THE Home Office is bypassing planning rules to expand the notorious Yarl’s Wood detention centre to hold 200 asylum-seekers while they await decisions on their claims.

Home Secretary Priti Patel is using emergency powers to construct single-occupancy portacabins on land next to the privately run removal centre in Bedfordshire. 

Questions have been raised about the legality of using these powers, with lawyers preparing to challenge the move, the Morning Star understands. 

It comes as the Home Office faces multiple legal actions over its use of former army barracks in Kent and Pembrokeshire where 600 asylum-seekers are being held in conditions described as “inhumane” and “prison-like.”

Bedford Borough Council confirmed that the Home Office has not applied for planning permission to expand Yarl’s Wood. 

Instead the department is using emergency planning laws in the Town and Country Planning Order 2015, which only requires it to notify the local authority.

Use of the act is unusual and permitted only in cases of an emergency for a period of six months after which the Home Office will be required to apply for full planning permission.

The Home Office is also seeking to bypass planning permission to hold 300 asylum-seekers in an “open prison-style” camp on the edge of a Hampshire village, according to reports.

News of the plans to build a camp at Yarl’s Wood were first disclosed in the Commons last week by local MP Mohammad Yasin, who accused the government of creating a new “hostile environment” policy. Councillors within the Labour Group in Bedford Borough Council have also strongly opposed the move.

The first group of asylum-seekers are expected to be moved into the camp on January 8 or 9. 

Campaigners have raised fears about the psychological impact of holding asylum-seekers within the confines of a detention facility. 

Medical Justice director Emma Ginn told the Morning Star: “We can only imagine how frightening it would be for torture and trafficking survivors to be held in the shadow of an immigration removal centre.  

“Medical Justice volunteer clinicians document how conditions of immigration removal centres retraumatise torture victims and can be the cause of mental illness.

“Being held in such close proximity may risk those held in the portacabins feeling under constant threat of being transferred over to the removal centre.”

Concerns have also been raised by health professionals about the public health risk of setting up a new site in a remote area and access to care. 

Doctors of the World UK head of policy and advocacy Anna Miller said the Home Office has a “poor track record” of meeting the complex health and mental health needs of asylum-seekers, “as we’ve seen in the Kent and Penally barracks.

“The government must urgently release the details of how these vulnerable people will be supported to register with a GP and access other health services, and how local health services will be supported to provide this,” she added. 

The Home Office claims that only single adult men with no vulnerabilities will be moved into the site.

Locals around Yarl’s Wood are organising to stop the Home Office’s plans. At a rally on Tuesday evening, hosted by Stand up to Racism Bedford, local campaigners expressed fears that asylum-seekers held at the site could be “escalated” straight into the detention centre.

Stand up to Racism Bedford co-founder Rosie Newbigging told the rally: “The Home Office is saying that it’s not detention, but evidence from elsewhere indicates that people could be escalated into the main immigration removal centre.”

Ms Newbigging added that the site could “feel like detention for people who have fled war, persecution, torture, trafficking, abject poverty.”