VALE of Evesham MP Peter Luff is visiting Rotterdam tomorrow to see how Dutch authorities use floating accommodation units to house asylum seekers. Similar units are also used by the Germans.

Before leaving, Mr Luff said he was disturbed to hear the Prime Minister suggest at his press conference last week that large asylum accommodation centres in rural England were essential to the government's whole asylum strategy.

"His implication that there was no alternative was wrong and there were at least three optional strategies, " said the MP campaigning against the proposed asylum seekers centre at Throckmorton,.

"Firstly," explained Mr Luff, most asylum seekers will, even under his current plan, be dispersed around the country. There is growing evidence this dispersal policy is beginning to work and should not be scaled back.

"Secondly, all the lobby groups, charities, churches and opposition parties would support smaller accommodation centres nearer to the urban areas where the help and support asylum seekers need can be found, and third, elsewhere in Europe other countries are using radically different solutions, such as these floating units."

Mr Luff said he worked briefly with the company building the units back in the early 1990s when they were being used as prison units, since when they had been used or proposed for a wide range of purposes ranging from hotels to accommodation for car workers.

"The great attraction of floating units, moored in ports, is that they are very flexible. If the location proves problematic, they can be moved somewhere else very quickly. You can't move a large village-come-holiday camp and its entire infrastructure. If the government's experiment with these large centres fails, as I believe it will, then another use will have to be found for these villages, but that's going to be very difficult."