the Chief Executive of the local Primary Care Trust, explained to you at the Public Meeting in Bicester the reason why the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford keeps on closing its door to new admissions is simply because they cannot recruit and retain sufficient staff. So unless the Home Office is willing to pay substantial premiums I think you are going to find considerable difficulty locally recruiting the numbers of staff that you feel you will need and the profile of staff that you will need to have any hope of this experiment working. It of course follows that if you were to pay premium rates it would simply make it more difficult for other Home Office establishments, such as H.M. P. Bullingdon, to recruit staff themselves.
Obviously it is always possible to recruit people from elsewhere in the UK and move them to the area. But where are they going to live?
House prices in and around Bicester have been rocketing up recently. Recent improvements on the Chiltern Line (the only railway company now to have a 20 year franchise because of the improvements they have made) meant that one can now get from London to Bicester in well under the hour. This has opened up Bicester as a commuter town. I enclose this week's property section of the local newspaper. Local house prices are high. It is very difficult for people to move from other parts of the country working in the public sector or jobs paid public sector type rates to be able to afford to live in Bicester which is why there are recruitments in practically every area of public service locally from school teachers to social workers.
Of course the MOD has plenty of available redundant land and it would be always possible to build housing for staff at the accommodation centre but that would inevitably substantially drive up the costs of the project.
Nor can the Home Office simply say that the staffing issue would be the responsibility of the contractor. If this experiment fails it will be Home Office Ministers who will be held responsible not the contractors.
The worst of all possible worlds for everyone would be for the Home Office to press ahead with this project and then to find, having been determined to build an accommodation for asylum seekers, that it is not possible adequately or properly to staff the centre.
So I would simply suggest to Ministers that before you irrevocably commit yourself to this site that your officials and potential contractors research the local labour market, and if you do so I am sure that it will confirm that it will be extremely difficult for you to recruit 200 or more people with the range of skills and qualifications that you are going to need to properly run an accommodation centre of such size.
