Bicester Asylum Site A: Three Councils Lodge Objections

Three councils have objected to the Home Office plan for up to 1,256 asylum places at the former Bicester Garrison. Cherwell District Council, Oxfordshire County Council and Bicester Town Council all wrote to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government before the deadline. All three letters are now published.

The comment period on Urgent Crown Development application PCU/RARE/C3105/3378843 ran from 7 September and closed at midnight on Thursday 17 September. It was not extended, despite requests from two of the three councils.

The site is not in Bicester. Site A sits inside the former garrison off the B4011, between Piddington and Upper Arncott, about 4.75km from the town. Its address is Bicester Garrison, Launton Road, OX25 1AE, and it lies in Cherwell’s Launton and Otmoor ward.

Cherwell wants the clock stopped, not just a No

Cherwell’s Planning Committee met on Wednesday 16 September. It noted the draft response and delegated the final wording to the Assistant Director for Planning, in consultation with the chair or vice-chair, as the printed decisions record.

The letter that went the next day is signed by David Peckford, Assistant Director for Planning. Its formal position matches what officers recommended a week earlier: the council objects to the application being determined at all, and to any grant of permission, on the information currently available.

What is new is what the committee added on top. The submitted letter asks the government to:

• extend the representation period immediately, or else hold the application in abeyance and restart consultation only once a complete package is published
• allow not less than 21 days for that renewed consultation, and more where a technical consultee reasonably needs it
• publish one consolidated package rather than a series of inconsistent documents, separating openly publishable material from what is genuinely security-sensitive
• have any genuinely sensitive material reviewed by an independent specialist, with a non-technical public summary
• produce an updated programme timetable, because the Home Office’s own July submission and late-August decision assumptions have already passed

There is also a point about length of stay that has not been made publicly before. The council says the application documents refer to a possible 90-day stay, but do not consistently establish it as an enforceable maximum. That matters because the 1,256 figure is a cap on people on site at once, not a cap on people over ten years. The council wants the transport, health, induction and safeguarding effects of a rolling population assessed separately from the concurrent total.

The committee asked for one thing officers had not proposed: an independent assessment of the scheme’s economic effects. Bicester sits in the Oxford to Cambridge Growth Corridor and is expected to take significant housing and employment growth. The council’s own letter is careful here. It says the absence of evidence is not proof that investment will be diverted, and that generalised concerns about national perception should not decide the application. Its worry is narrower: that the same constrained electricity, water, wastewater, transport and healthcare capacity may be needed both by this proposal and by planned growth.

On money, the letter says the scale and duration of the scheme is likely to create impacts that conditions alone cannot fix, and asks for draft heads of terms to be discussed. Its wording is blunt: “The Crown status and temporary description of the proposal should not leave evidenced development impacts unfunded or dependent on unenforceable assurances.”

If the Secretary of State approves it anyway, Cherwell wants the permission to fix the layout, phases, floorspace and occupancy, limit accommodation to the 6-metre envelope that was actually assessed, and expire after ten years with no automatic extension.

The county council objects on entirely different ground

Oxfordshire County Council’s objection came from Councillor Neil Fawcett, the Deputy Leader, in a letter published with its news release. It barely overlaps with the district’s. Where Cherwell writes about parameters and drainage, the county writes about people and services.

Its objections include:

• the site is poorly connected, with no buses, footways, cycleways or street lighting to surrounding settlements
• unresolved questions about flood risk, land contamination, wildfire, hazardous materials and fire protection between temporary accommodation units
• no locally agreed arrangements for infectious disease prevention and outbreak management, including vaccination, prescribing, isolation capacity, contact tracing, room occupancy and spare rooms
• a question over whether shared modular accommodation can stay safe during increasingly extreme temperatures
• insufficient detail on mental health support and privacy

One paragraph goes further than anything in the district’s letter. The county points out that the site is intended for adult men, but that errors in Home Office age assessments remain a significant risk. It wants clear operational arrangements for identifying, safeguarding and promptly relocating any child who presents at the site. General references to national guidance, it says, do not provide site-specific safeguards for a facility of this scale.

The letter also says Thames Valley Police “have already had to engage with tensions before construction has begun” and should get additional financial support. It notes that local authorities were given less than 24 hours’ notice of the plan, with no prior engagement with residents or partners.

Oxfordshire holds Council of Sanctuary status. Its letter ends by turning that against the proposal: “Supporting people in need and standing alongside local communities are not mutually exclusive. A responsible accommodation policy must do both. In the council’s view this proposal does neither.”

Bicester Town Council: 315 residents, 1,256 places

Bicester Town Council resolved at an extraordinary meeting on Wednesday 16 September that it strongly opposes the plan, and authorised its acting town clerk to submit a 17-point objection.

Its lead argument is arithmetic. Piddington has around 315 residents. The proposal would add up to 1,256 people, taking the local population to roughly 1,565. The village has no shop and no public house.

The letter also puts on record several things the application documents do not:

• a proposal for around 750 people on the same land was refused by an independent Planning Inspector in 2003, and subsequently cancelled
• the Transport Assessment repeatedly refers to the B1104 rather than the B4011, which is the road that borders the site
• no borehole investigation has been carried out, and a 2010 land quality assessment found the areas investigated were generally unsuitable for redevelopment to a domestic end use without remediation
• the ecological assessment states there are no records of bats, great crested newts, dormice, badgers, reptiles or rare plants within 2km; the town council says the correct records show 12 bat species, great crested newts on the site itself, badgers 300m away and 188 records of rare and protected wildflowers

On process, it makes the same point Cherwell does, with sharper numbers. The representation period ran 11 days. That is roughly half the 21-day minimum that applies to an ordinary planning application. Nearly two months passed between the application being submitted on 6 July and its publication for comment on 2 September, and the supporting documents run to well over 1,000 pages.

The £20,000 legal pledge

The same extraordinary meeting had a second item in front of it: a request for public money towards a legal challenge.

Bicester Countryside and Communities CIC asked the town council to fund Phase 1 of a three-stage legal strategy. Phase 1 is specialist legal advice on whether there are grounds for a judicial review of the government’s decision-making process. The company is registered at Companies House as number 17399471, incorporated on 13 August 2026, at an address in Bicester Market Square. It acts as the financial body for the Wrong Plan Wrong Site campaign.

The agenda pack recommended a pledge of £20,000 under section 137 of the Local Government Act 1972, drawn from the council’s Grants to Voluntary Organisations budget, with the final figure left to councillors. It states that approving a pledge creates no obligation to fund later phases.

The campaign’s own application sets out what the later phases would cost. It asks for up to £80,000 in the first instance to obtain legal advice on a 160-page document it has compiled, and says that if that advice is positive it will then need “upwards of £250,000”. It is seeking money from parish councils, businesses and private donors.

We cannot yet confirm what the council actually agreed. No minutes of the 16 September meeting have been published, and the recommendation left the final sum to members. We will update this article when the minutes appear.

What it means for you

The decision does not rest with any of these three councils. The Secretary of State determines the application under sections 293B and 293C of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, and Cherwell is a consultee only.

• The comment window has closed. If you wanted to write to MHCLG, that ended at midnight on 17 September. All three councils have asked for it to be reopened; nothing published so far says it will be.
• Watch the GOV.UK page, not the council’s. MHCLG says a summary of the material planning issues raised, and possibly redacted copies of representations, may be published there. As at 20 September it still shows the status as “Representation period” and was last updated on 4 September.
• The next real document is the decision itself. There is no committee stage, no public speaking and no local vote left in this process.
• If you live in Piddington, Upper Arncott or Blackthorn, the county council’s letter is the one that names your village and asks for the services and policing to be funded.

Cherwell’s full response, including the 36-page officer assessment as Appendix A, is on the council’s Site A page. Our earlier coverage set out what the application actually proposes and why officers moved from objection to asking for refusal.