Pontins Camber Sands: Dropped Asylum Site Proposal

Pontins Camber Sands was a commercial holiday park on the East Sussex coast, built in 1968 on a roughly 32-acre site near the village of Camber. By 2022 the park comprised approximately 820 self-catering chalets, each with bunk beds, a kitchenette and a small bathroom. At full commercial capacity the site could host around 3,000 guests, making it one of the largest single-site holiday parks on the south coast.

The village of Camber itself is small, with a permanent resident population in the low thousands. The area has limited public transport, a single primary school, and is around three miles from the nearest larger town, Rye. Local healthcare provision is concentrated in the Rye and Hastings areas, several miles away.

In December 2022 the Home Office formally approached Rother District Council and East Sussex County Council to ask whether the Pontins Camber Sands site could be made available for mass asylum accommodation as part of the wider effort to move people out of contingency hotels^[1].

Reporting at the time noted that all 820 chalets had been earmarked for potential use, although the department did not publish a confirmed final headcount. The approach formed part of the same programme that produced the formal large-sites announcements at RAF Wethersfield, RAF Scampton and RAF Linton-on-Ouse, alongside the acquisition of Northeye in Bexhill^[5].

Opposition was rapid and joined-up. Rother District Council (the freehold owner of part of the site and the local planning authority), East Sussex County Council, the local MP Sally-Ann Hart, and Camber Parish Council all raised concerns about the suitability of the location. The principal arguments were limited site access, the absence of nearby healthcare and school capacity, and the impact on a small coastal community already stretched by seasonal tourism volumes^[3].

The Home Office formally confirmed it would not proceed with the plan in a letter to Rother District Council and East Sussex County Council in February 2023. Rother District Council leader Doug Oliver welcomed what he called a sensible decision, saying the arrangement would not have been right either for migrants or for residents^[2].

No NAO investigation or Home Office transparency release has put a published figure on the cost of the Pontins Camber Sands assessment. The ~£250,000 shown in the callout above is therefore an estimate rather than a verified total, built up from comparable abortive-site costs and the visible activity at Camber: Home Office contracting and surveyor time during the assessment period, legal correspondence with both councils, and council officer time spent processing the approach. It is deliberately conservative.

For context, the Migration Observatory's benchmark of around £170 per person per night for hotel-based asylum accommodation^[6] means even a £250,000 abortive cost is equivalent to roughly 1,470 person-nights of hotel accommodation that the taxpayer could otherwise have funded.