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 From late October 2022 the hotel was withdrawn from ordinary commercial booking and used as Home Office contingency asylum accommodation. Local reporting through 2022 to 2025 records the site as one of the longest continuously operating asylum hotels in Kent.

A protest was held outside the hotel on 29 August 2025. More than a dozen people gathered 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.

No resident headcount for this hotel has been published by the Home Office, the council or the press, so we do not estimate a taxpayer cost for it. The only sourced capacity figure is the 103 beds reported by KentOnline when the hotel was emptied on 10 June 2026, and a bed count is not evidence of how many people were placed here. For scale at the portfolio level rather than this site, the May 2025 NAO contract review put the average per-hotel run rate across the wider estate at about £5.84 million per year^[4]NAO.