RAF Linton-on-Ouse: Cancelled Asylum Site Profile

RAF Linton-on-Ouse was a Royal Air Force flying training base in North Yorkshire, about 10 miles north-west of York, which ceased operations as an RAF station in March 2020. The adjacent village of Linton-on-Ouse has a resident population of roughly 700.

In April 2022 the Home Office, led by then Home Secretary Priti Patel, announced plans to repurpose the base as an asylum reception centre for up to 1,500 unaccompanied adult men. The proposed intake would have more than doubled the population of the village overnight, setting up an immediate confrontation with the local authority and residents.

Opposition to the Linton-on-Ouse plan came from an unusually broad coalition. Hambleton District Council and North Yorkshire County Council formally opposed the proposal and warned it was unworkable without adequate services, transport, healthcare and community infrastructure.

The area's Conservative MP Kevin Hollinrake publicly opposed the plan, making Linton-on-Ouse one of the earliest examples of a Conservative MP opposing his own government's asylum accommodation strategy. Residents formed campaign groups, and legal challenges were threatened within weeks of the announcement.

In August 2022, just four months after the April announcement, the Home Office formally dropped the plan. The Yorkshire Post reported that the department cited “site complexities” as the reason, though the decision was widely understood to reflect the combined weight of council, political and community opposition, and the legal risk the Home Office would have faced had the scheme proceeded^[2].

The House of Commons Library's overview of the large-sites programme records Linton-on-Ouse alongside RAF Scampton and Northeye as sites that absorbed public money without ever opening^[1]. The NAO, in its 2024 programme-level investigation, made the same structural point: the large-sites model was expected to cost more than hotels and to deliver fewer places than planned^[3].

The ~£2.9 million shown in the callout above is the publicly-reported pre-cancellation spend on Linton-on-Ouse, covering site surveys, contractor mobilisation, legal and planning processing, and Home Office staff time and overhead. Despite being an order of magnitude smaller than the Scampton or Northeye write-offs, it is still equivalent to roughly 17,000 person-nights of hotel accommodation at the Migration Observatory's £170/person/night benchmark^[4].

Linton-on-Ouse is the quickest cancellation in the UK's large-sites programme to date. From announcement to withdrawal took under four months. The template it established (broad local coalition + council resolution + legal threat + sympathetic local MP) is essentially the same template that later defeated Northeye and Scampton, and that has shaped local responses to subsequent sites such as Crowborough and Cameron Barracks. The site itself has since been earmarked for housing and garden-village redevelopment rather than institutional reuse.