Minister says women's safety fears over Piddington asylum housing taken seriously

Minister says safety fears over asylum housing will be examined as villagers protest

Residents in Piddington, Oxfordshire, have staged an unofficial vote to declare independence in protest at plans to house more than 1,000 migrants on a former Ministry of Defence site next to the village.

A group of women in the village wrote to female MPs, including the Minister for Women, saying they would be unsafe if the scheme went ahead. Asked about the letter, the Equalities Minister said the government takes any concerns raised by women "very seriously". She said no final decision had been taken on the site, and that on other sites where the same approach had been adopted there had been security.

Pressed on whether the women were right to be worried, she said that, sadly, women are right to be fearful in society more widely, pointing to harmful attitudes towards women and the normalisation of violence against women. She said most women who experience violence in the UK experience it from a partner or former partner, and that the starting point is the toxic attitudes women face. She announced that the government would seek to prevent this from happening in the first place.

She also set the plans in a wider context. She said small boat crossings were at their lowest level for six years, the asylum backlog was being dealt with, and people without a right to be here were being deported. But she said there remained a question about where to accommodate people who are here, and that this had been dragging on for many years. She noted a big concentration of people being housed in houses of multiple occupation, in large parts of the North, and in asylum hotels, which people do not want either. She described it as a question of fairness and a dilemma, while recognising that nobody wanted to be in this position.

Separately, the Daily Telegraph has reported that endangered birds could scupper plans for an asylum camp next to a village in Suffolk. The proposed site is the former RAF base at Barnham, recorded in the Domesday Book, which lies within the Breckland Special Protection Area, an internationally designated wildlife zone hosting more than 200 breeding pairs of stone curlews. Habitat regulations dictate that no development should take place, the report says.

The Suffolk report was discussed on air with scepticism. Presenters joked that "the eagles have been thwarted by some stone curlews", described the situation as an example of "the woke excesses of the state", and argued that regulatory obstacles are why Britain struggles to get things built. A similar proposal in Piddington was also referenced, with mention of a bat said to have been disturbed by spotlights.

The interview also touched on identity politics. The Prime Minister wrote in the Times this weekend about identity and fears that the country risks equating skin colour with nationality, warning that multi-ethnic democracy is under strain. The Equalities Minister called the piece thoughtful and agreed the country had benefited hugely from migration, while saying it was disturbing that questioning people's British identity on the basis of skin colour had become normalised among frontline politicians from Reform and the Conservatives. She said she was worried about the questioning of the integrity and identity of people with a different skin colour, calling it profoundly un-British.