CONTROVERSIAL plans to transform a former nursing home into an asylum seeker complex were set to be approved today.

The move has sparked fears the numbers of refugees in Blackburn and Darwen is about to spiral out of control.

Opposition councillors today attacked the ruling Labour group on Blackburn with Darwen Council for failing to adequately control the number of asylum seekers entering the borough.

And they claimed that by approving the plans for Witton Bank Nursing Home to be turned into a 30-bedsit centre for asylum seekers, they were opening the floodgates for similar developments in big buildings across the borough.

The council has an agreement to provide around 150 places in former council houses for asylum seekers. The Government has designated the area a 'cluster area' with another 550 supposed to be placed in the private sector.

When the Witton Bank project was first revealed in August, the council denied the plans and said a limit of 700 asylum seekers was in place.

Just weeks later, it was forced to confess there were actually 791 in the borough, higher than the one-per-200 of the population target set by the Government.

And that could rise even higher if the Witton Bank development is given the go-ahead because Clearsprings Management, the firm behind the plan, have a contract with Government to provide a set quota of spaces in the North West for asylum seekers, no matter where.

A report to the planning and highways committee of Blackburn with Darwen Council states that because the old home, in Spring Street, was previously used for 'multi-occupancy' purposes in the past -- as a nursing home and hotel -- the plan cannot be rejected.

Concerns from residents, who collected two petitions -- one of which, with 1,200 signatures on it -- about a potential rise in crime and anti-social behaviour are rejected in the report because 'they cannot be addressed by the planning system.'

It also adds that such concerns at similar schemes elsewhere in Britain have failed to materialise.Coun Maureen Bateson, who citizens' rights portfolio includes asylum seekers, has written to the Home Office to ask that no more asylum seekers be sent to the borough until the number of asylum seekers drops back below 700.