Holiday Inn Express, Manvers (Rotherham)

The Holiday Inn Express in Manvers sits on the edge of the Manvers Way business park in Wath-upon-Dearne, just outside Rotherham. The area is served by the regional asylum contract for the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber held by Mears Group. The hotel had been used for asylum accommodation for several months before the August 2024 disorder.

The August 2024 unrest in towns including Rotherham, Tamworth, Hull, Liverpool and Aldershot followed false claims circulated online about the identity of the suspect in the Southport stabbings. The Holiday Inn Express in Manvers became one of the central images of that episode.

On the afternoon of 4 August 2024, a crowd estimated at more than 700 people gathered outside the hotel. Bricks, bottles and other missiles were thrown at the building; windows were smashed, fires were set against external walls, and bins were used as makeshift battering rams. Asylum seekers who were inside at the time later described barricading themselves into rooms while smoke entered the corridors^[1]Press. South Yorkshire Police later confirmed that more than 50 officers were injured at the scene.

On 11 September 2024 Rotherham Borough Council passed a cross-party motion that described the attack as a terrorist incident motivated by racial and religious hatred^[2]Council. Over 100 people were eventually charged in connection with the disorder, with custodial sentences imposed in the months that followed.

At the Migration Observatory's £170 per-person per-night benchmark^[3], a hotel housing 200 residents represents around £34,000 per night, or approximately £12.4 million per year in headline taxpayer exposure. As with all sites, this is a contractual capacity figure rather than a settled invoice.

The May 2025 NAO report on accommodation contracts confirmed that 222 hotels were in use in 2024/25 with a combined contract bill of approximately £1.296 billion^[4]NAO, implying an average per-hotel exposure of £5.8 million per year — close to the formula above.