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 From around September 2022 the site was withdrawn from public booking and used as contingency asylum accommodation under the Asylum Accommodation and Support Services (AASC) contract held in the Midlands by Serco^[2]Press.

Local reporting from the Banbury Guardian and Banbury FM tracked the hotel through its asylum-use period, including community engagement with neighbours and Cherwell District Council briefings on local impacts.

On 19 April 2026 the Home Office announced eleven hotels would close as part of its plan to end the use of asylum hotels. Banbury House was named on the list, alongside other Midlands and Yorkshire sites^[1]GOV.UK.

Banbury MP Sean Woodcock issued a statement welcoming the confirmed end of asylum use at the hotel and saying he had pressed Home Office ministers and Serco for the closure throughout the previous year^[3]Press.

At the £170 per person per night Migration Observatory benchmark^[4], 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 that puts cumulative spend at around £10 million, although 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^[5]NAO.