Opinion: The Crowborough asylum camp is not a solution – it’s a warning

By Fuad Mahamed, Chief Executive, ACH

When people talk about the asylum “camp” in Crowborough, the debate quickly hardens. Positions are taken. Lines are drawn. Communities are pitted against people they have never met.

But strip away the politics and the headlines, and what remains is a simple truth: large-scale, isolated accommodation for people seeking asylum isn’t a solution to a broken system. It’s a symptom of it.

I’ve spent years working directly with people who have fled war, persecution and violence. At ACH, we support refugees and people seeking asylum to rebuild their lives — to find stability, dignity and, eventually, independence. What I’ve learned is this: how we house people at the point of arrival profoundly shapes what happens next.

Congregating vulnerable people in remote, institutional settings doesn’t speed up decision-making. It doesn’t reduce costs in the long term. And it doesn’t help people integrate. What it does do is create isolation, dependency and, too often, despair.

We’ve been here before. Large asylum accommodation sites — whether hotels, former military facilities or purpose-built camps — are repeatedly presented as pragmatic, temporary answers. In reality, they become long-term holding patterns, places where people wait rather than live. The human cost is high, and the social return is low.

For those placed in sites like Crowborough, everyday life becomes harder, not easier. Access to healthcare, legal advice, education and employment support is limited. Mental health deteriorates. People lose the confidence and skills they arrived with. This isn’t because they lack resilience, but because the system is designed around containment rather than contribution.

And there’s another cost we rarely talk about honestly: the impact on local communities. When large numbers of people are placed in one location without proper planning, investment or engagement, tensions are almost inevitable. Communities are asked to absorb change without being given the tools to make it work. That is unfair on residents — and on the people seeking safety.

This framing of “locals versus asylum seekers” is deeply misleading. Most communities, when given the facts and the right support, respond with generosity. What fuels anxiety isn’t compassion fatigue, but policy failure.

The UK doesn’t lack alternatives. We know what works because we’ve seen it work. Smaller-scale, community-based accommodation. Early access to legal advice. Permission to work. Proper support for councils and voluntary organisations. These approaches aren’t soft; they’re effective. They reduce long-term costs and improve outcomes.

ACH works in partnership with local authorities and communities to deliver exactly this kind of model. We see people move from uncertainty to stability, from dependence to contribution. That is what integration looks like in practice.

The debate around Crowborough should be a moment of reckoning. Not about one site, but about the direction of travel. Do we continue to expand emergency measures that entrench failure? Or do we invest in an asylum system that’s humane, efficient and rooted in communities?

This isn’t about ideology. It’s about evidence. And it’s about values.

People seeking asylum aren’t a problem to be managed out of sight. They’re people with skills, hopes and the potential to contribute — if we let them. Camps send the opposite message: that they’re to be parked, contained and forgotten.

We can do better. The question is whether we choose to.