How Reform ‘misinformation’ campaign sank town’s refugee san...

With its donkey rides, historical grand pier and long sandy beach, Weston-super-Mare is a quintessential Victorian seaside resort; busy with ice-cream toting crowds in the summer but imbued with the laidback charm of a town that moves at a slower pace.

But in the last few months, the town has become deeply divided over a proposal to become a council of sanctuary, a project designed to improve efficiencies in the provision of support for refugees and asylum seekers.

The move was seized upon by Reform UK, which launched a prolific social media campaign against the plans. Supporters of the scheme have said that Reform campaign was riddled with misinformation and led to a U-turn by the town’s council just six months after it had voted in favour. The charity behind the project, City of Sanctuary UK (CoS), said it was the first time that had happened in England.

Reform – which has no elected councillors in the North Somerset town – repeatedly claimed online that becoming a council of sanctuary would lead to a surge in “illegal immigrants” and that joining the network would divert taxpayers money away from public services, claims strongly refuted by the charity and supporters of the scheme.

The council of sanctuary award links up authorities in an attempt to improve support for asylum seekers and refugees settling into the area; it has no influence on the numbers placed in a town, that is a decision made centrally by the Home Office and its contractors. It costs a town council £150 a year for the three-year duration of the award.

Since it was first proposed, heated protests have broken out in the normally peaceful town. Councillors who supported the scheme have received abusive correspondence.

Caroline Reynolds, a Liberal Democrat councillor who first put forward the motion in March, said: “Reform were looking for something and I fell right into their hands without realising. I’m not saying that would have stopped me. That I would have done anything differently, but that’s just what happened.”

Reynolds said the “misinformation” started as soon as the motion was published. “Reform said we would be inundated with illegal immigrants,” she said.

Reform helped mobilise a large protest of about 200 people outside the town hall on the night the motion was put to a vote. Counter-protesters have alleged chants of “send them back home” were heard as well as comments about grooming gangs.

Reynolds said the arguments she heard against the proposal became more intense and prejudicial. “It became about grooming gangs, being inundated with migrants, a little bit of Islamophobia,” she said.

She added that she and colleagues in other parties received abusive emails. “The worst one I had was: ‘Wouldn’t it be a shame if in the future some time one of these illegals you think so much of carries out a crime against you or your family, as is happening all over the country,’” Reynolds said.

Other councillors came under pressure from residents and started to speak out against the proposal. Ultimately, in late September, the authority decided to abandon the plans.

Holly Law, who has lived in Weston-super-Mare for 15 years, spoke at the meeting in September in support of the proposal. “I wanted the council to take a stand and commit to ensuring that we’re as welcoming as possible. I’m embarrassed that there are hundreds of councils that have uncontroversially committed to being a city or council of sanctuary and I find it sad it was rejected,” Law said.

“There were intelligent councillors bending to the misinformation shared,” she added.

Tensions mounted throughout the summer. Avon and Somerset police are investigating a suspected hate crime at a cafe, which was vandalised and covered in racist stickers overnight in late August. No arrests have been made.

Reform is polling well in the town. In the most recent YouGov MRP poll, the party was forecast to take the seat of the local Labour MP Dan Aldridge if an election had been held the day after the survey was conducted.

The local branch of Reform increased its activity on social media as soon as the motion appeared in the council agenda. When the motion was voted through, the branch claimed on social media: “This means that the council must support illegal immigrants, possibly meaning future financial funding.”

It claimed organisations were “pushing mass migration into towns like ours”.

And responding to a post by the Reform leader, Nigel Farage, in June claiming 17,000 people had crossed the Channel so far in 2025, the Weston branch wrote: “Coming to a council of sanctuary near you.”

Oliver Hargreaves, the 29-year-old chair of the local Reform branch, stands by the allegations the scheme would facilitate illegal migration. “The website clearly states they would work with policy leaders to fight for anyone who came here by any means,” he said.

Hargreaves, who has ambitions of becoming a councillor or MP, also claimed that City of Sanctuary UK had a “list of demands”, among which was a requirement to work with local media to publish positive stories about asylum seekers. The charity rebutted this, saying that while there were criteria to be met, media was not mentioned, although councils would be expected to “raise awareness” of their work in support of inclusion.

“To have asylum seekers in the town is contrary to the wants and needs of the taxpayer majority of the town,” Hargreaves said, a point contested by supporters of the sanctuary proposal. “Why are they here? They’ve come from multiple safe countries. I just don’t think it should just be a given that local taxpayers should be burdened with their presence, I mean fiscally.”

When allegations of misinformation were put to Hargreaves, he said: “But they [CoS] are not being honest in the way that they’re thinking. I mean, it is an explicitly leftwing charity with leftwing objectives to influence our local media and policymakers, because there is an influx of immigration via asylum seekers. And there will be more.”

Most recent official figures suggest Weston-super-Mare is a town that historically has experienced below average levels of migration. In 2021, 10.4% of the population was born outside the UK, while 6.7% identified as “non UK”. The ethnic and religious make up of the town is uniform, with 95% of the population identifying as white. The numbers identifying as Asian, black, Muslim, Sikh or Jewish are far below the national average.

But Hargreaves claimed that over the past five years the town of about 83,000 people had experienced a “heavy increase in immigration”, and that there were about 150 asylum seekers in Weston-super-Mare. The Guardian has not been able to verify this figure.

“It’s all about trajectory, right?” Hargreaves said. “I don’t care about now. I care about five years’ time. And the things that they’re doing, the things that they’re prioritising, the landing pads that they’re making for themselves, point merely to a direction of an increase of immigration that people don’t want to increase.”

Hargreaves claimed the public found it frustrating to see support for immigrants in the town when services were being stretched. He used broken toilets and reduced bin collections as examples. “If you weren’t seeing a coincidence of dropping of living standards and house prices being 10 times more than they were 10 days ago, people really wouldn’t care,” Hargreaves said.

There are no hotels being used to house asylum seekers in Weston-super-Mare, although the local Reform branch has been accused of falsely claiming there are, focusing on one temporarily closed hotel in the town.

Aldridge, the town’s first ever Labour MP, sayid Reform UK’s Weston-super-Mare’s social media accounts were “full of attempts to divide our town”, adding that he was concerned by the “blatant, shameless spreading and encouraging of misinformation”.

“Their continued misinformation about our town feels increasingly damaging, like they want to trash our reputation,” he said.

Aldridge said he had received reports of people arriving in the town for a short break being wrongly labelled as asylum seekers and in some cases harassed in the streets. “This behaviour needs to stop,” he said. “It doesn’t just spread fear and misinformation. It damages Weston’s reputation as a welcoming seaside town.”

The row had caused many residents to feel “intimidated and vulnerable”, Aldridge continued. “I do not recognise the Weston some Reform UK activists try to portray.”

But the MP fell short of backing the the scheme. “The truth is, Weston already acts like a town of sanctuary – we don’t need a stamp of approval to show that,” Aldridge said.

There are 32 awarded councils, with a further 180 involved in the network. Maggie Filipova-Rivers, the local authority programme manager for CoS, said: “Councils are free to decide whether or not to seek the award, and we respect that. What we do feel is that some of the facts about what the award means have been misunderstood or lost in the debate.”

Filipova-Rivers said the charity was realistic about the challenges in the current political climate but added: “The appetite for inclusivity and fairness is still very much alive. Our main concern is that the political noise around immigration risks distracting from the valuable, practical work councils are doing every day to support integration.”

Reynolds remains optimistic. “I’m very hopeful,” she said. “Now, a lot of people have contacted me, people have stopped me in the street to say that this is not their town. It’s a loud minority.”