Banbury House Hotel, Oxfordshire

The Banbury House Hotel is a 50-bedroom Georgian property on Oxford Road in Banbury, Oxfordshire. From around September 2022 the site was withdrawn from public booking and used as Home Office contingency asylum accommodation, housing small-boat migrants awaiting decisions on their claims^[2]Press. The accommodation provider was not named in the closure coverage. Local reporting from the Banbury Guardian and Banbury FM tracked the hotel through its asylum-use period^[3]Press.

Asylum use at Banbury House ended in February 2026: GB News reported that residents were observed leaving on 18 February 2026 and that the hotel had “ceased operating as asylum seeker accommodation”^[2]Press.

On 15 April 2026 the Home Office announced that eleven asylum hotels had closed and been returned to their communities, naming Banbury House alongside the 15 Citrus Hotel in Cheltenham, the Crewe Arms Hotel, a Holiday Inn near Heathrow, the Britannia Hotel in Wolverhampton, Madeley Court near Telford, OYO Lakeside in St Helens, the Marine Court Hotel in Bangor, a Sure Hotel in Aberdeen, and both the Rock Hotel and Wool Merchant Hotel in Halifax. The Home Office said the round of closures saves around £65 million a year^[1]GOV.UK.

Banbury MP Sean Woodcock welcomed the closure, describing it as a positive step toward ending excessive spending on asylum hotels^[4]Press.

At the £170 per person per night Migration Observatory benchmark^[5], a 50 bedroom hotel run at full asylum occupancy implies headline taxpayer exposure of about £8,500 per night and roughly £3.1 million per year. Across the roughly three and a half years of asylum use (2022 to early 2026) that puts cumulative spend at around £10 million, although the actual run rate varied with occupancy. The May 2025 NAO contract review put the average per hotel run rate across the wider portfolio at about £5.84 million per year^[6]NAO.