Allesley Hotel, Coventry

The Allesley Hotel sat on Birmingham Road on the western edge of Coventry, with about 113 bedrooms across the main building. From 2020 the site was contracted into the Home Office asylum estate under the Asylum Accommodation and Support Services contract held in the West Midlands by Serco, alongside the larger nearby Coventry Hill Hotel. The hotel stopped taking commercial bookings while it continued to house asylum seekers^[2]Press.

In August 2021 Coventry City Council issued the Allesley Hotel with a six page temporary stop notice ordering it to remove all asylum seekers from the premises by midday on Friday 3 September 2021. The council argued that the hotel was operating as a hostel without planning approval and that the change of use breached planning control, having gone ahead despite earlier assurances from the Home Office^[1]Press.

At the time Coventry was housing more than 500 asylum seekers in temporary hotels in addition to over 1,000 in dispersal accommodation, a number the council described as overly and disproportionately high compared with the UK average. The Allesley Hotel manager said the notice came without prior warning and indicated the hotel would seek legal advice to challenge it^[3]Press. The case sat alongside a wider judicial review challenge by Coventry and six other West Midlands authorities over the Home Office dispersal policy^[4]Press.

The Allesley Hotel ceased trading in 2022. Since closure the building has suffered two large fires, leading West Midlands Fire Service and the council to treat the structure as unsafe and beyond repair^[5]Press. The site is now marketed for redevelopment as land at the former Allesley Hotel rather than as a hotel reopening.

At the £170 per person per night Migration Observatory benchmark^[6], a 113 room hotel run at full asylum occupancy would imply headline taxpayer exposure of about £19,210 per night and roughly £7.0 million per year. The May 2025 NAO contract review put the average per hotel run rate across the wider portfolio at about £5.84 million per year^[7]NAO.