Nesscliff Training Area

The Nesscliff Training Area sits at Nesscliffe in Shropshire, around 11 km north west of Shrewsbury. It is an active Ministry of Defence training estate. Like Larkhill Camp, RAF Weeton, Bulford Camp and Cameron Barracks, it was brought into use as transitional accommodation for ARAP arrivals during the 2023 to 2024 backlog, rather than as part of the wider Home Office asylum hotel programme.

The Shropshire Star reported in November 2023 that the Home Office had shared its plans to temporarily house around 200 Afghan individuals, a mixture of single people and families, at Nesscliffe Barracks. The reporting clarified that the cohort would be moved on within weeks and that residents had the right to be in the country under ARAP rather than as asylum-seekers^[1]Press.

Shropshire Council's ARAP page is explicit that the Nesscliff site is being used for the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy, the government's scheme that offers Afghan nationals who worked for or with the UK government relocation to the UK. The site is described as transitional accommodation, with residents expected to stay no more than six weeks before being moved on to a settled housing option, which could be anywhere in the UK^[2]GOV.UK.

That distinction matters for the public record: ARAP residents are not part of the Home Office asylum dispersal estate that this tracker primarily covers, even though both schemes have used MoD sites and have attracted protest activity in recent years.

The Migration Observatory benchmark of £170 per person per night^[3]implies that a 200 person ARAP cohort would cost taxpayers around £34,000 per night and roughly £12.4 million per year if continually occupied. The May 2025 NAO contract review noted that large MoD sites tend to cost more per person than dispersed hotels, with much of the spend covering security, transport and standby capacity rather than residents on site^[4]NAO.