Mercure Dumfries Cargenholm House

The Mercure Dumfries Cargenholm House is a four star Accor branded hotel set in grounds at Glen Caple, on the A75 a short drive from the centre of Dumfries. Dumfries and Galloway Council confirmed in its August 2023 public Q+A that the Home Office had contracted the site, that 61 single male asylum seekers would be placed there under Mears Group, and that 24 hour security and Police Scotland support arrangements were in place^[1]GOV.UK^[3]Press.

In April 2026 Police Scotland published a Freedom of Information disclosure log entry, reference 26-0723, titled “Asylum Seeker Hotel Crime Stats: Accused Resident, Mercure Cargenholm House and Station Hotel, Dumfries”. The disclosure covers crime statistics where the accused was recorded as a resident of either the Mercure Cargenholm House or the nearby Station Hotel in Dumfries^[2]GOV.UK.

The disclosure is a rare instance of a UK police force publishing site specific crime data for a single asylum hotel and its neighbouring sister site. We log the accompanying Police Scotland deployment costs, the FOI processing time and the road safety working group time referenced in the council Q+A as ancillary public costs that fall outside the headline accommodation contract.

At the £170 per person per night Migration Observatory benchmark^[4], 61 single male residents in the Mercure Cargenholm House implies headline taxpayer exposure of about £10,370 per night and roughly £3.8 million per year. That is below the May 2025 NAO contract review average of about £5.84 million per year per hotel, reflecting the smaller resident count^[5]NAO.