Best Western St Pierre, Newmillerdam, Wakefield

The Hotel St Pierre is a Best Western branded country hotel on Barnsley Road in the village of Newmillerdam, on the southern edge of Wakefield. The site had been used briefly for asylum accommodation during the early stages of the pandemic in 2020, and was returned to commercial trade after that. From 2023 the hotel was again contracted by the Home Office under Mears Yorkshire and the North East to house contingency single male asylum seekers.

Yorkshire Live reported in 2023 that a beauty salon owner based inside the Hotel St Pierre had been told the property had accepted the Home Office contract and that her business had to vacate within two days. The Yorkshire Post separately reported anger from local residents and from Wakefield Council leadership at the speed of the change of use^[2]Press^[1]Press.

Conservative Dewsbury MP Mark Eastwood publicly backed Newmillerdam residents in opposing the use of the Hotel St Pierre as asylum accommodation, citing the existing long term Cedar Court placement and the impact on the local tourism trade^[3]Press.

In late March 2024 Eastwood announced via X that following his meeting with Home Office Minister Tom Pursglove, the government would close the Hotel St Pierre as asylum accommodation. The closure made the St Pierre one of the early sites to come out of the Yorkshire and North East Mears asylum portfolio^[4]Press.

At the £170 per person per night Migration Observatory benchmark^[5], an approximately 100 person contingency placement at the St Pierre implies headline taxpayer exposure of around £17,000 per night and roughly £6.2 million per year if the contract had run a full year. With closure secured at the end of March 2024, after roughly nine months of asylum use, the actual contract spend on this site was below the May 2025 NAO contract review average of around £5.84 million per year per hotel^[6]NAO.