Poppies on lapels, veterans on pavements—£15bn for hotel strangers.
THE RATIONALS
As Remembrance Day draws near, with its poppies pinned and its silences observed, Britain pauses to honour those who served—men and women who faced the mud of Flanders, the skies over the Ruhr, and the deserts of Iraq—only to return to a nation that too often seems to have forgotten the covenant of care. Yet in the shadow of those solemn commemorations, a quieter scandal unfolds: 7,500 veterans, the very heroes we salute, sleep rough or in refuges, while the government—both the Tory architects of austerity and the Labour restorers of the social contract—pour billions into housing asylum seekers, even as over 400 former and surplus sites lie empty, barracks still echoing with the ghosts of wartime resolve. This is not mere mismanagement, it is a profound betrayal, a national ingratitude dressed up as fiscal prudence and humanitarian necessity, where the keys to empty quarters go to strangers while our own are left to the streets. What price loyalty when the ledger bleeds red for strangers and black for our own?
The Empty Barracks
The Ministry of Defence estate sprawls across 341,400 hectares—1.4% of the entire United Kingdom, a domain larger than some counties—yet riddled with redundancy. The Better Defence Estate strategy, launched in 2016 with ongoing updates, mandates a 30% reduction in the built estate by 2040, disposing of 56 sites beyond the initial 35, with sales generating over £1 billion to date. But the true tally of disuse is far greater. Estimated at over 400 disused or surplus sites, approximately 300 former RAF stations (from a WWII peak of 500, with 38 shuttered between 1995 and 2015 alone), 80–90 Army barracks, and 20–30 Navy or joint facilities, lie fallow according to the MOD Land Holdings Bulletin 2025 and historical inventories.
The rot deepens with each closure, Linton-on-Ouse, Scampton, Henlow, shuttered with a shrug and a spreadsheet. These are not mere footnotes, they form a lattice of legacy infrastructure, from derelict airfields in Lincolnshire to mothballed camps in the Highlands, many of which are contaminated with asbestos or unexploded ordnance, remote from urban needs yet ripe for revival.
The empty beds speak for themselves. MOD benchmarks put active single-living accommodation at an estimated 80,000–100,000 bed spaces across roughly 230 sites, averaging 350 to 435 per base, yet disused legacies run smaller. 100–150 per old RAF outpost, 300–500 for Army garrisons, 200–300 for Navy. Weighted across the 400+ surplus sites, that still yields 50,000 to 100,000 unused beds. Eight to twelve of them could house every one of the 7,500 homeless veterans. Instead, only four asylum hubs are open, MDP Wethersfield (1,245 beds), Napier Barracks (328), with Cameron (300) and Crowborough (600) adding 900 by November 2025, on a path to 10,000 places across 10–20 sites by 2029.
Refurbishment costs are obscene: £20–50 million per site, from Napier’s £1.3 million setup (plus ongoing ops costs) to Scampton’s £48.5 million squandered before its 2024 cancellation, reaching £500,000 per bed space in the worst cases. Yet the MOD refuses to repurpose these sites for veterans, insisting they fall outside the standard “commercial disposal framework” for estate sales, a bureaucratic barb that stings deeper than any shrapnel.
The £15 Billion Black Hole
The contrast is brutal. The Home Office’s asylum contracts for 2019–2029 balloon to £15.3 billion, triple the £4.5 billion forecast, with £3.1 billion devoured by hotels in 2023/24 alone at £5.5 million daily. As of June 2025, 110,000 asylum seekers languish in supported accommodation, 32,000 in hotels, a drop from the 56,000 peak of 2023 but still 2,500 more than the prior year. These costs are not optional, they stem from a backlog swollen by Channel crossings (4% of total immigration but politically incendiary), obliging the state under the UN Refugee Convention to provide shelter.
Yet the choices reveal priorities. While veterans scrape by on an estimated £8–12 million in total funding through Operation Fortitude and the Reducing Veteran Homelessness Programme, rehousing a mere 400 by 2024 against a 2023 pledge to end rough sleeping, the asylum ledger swells unchecked.
But the betrayal runs deeper than headline billions. The National Audit Office lays it bare: housing an asylum seeker in a disused barracks costs an estimated £200–300 per night, not just a bed but security guards, three hot meals, on-site GP, welfare officers, transport, and legal safeguarding, all run by private contractors who pocketed £380 million in profits over recent years. £300 a night to guard an asylum seeker in a barracks, £20 a day to help a veteran sleep safe. Let that sink in.
For the homeless veteran, that means a shared flat, a weekly PTSD session, a benefits form filled by a charity caseworker on £30,000 a year. No fences. No catering. No “public confidence” budget. That’s ten times the cost per head for a system the Refugee Council calls “fanciful” and MSF brands “prison-like,” while 7,500 British veterans, many disabled, many suicidal, are told the money’s gone.
Consider the return on that investment. Asylum’s £15.3 billion yields low occupancy and contractor profits, with 50% underuse in sites like Wethersfield and ongoing violence risks at Wethersfield and Napier that demand even more security spending. In contrast, the £8–12 million for veterans rehousing 400+ individuals with up to an 80–90% long-term success rate, preventing an estimated £22 million in annual costs to the NHS and economy from veteran mental health issues like depression and suicide. Repurposing just eight bases could end the crisis for all 7,500 at an estimated £40–400 million upfront, a fraction of asylum’s annual £41,000+ per person, delivering high ROI through stable lives and fulfilled Covenant duty, versus the chaotic churn that squanders billions without resolution. They gave the strangers the keys to the barracks our heroes died defending while telling the heroes there’s no room at the inn.
Tory Waste, Labour Continuity
- Tory rhetoric in 2023: “Stop the boats.” Result: £48.5 million empty hole at Scampton.
- Labour pledge in 2025: “Homes for heroes.” Reality: estimated £50 million for two new asylum sites.
This is the anatomy of hypocrisy. Rishi Sunak’s 2023 vow to “stop the boats” announced Wethersfield and Napier, capacity around 1,573, yet Scampton alone hemorrhaged £48.5 million before Labour axed it in September 2024 as “not value for money,” per former Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. Robert Jenrick’s “unacceptable” hotels rang hollow as costs tripled to £15.3 billion, 76% on just 35% of cases, while Operation Fortitude, Sunak’s 2023 “end rough sleeping” pledge, delivered just 200 moves in its first nine months to March 2024. The Covenant, non-binding since 2011, became lip service, veteran proposals rejected as “non-commercial,” bases like Browndown Camp (around 300 beds, closed 2019) gathering dust just miles from Portsmouth’s veterans.
Labour’s inheritance was a poisoned chalice, yet their “fix the mess” mantra curdles into continuity. Keir Starmer’s September 2024 conference clarion, “homes for heroes,” exempting veterans from local connection rules via the December 2024 Allocation of Housing Regulations, pairs with £3.5 million for the Reducing Veteran Homelessness Programme through 2026, extending Fortitude’s £8.8 million lifeline. The February 2025 buyback of 36,000 military homes reversed John Major’s 1996 privatisation fiasco, saving £600,000 daily in rents, while £1.5 billion boosts forces’ family housing under a new Consumer Charter, named officers, reliable repairs, no bans on personalisation. Steve Reed’s September 2025 Liverpool speech echoed Attlee’s postwar boom of “build, baby, build” for 12 new towns, 1.5 million homes by election’s end, yet where are the keys for the homeless?
Meanwhile, Labour’s asylum pivot reeks of inherited haste, repackaged as resolve. Starmer’s October 2025 fury—“furious at hotels”—propels the openings of Cameron and Crowborough (+900 beds), aiming for 10,000 by 2029. Yet No. 10 concedes that “public confidence” justifies the £200–300 nightly overruns versus £119–192 hotels (average £145, down from £162). The Home Affairs Committee’s October 2025 indictment, “squandered billions” on a “failed, chaotic” system, cites Northeye’s £15.4 million unused purchase as damning evidence, yet Labour clings to Wethersfield (£338 million to 2027) and extends Napier through December. Refugee Council’s Enver Solomon brands these 10,000-site dreams “fanciful”, MSF decries the “prison-like” squalor, and local fury simmers over Inverness Council’s consultation snub and Crowborough MP Nusrat Ghani’s outrage.
The £1 billion “slashed” since July 2024 via 71 hotel closures rings tentative indeed when £50 million+ pours into two new sites, announced the very week of Starmer’s £3.5 million veteran “tribute.” Home Office stonewalls, asylum framed as “national security,” veterans shunted to “local authority responsibility”, a jurisdictional jujitsu that deftly evades the shared duty.
The Human Cost
Colin Gaylor, chief executive of Veterans Centre Southampton, captures the human fracture, “The military teaches you ‘you can, you can, you can’—but sometimes, you can’t.” Picture Mark—38, Royal Signals, PTSD rattling in his skull, sofa-surfing in Glasgow, just 15 miles from the empty Redford Barracks whose gates he guarded before deploying to Basra in 2003. Or Northeye’s £15.4 million folly, bought September 2023 for asylum, scrapped for contamination while 280 Southeast veteran households went homeless in 2022/23 alone, owed a duty under the Covenant. SSAFA’s Sir Andrew Gregory, the former chief executive of the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Families Association (SSAFA) the UK’s largest Armed Forces charity, tallies the toll through the “eight Ds” (debt, drink, drugs, depression, divorce, domestic violence, dependency, and digs) that cascade into despair for too many, with 48.5% of veterans disabled (per ONS) and 31.3% battling loneliness versus 20.5% in the general population.
On the flip, Wethersfield’s 1,245 beds shelter single males amid violence reports, legal challenges, a 2021 High Court “squalid” ruling at Napier echoing in 2025 extensions. “Pointlessly cruel,” MSF deems it, yet “public confidence” trumps cost. £23.25 nightly for dispersal, £144.98 for hotels, £200–300 for sites, a hierarchy where strangers’ roofs outbid heroes’.
In the end, as the eleventh hour tolls on Remembrance Sunday, Britain confronts not just memory but mirror. A tapestry of empty barracks and occupied hotels, where gratitude is gauged in ledgers and loyalty in leftovers. Will we persist in this parsimony, propping up a system that warehouses the vulnerable while our veterans vanish into the margins? Or will the weight of witness, those 7,500 souls, those 425 silent sentinels, finally compel a reckoning, forcing red and blue both to honour the oath they swore in poppy-pinned pieties, or confess the poppies were plastic all along?
#Veterans #Homelessness #UKPolitics
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This article (425 Empty Barracks, 7,500 Homeless Heroes, £15bn Wasted on Asylum Hotels: The Great British Betrayal) was created and published by The Rationals and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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