Haslar Immigration Detention Centre: Community Impact

There is a particular cruelty in being told that a decision affecting your daily life, your property, your sleep, and your sense of security has already been made — and that your role in the process is, at best, ceremonial. For the residents of Fort Road in Gosport, Hampshire, that is not a hypothetical grievance. It is the lived texture of their present.

Haslar Immigration Removal Centre, a former Victorian-era naval prison that closed in 2015 following sustained criticism over inhumane conditions and the treatment of detainees, is being brought back into operation. The Conservative government announced the redevelopment in 2022; the Labour administration that followed chose to continue it. The Home Office has committed £101.5 million to the project. Residents were not consulted in any meaningful sense. They are, as one of them put it, simply “mortals.”

The redevelopment proceeds in two phases. The first — currently underway — refurbishes the existing structure to accommodate approximately 130 detainees. The second, which has not yet received final approval, would add three-storey accommodation blocks and expand total capacity to as many as 600 people. The centre is intended to house foreign nationals who have served criminal sentences, as well as individuals deemed to have violated immigration rules, while they await deportation. It will operate around the clock, every day of the year, in a dense residential neighbourhood where the nearest garden fences sit metres from the perimeter.

Before a single detainee has arrived, the construction phase alone has already imposed significant costs on the people who live there. David Robinson, 65, a retired civil servant whose home on Fort Road directly faces the site, describes contractors arriving before 6 a.m., slamming car doors, unloading equipment in the street. On one occasion, a contractor’s vehicle snagged a telephone cable and tore part of the soffit from his house. Another resident, who requested anonymity and spoke at points through tears, described builders playing music at volume — “boom, boom, boom” — conducting loud arguments, swearing, and sounding their horns each morning without exception. “Our lives,” she said, “are already hell.”

Residents eventually secured minor concessions: traffic cones, a parking warden. The disruption, they say, continues regardless.

These are not trivial complaints, but they are also, in the broader picture, preliminary ones. What residents fear most is not the construction but what follows it. Robinson recalls the period before Haslar’s 2015 closure as already fraught — chronic parking problems, detainees’ visitors knocking on his door to ask him to call a taxi. He has since been told that once fully operational, the site could receive four heavy goods vehicles per hour for routine deliveries and waste collection alone. “Six hundred people,” he said, “is not the sort of volume of detainees that you want in a residential area. It would be better suited to a rural area, where the majority or all the immigration and removal centres actually are.” That observation is not without factual grounding: most of the UK’s immigration removal estate is indeed located away from dense residential communities.

Katie Wakefield, 58, a retired police officer, described the prospect of the expanded facility as a feeling of being “invaded.” She told this publication that she was unaware of any comparable facility in Europe situated so close to family homes and private gardens. Her concerns extend beyond noise and traffic. The planning application, she noted, leaves fundamental operational questions unanswered: whether the facility will function as a secure unit, what bail provisions might apply, who will have access to the surrounding streets. “We’ve had no say in it whatsoever,” she said. “We have not been listened to.”

That absence of meaningful consultation is not incidental — it is structural. The Home Office submitted the Haslar redevelopment as a Crown development of national importance, a designation that removes the decision from local planning authority and routes it through a centralised national process. Gosport Borough Council leader Zoe Huggins confirmed that communication with residents had been “very little,” and noted that the planning application itself contains extensive redactions. “Quite rightly, that raises suspicion, fear and uncertainty,” she said, “because you’re trying to fill in the blanks.” She added that Gosport is among the first local authorities in the country to face this particular procedural mechanism, which renders formal objection exceptionally difficult when the document being objected to is substantially obscured.

The redactions are explained by the Home Office on grounds of site sensitivity. That rationale may be operationally coherent. It is nonetheless worth noting what it produces in practice: a community asked to accept a major infrastructure project on the basis of a document it cannot fully read, submitted through a process it cannot meaningfully influence, by a government that describes its own ambitions in the language of unapologetic expansion.

Susan Barrett, 73, a retired logistics worker who describes herself as a “Gosport girl,” frames the issue in part through the lens of housing policy. When Haslar closed in 2015, the Ministry of Justice promoted plans for approximately 225 residential homes on the site — a proposal that would have added to the local housing stock at a time of acute national shortage. Those plans were abandoned in 2022 when the detention refurbishment was confirmed. The £101.5 million allocated to Haslar will not house a single Gosport family. Rightmove data cited by residents suggests the price of a terraced house on Fort Road has already declined, from approximately £410,000 in 2023 to an estimated £390,000 today. Barrett, who can currently see the sea from her window and fears she will lose that view entirely to new accommodation blocks, said simply: “If I could, I’d get out of England.”

The Home Office, for its part, defends the project with reference to rising detention figures. According to its own statistics, 22,586 people entered immigration detention in the year ending March 2026, a seven-percent increase on the preceding twelve months. A spokesperson stated that the government makes “no apology for significantly expanding our detention capacity,” projecting that the expanded estate will facilitate the removal of more than 45,000 “foreign criminals and illegal migrants” over the coming decade. The language is calibrated for a domestic political audience. It says nothing about the legal status of those detained, the proportion who are ultimately removed versus released, or the conditions that will prevail inside a facility whose planning documents are partially classified from the very community that will live beside it.

What remains, when the political rhetoric recedes, is a set of unresolved questions with serious implications. The UK’s immigration detention system operates under international human rights frameworks that impose obligations regarding the necessity, proportionality, and conditions of detention — obligations that have, in Haslar’s own history, been found wanting. The decision to reopen and dramatically expand a facility with that record, in a residential location with no precedent among comparable European states, without transparent community engagement, and through a planning mechanism that forecloses normal democratic scrutiny, is not merely a local planning dispute. It is a case study in how decisions of significant consequence get made in the gap between institutional power and the people most directly affected by it.

The phase two expansion has not yet been approved. The residents of Fort Road wait, largely in the dark, for a decision they did not shape and cannot meaningfully contest. “Us mortals,” one of them said, “don’t get told that kind of thing.” The sentence lands with the particular weight of a truth stated without embellishment.