McLays Guest House, Glasgow

McLays Guest House was a budget guest house at 268 to 270 Renfrew Street in Garnethill, central Glasgow. In late March and early April 2020, in response to the start of the Covid 19 pandemic, Mears Group used the site as part of a wider estate of Glasgow hotels and guest houses to accommodate asylum seekers it had taken off the £5.39 a day subsistence payment.

Bella Caledonia documented these moves at scale, reporting that around 350 people were displaced in Glasgow over a few weeks, often into rooms shared with strangers and with minimal access to health care or interpreters^[1]Press.

On 5 May 2020 Syrian asylum seeker Adnan Walid Elbi was found dead inside his room at McLays. Positive Action in Housing statements following the death said other residents at the site had been moved on by Mears in the days afterwards, while warning about the lack of Covid 19 testing across the wider Glasgow hotel estate^[3]Press.

Elbi's death sat alongside earlier 2020 incidents elsewhere in the Glasgow Mears estate and prompted urgent questions about welfare, isolation and mental health support for people moved into the new emergency hotel arrangements.

On 29 June 2020 the House of Commons held a debate on Covid 19 support and accommodation for asylum seekers. Glasgow based members raised the McLays death and the wider Mears forced moves, calling for a return to cash support, proper testing and individual assessments before further moves^[2]Hansard.

The debate became a key reference point in subsequent Scottish Refugee Council and Glasgow City Council criticism of the Mears Glasgow contract.

At the £170 per person per night Migration Observatory benchmark^[4]and an estimated peak of around 100 residents during the spring 2020 forced moves, McLays implies headline taxpayer exposure of around £17,000 per night during the period of use. 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.

The site also generated a separate ancillary public cost following the death of Adnan Walid Elbi: a fatal accident inquiry, sudden death attendance by Police Scotland, NHS ambulance and A&E response, and biohazard cleanup of the room. The popup totals these as roughly £11,000 of incident response cost, on top of the accommodation contract.