Residents in uproar over plans to house asylum-seekers at former naval base

Plans to turn the former home of the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm into an accommodation centre for asylum-seekers provoked uproar yesterday, with residents warning that the local economy could be wrecked.

Beverley Hughes, the Immigration minister, said the former HMS Daedalus site at Lee-on-the-Solent in Hampshire was being considered as a centre for about 400 single male asylum-seekers.

The site is close to the Haslar immigration removal centre in Gosport, where failed asylum-seekers have recently begun hunger strikes after the suicide of a detainee.

People living in Lee-on-the Solent voiced immediate concerns. Graham Burgess, who represents the area on Gosport Borough Council, said he had been inundated with calls and e-mails opposing the proposal. "We are going to have 500 people wandering the streets of an isolated village. I have had phone calls from shopkeepers worried about what is going to happen," he said. Charlie Marke, 69, a retired naval steward who worked for 30 years at the base, said: "HMS Daedalus was one of our greatest naval bases. It is sickening to think that something we should be so proud of is going to house asylum-seekers."

The anger in Hampshire contrasted with celebration in Wales – where similar plans for an accommodation centre at a former hospital were dropped – and highlighted the Government's problems in managing the asylum-seeker population. Having abandoned proposals for a centre at Throckmorton in the Cotswolds when faced by strident local opposition, the Home Office withdrew its plans for South Glamorgan, Edinburgh and RAF Hemswell in Lincolnshire yesterday.

John Smith, Labour MP for Vale of Glamorgan, said the news that Sully Hospital would not be used to house asylum-seekers was a victory for common sense. "Throughout this campaign I have maintained that the former miners' hospital was not suitable and at the earliest occasion I went straight to the Home Secretary," he said.

The Tory MP for Gosport, Peter Viggers, said the HMS Daedalus plan was potentially "devastating" for the community. He said: "They will go through public consultation but what is the point of consultation when every person is utterly against it?"

The Government's asylum plans are based on processing applicants through a system that begins with short stays at induction centres and continues to either accommodation centres or removal centres. Proposals for two accommodation centres – at Newton in Nottinghamshire, and Bicester in Oxfordshire – are already the subject of planning disputes.

Keith Best, of the Immigration Advisory Service, said the Government needed to educate people about asylum-seekers.