Holiday Inn Ashford Central, Canterbury Road

The standout feature of the Ashford site is not the headcount or the protests but the formal council position on the way the Home Office took the building. Cllr Gerry Clarkson, then leader of Ashford Borough Council, told Kent Online in November 2022 that the council had no control over the decision and was extremely angry at how the Home Office had handled it. He said the Home Office had ignored the views of Ashford Borough Council, Kent County Council, Kent Police and local health services^[1]Press.

That stands in contrast to other 2022 to 2025 Home Office hotel placements, where councils typically received at least short formal notice before residents arrived. The Ashford experience helped feed the broader political argument that the Home Office was bouncing local authorities into hotel dispersal as a fait accompli.

The Holiday Inn on Canterbury Road sits on a major route into Ashford town centre, around a mile from Ashford International station. From late October 2022 the hotel was withdrawn from ordinary commercial booking and used to accommodate single adult asylum seekers under the Southern Asylum Accommodation and Support Services contract. Local reporting through 2022 to 2025 records the site as one of the longest continuously operating asylum hotels in Kent.

In February 2023 Kent Police were called to the hotel at 4:42pm on 13 February over concerns for a person's welfare. A woman was arrested and later released without charge. The article confirmed the site had been housing asylum seekers following Channel arrivals from late October and early November 2022^[3]Press.

The site then became a recurring venue for local anti-asylum demonstrations through summer 2025. On 29 August 2025 more than a dozen people gathered outside the Holiday Inn with England and Union flags and banners reading “Shame on our two-tier government” and “Toot if you have had enough of mass immigration”. Kent Online counted at least 50 cars sounding their horns in the 15-minute period its reporters were on site^[2]Press.

At the £170 per person per night Migration Observatory benchmark^[4], an estimated 200 single adult residents implies headline taxpayer exposure of about £34,000 per night and roughly £12.4 million per year. 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.