Laverstoke Court, Derby

Laverstoke Court is a hall of residence at Peet Street in the Hartington Street area of Derby (DE22 3NT). It had been standing largely empty for some time, apart from limited use as housing for overseas students, when Urban Housing Services submitted a planning application on behalf of G4S in 2017 to change its use to a residential hostel for asylum seekers^[1]Council.

The proposal was for an initial accommodation centre, a specific category in the Home Office system. Service users would arrive within hours of an asylum claim, receive an induction briefing translated into ten languages, and stay roughly three weeks while their applications were processed before being moved to dispersed accommodation in the wider region. About 25 staff would have been employed on site, including a site manager, deputy site manager, administrator, security staff, domestics and a maintenance team^[2]Press.

The Consultation Institute used the Laverstoke Court proposal as a published case study in local engagement failure. Residents in the Peet Street area first learned of the plan through informal channels rather than from the Home Office or G4S; an estimated 3,000 leaflets advertising a community information event were never delivered, and a petition opposing the plan gathered hundreds of signatures^[2]Press.

The 240 place initial accommodation centre never opened at Laverstoke Court in the form proposed. G4S has since divested its asylum accommodation business, with the successor estate reorganised in 2019 under the COMPASS successor contracts that today are held by Mears, Serco and Clearsprings.

Because the centre never opened in this form, there is no accommodation contract spend at Laverstoke Court to report. The taxpayer cost is the abortive spend on planning processing, council legal review, G4S and Urban Housing Services pre development design work and a failed community consultation. We model that at roughly £95,000 in 2017 prices, broadly comparable to other small abortive HMO and hostel proposals in the same period^[3][4]NAO.