Mayor wants meeting with home secretary over Linton asylum plan

York and North Yorkshire's elected Labour mayor David Skaith wants to meet Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood over plans to turn the former Linton-on-Ouse RAF base into an asylum centre.

Skaith said the village's residents deserved "really good engagement" on the issue.

The Home Office is considering using the site, near York, to house up to 1,200 asylum seekers - although no final decision has been made.

During the monthly interview with the mayor on BBC Radio York, Skaith also answered questions about food security, tourist tax plans and the £2bn scheme to redevelop the York Central site.

Skaith said he and Deputy Mayor Jo Coles had written to the home secretary to arrange a meeting to "discuss the plans further".

Instead of being turned into an asylum centre, Skaith said the site should be used for housebuilding.

He said: "I raised it with the prime minister a couple of weeks ago as well, about the challenges of the site and also the opportunities.

"I have responsibility for growing the economy and creating a region that works for everyone. A site of that size is never going to stay empty, I'm pressing for it to be used for some of the housing that our region so badly needs."

A Home Office spokesperson said ministers were working to close every asylum hotel and had saved more than £1bn since the general election.

"We are working to fairly house asylum seekers across the country, moving asylum seekers into alternative accommodation, including former military sites which are designed to be self-contained to reduce impact on the local community," the spokesperson added.

Skaith was asked about the implications for national food security from developers applying to build new homes on farmland.

High-quality agricultural land should be used for producing food, Skaith said.

He said: "The big challenge we have when we talk about defence and energy security, food security for me is right up there as well.

"Our region is not only rich in heritage in producing food, but also research and development at the University of York and Fera, science around crop resilience and how we can build a food system that can work alongside the climate that we're seeing."

Fera is the former Food and Environment Research Agency, based at Sheriff Hutton, just outside York.

Skaith said he and other Labour metro mayors had committed to setting a tourist tax, more formally known as visitor levy, at "no more than 5%" of accommodation costs.

A report, commissioned by the mayor's office and written by academics at York St John University, had recommended a flat-rate levy of £1-a-night.

"A percentage is much fairer," he said.

No final decisions have been made on the levy, the mayor said, as the full legislation has not been released and a public consultation has to be held.

But Skaith confirmed monies raised would be spent across York and North Yorkshire, and not alloated to the towns or cities where it had been collected.

"It will be a region-wide pot collected for the whole of the region," he added.

Skaith said he and his team were "doing everything possible" to get the percentage of homes classed as affordable at York Central up from 20% to 40%.

Earlier this month, City of York Council approved planning permission for the first phase of the long-awaited £2bn scheme, on land behind York Station.

"The first phase will see 1014 homes built there, 20% of those will be affordable. I am determined to get that rate up. There are a lot of challenges, the cost of land in York makes it more expensive to build, so there will have to be a bigger rate of intervention to get that affordability rate up."

When fully complete, York Central is expected to deliver at least 2,500 homes. The first phase is expected to be finished by 2030.

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