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The Home Office has been presented with plans to shut down asylum hotels in as little as a year, it can be revealed. A private company which already holds a contract to provide asylum accommodation has helped devise a scheme to quickly set up camps in ex-military bases, the Daily Mail understands. Bosses at Serco believe the scheme could allow Labour to close down hugely expensive migrant hotels within 12 to 18 months, it is thought. The company already holds asylum accommodation contracts for the North West, Midlands and the East of England. One of the proposals will set out ‘efficient’ ways to ‘operationalise’ accommodation centres to hold thousands of small boat migrants at ex-military sites, it is thought. Other accommodation options are also thought to have been put forward to the Government as part of the same package. They are likely to involve modular, or prefabricated, buildings to provide accommodation more quickly than in bricks and mortar. According to latest figures the Home Office is housing just over 32,000 migrants in hotels, which cost the taxpayer an average of £144.98 per person per night. It came as a Cabinet minister said progress on the provision of asylum accommodation outside of hotels will be announced ‘within weeks’. Housing Secretary Steve Reed also confirmed the Government was looking at modular buildings to ensure sites could be set up quickly. ‘You can use modular forms of building,’ he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. ‘That means it can go up much faster than would normally be the case, and there are planning processes that we can use in these circumstances to make sure that the planning system itself isn't delayed. ‘I'm expecting announcements to come on that within weeks, so we just have to wait and see. ‘So we want to get it right, but the intention is to get those former military bases is one example of it, where we could use big sites and get people on there and end the use of hotels entirely. ‘That's where we want to get to.’ In September Labour revealed it was poised to revive plans to house migrants on ex-military bases less than a year after they were abandoned on cost grounds. Luke Pollard, the defence minister, confirmed it could include using the previously-scrapped scheme to accommodate migrants at the historic Dambusters base at RAF Scampton. Under the Conservative government almost £50million was spent on plans to turn the Lincolnshire site into an asylum camp. But Labour canned the project in September 2024 saying that it would not provide 'value for money’. Mr Pollard said at the time that MoD military planners were now reviewing all sites including Scampton as part of a new government push to close down migrant hotels.
