Burrows Court Tower Block, Sneinton

Burrows Court was built in 1967 as part of Nottingham's post war council housing programme and originally comprised 130 one and two bedroom flats. Nottingham City Council decommissioned the block in 2005 because of low demand and persistent drug dealing in and around the building, and it stood empty for 16 years until a refurbishment programme returned it to residential use at the end of 2021^[1]Press^[3]Council.

When residents began moving in at the end of 2021 the tower was identified by local press as a Home Office dispersal site rather than open-market council housing. Around 127 of the flats were reported to be in asylum use by 2022 with an estimated headcount of about 300 across the block, making it one of the largest single dispersal sites in the East Midlands.

The Nottingham Post sent reporters into the building in 2022 and published an account of broken furniture, mouldy food in fridges and mattresses with visible holes inside the flats. Elderly people and children were sleeping in broken beds and the paper recorded several residents sleeping on the floor because their beds were in such bad shape. Pest control had been called for an outbreak of silverfish and bedbugs, but staff anonymously told the paper that the outbreak had gone too far^[2]Press.

HMO and dispersal-flat accommodation typically runs at roughly £14 to £25 per person per day, well below the £170 hotel benchmark used elsewhere on this site^[4]. At the lower end of that band, 300 residents implies roughly £6,000 a day or about £2.2 million a year. The May 2025 NAO contract review confirms the Home Office's policy direction is to shift dispersal away from hotels and towards exactly this kind of larger fixed-site block^[5]NAO.