Mercure Hatfield Oak Hotel

The Mercure Hatfield Oak is a three star, 76 room hotel on the edge of Hatfield in Welwyn Hatfield borough, Hertfordshire, sitting near the A1(M). It was originally built as a commercial business and conference hotel and has since been used by the Home Office as part of its East of England contingency accommodation portfolio.

The Comet reported in August 2025 that new figures showed Welwyn Hatfield was accommodating 238 asylum seekers in hotels, up from 190 in March 2025. The reporting drew on council and Home Office statistics to track headcount growth across the borough's contingency sites, including the Mercure Hatfield Oak^[1]Press.

A Freedom of Information request published on WhatDoTheyKnow asked the Home Office for data on the housing of asylum seekers in Welwyn Hatfield from 2020 to 2025, naming the Mercure Hatfield Oak and other contingency hotels in the borough^[2]GOV.UK. A separate parliamentary written question on Asylum: Welwyn Hatfield logged on the parallelparliament index further confirms the Welwyn Hatfield placements as part of the official record^[3]GOV.UK.

At the £170 per person per night Migration Observatory benchmark^[4]and an indicative occupancy of around 75 residents, headline taxpayer exposure runs at roughly £12,750 per night and about £4.7 million per year. The May 2025 NAO contract review put the average annual run rate per hotel across the wider portfolio at about £5.84 million per year^[5]NAO.