Chimney House Hotel, Sandbach

Chimney House is a Tudor-style country hotel on Congleton Road in Sandbach, set in around eight acres of grounds and built in the early twentieth century. The 51 en-suite bedrooms, restaurant and conference facilities made it a popular Cheshire wedding venue, and its location 500 metres from M6 Junction 17 makes it equally accessible from Manchester and Stoke-on-Trent.

By autumn 2020 the Chimney House had been taken into use as Home Office contingency asylum accommodation. The Home Office described the placement as part of contingency arrangements that would be discontinued as soon as it was able to do so, and noted that a comprehensive cessation plan had been established with input from Local Authorities, Other Government Departments and Stakeholders to reduce the number of people in hotels^[2]GOV.UK.

On 29 September 2020 a parliamentary written question, PWQ 96847, asked the Home Secretary specifically about the numbers of asylum seekers being housed at the Chimney House Hotel in Sandbach, the duration of the contract, and what consultation had taken place with Cheshire East Council. The Home Office answer of 5 October 2020 declined to provide site-specific occupancy data on commercial-confidentiality grounds but confirmed the hotel was in contingency use under a regional Clearsprings or Serco contract^[1]GOV.UK.

At the £170 per person per night Migration Observatory benchmark^[6] and an estimated 50 residents in a 51-bedroom hotel run at roughly one resident per room, headline taxpayer exposure worked out at about £8,500 per night and roughly £3.1 million per year while the hotel was in asylum use (2020 to June 2026). 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, so the Chimney House sat below the national average given its smaller capacity.