Inside the sleepy Yorkshire village which will soon house 1,500 asylum seekers – where locals are ‘shell-shocked’
SET amid glorious rolling farmland, the picturesque North Yorkshire village of Linton-on-Ouse is an unlikely epicentre of Britain’s migrant crisis.
It lies some 300 miles from Dover, with ponies clip-clopping beneath its cherry blossom trees.
There is one shop, few buses and its only pub is currently closed.
Yet soon the close-knit community of around 700 could be joined by as many as 1,500 male asylum seekers housed in a reception centre in a former RAF base, yards from Linton’s main street.
The Government plan has been met with dismay by many villagers and the facility has already been christened “Guantanamo-on-Ouse” by a local councillor.
Teaching assistant and mum-of-one Jade Bov, 49, told me: “We’re all a bit shell-shocked. We’re just a small village with one road in and one road out. An extra 1,500 people roaming around it is going to have an impact, whatever the Home Office say.”
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Villagers I spoke with stressed they are not racist or against accepting asylum seekers but said that Linton-on-Ouse was completely unsuited to a large reception centre.
IT consultant Omar Flatekval, 47, who has lived in the village for eight years, described Linton as “idyllic”.
The dad-of-four added: “We love living here. There’s horse-riding out the back, a school in the village, it’s wonderful.
“That will change with 1,500 new arrivals, wherever they come from. The village won’t be able to cope with that amount of people.”
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Linton-on-Ouse is a cornerstone in Home Secretary Priti Patel’s latest attempt to fix what she calls “the broken asylum system” which currently costs the UK £1.5billion a year.
Asylum seekers — predominantly adult single men from Syria, Iran, Iraq and Eritrea — will live at the centre while their claims are processed.
They will be free to come and go from the old RAF base but will be expected back on site by 10pm.
Announced to little fanfare at the same time as a plan to send some asylum seekers 4,000 miles to Rwanda, central Africa, it aims to cut the eye-watering £4.7million daily bill for housing migrants in hotels.
But refugee charities have labelled the new centre “a cross between a hostel and a low-security prison”.
City of York Lib Dem councillor Darryl Smalley called it a “Guantanamo-on-Ouse” plan, after the controversial US detention camp in Cuba.
He said it was “an ill-thought-out, cruel and morally bankrupt ploy to reduce our obligations to the most desperate people”.
The Home Office insists the centre “will provide safe and fit-for-purpose accommodation for asylum seekers who would otherwise be destitute”.
A spokesman added: “To suggest otherwise or to make inaccurate, extreme comparisons is offensive, misleading and scaremongering.”
Locals say they were not consulted about turning the former RAF base, ten miles north of York, into a giant one-stop migrant reception centre.
Health worker Neil Goodridge, 59, who lives in the village, said: “We’re a relatively liberal country and all for helping out but migrants need to be somewhere where they will have services. This is the wrong place.
“We’re a village of 700 people and they are effectively dropping 1,500 single men here. It’s an invasion for us. Down in Westminster they’ve thought, ‘We’ve got a military base which is surrounded by fences’. But it isn’t, it’s a 760-acre open site.
We’re a village of 700 people and they are effectively dropping 1,500 single men here. It’s an invasion for us.
Neil Goodridge
“I’ve got no issues with people coming to Britain but I just think it should be a better location. There’s no facilities here for them.”
The Home Office says the site will have “self-sufficient accommodation” and “provisions for healthcare, faith and other services on site to minimise impact on the local community”.
But shop assistant Emily Gowlett said: “There will be more people coming than actually live in the village now. There’s not a lot for them to do here. There’s only four buses daily to the village so they can’t really go anywhere.”
The 28-year-old mum-of-two added: “I haven’t got issues with people coming to Britain but I think the reception centre should be in a better location. They’d be happier in a city with more to do.”
Some villagers are worried about the effect on house prices.
According to property website Rightmove, the average home in the area is worth just under £238,000.
Corporate trainer Paul Gerrad, 62, had already decided to move before the plans were announced.
He said: “I think if it was families coming people wouldn’t be worried but it’s 1,500 young men. I’ll be honest, I’m glad we’re moving.”
Local Tory MP Kevin Hollinrake has written to the Home Secretary asking her to overturn the plan.
He wrote: “While supportive of providing safe harbour and government accommodation for those fleeing persecution, I do not believe that the small rural village of Linton-on-Ouse is the appropriate place to house up to 1,500 young, male asylum seekers.”
Local authority Hambleton District Council is to mount a legal challenge to the plan — just as this week the Prime Minister criticised “liberal lawyers” for trying to scupper the Rwanda asylum plan, which No10 now concedes could take months to implement.
The backlog of asylum seekers in hotels is not only vexing the Home Office but the migrants themselves.
An ill-thought-out, cruel and morally bankrupt ploy to reduce our obligations to the most desperate people.
Darryl Smalley
Traumatised after fleeing the Taliban, Farhad Tabesh now lives in a spa hotel on the Manchester Airport Relief Road.
A former admin worker for the British Embassy in Kabul, the articulate 22-year-old told me: “I have good skills. I want to get a job and move from the hotel to my own place.”
It may be a long wait. For Farhad is among 12,000 Afghans currently languishing in hotels, waiting to be housed — costing taxpayers a staggering £1.2million a day.
I first met Farhad — whose name we have changed — at a jumble of tents on a freezing canal bank at Grade-Synthe near Dunkirk on January 21.
With his decent English and a personable smile, he told me: “When I get to Britain I’d like to go to university and then work in a bank.”
Shivering in the drizzle, he told how he had fled Afghanistan in 2019 after working for a Kabul logistics company that did work at the British and Australian Embassies there.
After receiving Taliban threats because he was working for the British, he fled via Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Greece, Italy and then France, before taking a £2,500 journey on a rickety dinghy across the English Channel.
Nearly 700 migrants have made it across the Channel in just three days this week. A record 7,389 have made it to the UK this year, treble last year’s rate.
Farhad — whose uncle was shot by the Taliban — was then housed in the Best Western Manchester Airport Stanley Hotel, where he has remained, kicking his heels, for three months.
The four-star hotel — which is currently closed to the public — has a Very Good rating on travel website Tripadvisor, though its spa is now closed.
But two of the most recent Tripadvisor reviews were scathing, with one saying “avoid — should be demolished”.
Another post last year said the food was “awful” and his party had been “treated like cattle”.
I haven’t got issues with people coming to Britain. They’d be happier in a city with more to do.
Emily Gowlett
But when I met Farhad nearby he said he was very grateful to be housed at the hotel, ten miles from Manchester’s centre, and to receive free health care and ample food.
He said: “It’s a good hotel. We all have our own room and I like the food. I appreciate the help I’ve received very much.
“There’s maybe around 50 people here from Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Pakistan and Africa. It’s all young, single men.”
The Home Office’s new plan would see new arrivals who were not transported to Rwanda staying at the Linton-on-Ouse centre while their claims are processed.
Kevin Robinson, 65, who runs a guest house in the village, said: “We’re told it won’t be secure so asylum seekers can walk in and out as they wish.
“If these are people applying for the right to live in the UK and they think they won’t get permission, they’ll just walk out and disappear to Leeds or London.”
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Yet Priti Patel will hope this tranquil village a world away from Middle East trouble spots will ease the “broken” system she presides over.
If not, the patience of voters could soon wear thin.
