At least twice a week, usually at midmorning, a fleet of Ford Transit mini buses pulls into Braintree town centre and a group of up to 50 men disembark.
Most appear to be in their twenties and thirties – and all are asylum seekers, mainly from the Middle East, Africa and Asia who are recent arrivals to the UK on small boats from France.
With little else to do, the men largely hang around the Essex town in groups for several hours before being collected and returned to a former RAF base where they are housed.
But while these day trips may seem innocuous, the alleged behaviour of some during the visits has caused huge concern and backlash among locals, as the Daily Mail found out when we visited the town this week.
While several people we spoke to said they had not had any problems with the asylum seekers and expressed sympathy for their plight, we heard troubling accounts of migrants housed at the centre ‘targeting’ women.
Locals described the bored groups of men taking pictures of schoolgirls, blowing kisses at female staff in beauty salons and making teenagers cry by wolf-whistling at them.
Even more disturbingly, some women were said to be terrified after being followed on the way home from work.
Several said they are now scared of going out alone and some have even started arming themselves with ‘safety packs’ including whistles and alarms. Many pin the blame for the problem on the Prime Minister, who they accuse of reneging on an apparent pre-election promise to close the centre.
A sign on the door of Braintree’s Sue Ryder charity shop warns of the consequences of crime
The three-person rule at the Sue Ryder shop was brought in on the police’s advice, the Daily Mail was told, after the store was targeted by groups of asylum seekers
The asylum seekers are housed 12 miles outside Braintree at former RAF Wethersfield, originally built in the Second World War as a base for Allied bombers to launch sorties against the Nazis.
It continued to play a vital security role through the Cold War when US bombers were stationed there to deter Soviet aggression. When that ended, it became a training centre for military police.
But in 2023, amid huge numbers of small boat arrivals and the spiralling cost of housing them in hotels, the Conservatives started using it to lodge single adult male asylum seekers, with an original capacity of 580.
As well as accommodation, three meals a day, free Wi-Fi and some recreational facilities, the plan included free transport to nearby Essex towns, including Braintree.
And this is where many of the problems began.
Susan Doan, the joint owner of Braintree’s Sisters Nails and Beauty, explained: ‘They hang around outside the shop blowing kisses at the staff here.
‘During the dark nights you would not want to leave here on your own.
‘I had a client who left here and was followed by a group. She was terrified and so came straight back. If the Government wants to accommodate them and give them access to education then fair enough.
‘But I should be allowed to stand outside my own store without getting kisses blown at me and things being said to me.’
She described a recent incident when she went outside to ask a group to move away from the shop front to an empty bench nearby.
‘They ignored me and I got angry with them and they spat their chicken bones at me from the food they’d been eating.
‘The disrespect from them towards women is unreal.
‘I have even seen them sitting outside of Tesco taking pictures of schoolgirls.
‘What is being done about this?’
Like many we spoke to, Ms Doan is furious at Sir Keir Starmer.
Weeks before the 2024 General Election, with a local backlash against the centre already underway, the Labour leader told regional TV news that the camp ‘needs to close’.
Although he declined to put a date on it, he said: ‘I do know how keenly this is felt locally and understandably so.’ Thrilled locals assumed the new Government would immediately shut the camp down.
But, perhaps unsurprisingly given Starmer’s track record on keeping promises, nearly two years on not only is the camp still operating as an asylum centre, but last summer the Labour administration announced its capacity would increase temporarily to up to 1,225 – more than double its original size.
Susan Doan said migrants ‘hang around outside the shop blowing kisses at the staff here’
Ms Doan said: ‘Keir Starmer says one thing and then does another. ‘And you wonder why people are getting angry – because you’re doing nothing for us. What’s been done to safeguard the women and children and make sure people feel safe coming into their own town?’
Braintree’s Sue Ryder charity shop, raising money for end of life care, now has a ‘no groups over three’ sign plastered on its front door above a poster reading: ‘Open for business, closed for crime.’
The three-person rule was brought in on the police’s advice, the Daily Mail was told, after the store was targeted by groups of asylum seekers. A source said groups of about ten would go in, and stock would vanish.
And a female worker at another charity shop told how she was ‘living in fear’.
‘One of the asylum seekers kept coming in, always to the end of the day and would always flick through the women’s clothes,’ she said.
‘I told police and they have spoken to him. He was very scary.
On a different occasion, with a different asylum seeker, I was followed on my way to work.
‘He came at me sideways and I just rushed to one of the market traders.’
Serena Fletcher, owner of Stylistic salon, said: ‘I’ve heard a few stories of women being followed by them when they come into town.
‘One said she was followed from Boots as she walked through town and then turned and went back into Boots because she knew there was security there.’
And it’s not just women who are concerned.
One man with good reason to worry is Charbel Chami, who was brought up an Arabic-speaking Christian in Lebanon but was forced to flee in his youth as civil war tore his country apart. After arriving in the UK in 1993, he was eventually granted asylum and for the last two decades the hardworking father of three has run Braintree’s popular Yumy Cafe.
‘Many of those [asylum seekers] who are here do not want to be here because they see people who are not Muslim as being impure,’ he explains.
Many of Braintrees residents are furious at Keir Starmer, who told regional TV news two years ago that the camp ‘needs to close’
‘The cultures are so hugely different to those coming from certain countries – such as Sudan, Syria, Libya or Afghanistan.
‘So you end up getting situations where you have sexually frustrated men saying totally inappropriate things to young women and girls.
‘They need to be integrated but, more importantly, they need to want to be integrated and to know how we live in this country.
‘When I was young in Lebanon, it was normal for people of all religions to live in the same area and to get on with each other.
But that was our norm, that was our culture.’ For Mr Chami, the situation got personal when a group wolf whistled at his 14-year-old daughter, reducing her to tears.
‘They told me: ‘We’re sorry, we didn’t know she was your daughter.’
‘I told them that is not the point – it doesn’t matter whose daughter it is. She’s a 14-year-old girl.’
In a recent letter to the Home Office, former home secretary and Braintree’s Tory MP James Cleverly warned the site is ‘creating real problems in the local area’.
He wrote: ‘Asylum seekers at the site are transported to surrounding towns and villages with little to do other than hang around.
‘Groups of bored young men, in any circumstances, are intimidating and local shopkeepers have reported declining footfall.
‘These developments are contributing to rising tension and division within communities that have already shown considerable patience and co-operation.’
However, the letter appears to have fallen on deaf ears, and with an apparent lack of help from government, extremist elements have taken their chance to exploit local concerns.
When around 1,000 demonstrators marched through Braintree town centre to complain about the site in January, they were joined by far-Right thug and activist Tommy Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.
The former RAF base in Wethersfield was originally built in the Second World War as a base for Allied bombers to launch sorties against the Nazis but now houses asylum seekers
In the vacuum of official support from authorities, a local women’s group – run by an advocate of Robinson – has started giving out safety packs for women, including whistles and alarms.
The problems aren’t only in Braintree, but also around and in the camp itself, which is surrounded by farmland.
Len and Margaret Freshwater, aged 84 and 82, moved to their 17th-century former farmhouse two years before the base begun housing asylum seekers.
‘I’m not sure we’d have bought it if we’d have known at the time what was to come,’ says Mr Freshwater, adding that asylum seekers mostly do not cause problems.
‘But some of them go out into the field to go to the toilet – you can see it, and the toilet paper, which is disgusting.’
Simone Sutcliffe, who has lived in her house just yards from the base for 44 years and previously worked there when it belonged to the RAF, raised the same concern: ‘They don’t bother us too much really but they do their business in the field – it even happened just near our front garden before.
‘I don’t understand that, it’s awful. There are toilets inside.’
Other locals said they’d been told fights had previously broken out between rival nationalities and religions inside the base.
And violence in the camp certainly appears to be an issue. Last month at Colchester Magistrates’ Court Adnani Mohammed, 25, was sentenced to 150 hours of unpaid work for ‘violently’ attacking security staff at the site in a drunken rage, including headbutting one victim three times and kicking another.
The court heard he received £49 per week after he arrived in the UK, although it is believed most of those at Wethersfield get the £10 weekly stipend given to asylum seekers in lodgings where meals are provided.
Women feel under siege in the town after male migrants were bussed in regularly from a sprawling camp
Last year, security workers at the site who were sacked from their jobs after refusing to work in a dispute over pay and conditions described how the asylum seekers ‘go out shopping and come back with alcohol and weapons’.
One told the BBC: ‘There was no protection for security officers. A few were assaulted and spat on. There’s no comeback when you mention it. There are no powers.
‘At night they have parties with alcohol and being 20-odd security officers on site versus 1,200 asylum seekers, you can see what we’re dealing with. We have no protection whatsoever.’
Another worker described how the guards’ task was to ‘break up the disturbances’ among those housed there.
‘One colleague got attacked, pushed against the wall. There are times I have felt very vulnerable,’ he said.
It’s not just locals and workers raising the alarm about problems with the centre.
In early 2024 – seven months after it had started housing asylum seekers – the then independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, David Neal, said a lack of ‘purposeful’ activity was ‘likely to have a deleterious impact on residents’ mental health’ and a ‘heightened risk of disorder’.
A report last year by charity Medecins Sans Frontieres found ‘high levels of mental distress’ among those housed at Wethersfield and identified ‘worrying numbers of people for whom the site was unsuitable’ complaining of ‘poor conditions and structural violence’.
One asylum seeker said the ‘military camp’ was a ‘reminder of the ones in my home country’
‘The conditions and the site itself – frequently described by residents as ‘prison-like’ – exacerbate psychological distress in the people held there,’ it said.
It quoted one man, given the alias ‘Fadil’, who complained of fights breaking out among those lodging with him.
He said: ‘They didn’t tell us that we would live in portacabins, each portacabin has six people and bathrooms are shared and far away… I swear I feel like my head is going to explode [with] anxiety and thinking and at the same time it is noisy.’
Fadil also described the ‘shared bathrooms with different communities’, explaining: ‘Sometimes you don’t even want to go to the bathroom because of the dirt.’
And the report quotes another asylum seeker at the camp as saying no account was taken of the mental state of those they were housed with.
He said: ‘There are people suffering from mental health issues, so they could be knocking on our door at nighttime and try to assault us.
‘So, instead of helping those with mental health difficulties and putting them in a separate place to us, to help them heal or give them all the medical assistance they need – they put us all together… we can see they might want to attack us.’
Another asylum seeker called Mahdi, whose nationality wasn’t identified, arrived in Wethersfield in the summer of 2024 after travelling via Turkey, Greece and France.
He said: ‘When I first saw the military camp, it was a reminder of the ones in my home country.
‘You are not engaged in the society because you are isolated. Three months of being isolated, it is like a prison, but open-air.’
Little surprise then that when they get the chance to visit nearby towns so many take it.
But with another protest against the camp planned for later this month and the toxic mix of government inaction and far-Right agitation, locals are growing increasingly worried that an already tense situation could become explosive.
