North Stafford Hotel, Stoke-on-Trent

The North Stafford was completed in 1849 as the gateway hotel for the North Staffordshire Railway, in Elizabethan revival style with tiled roof and Dutch gables. The property has 88 bedrooms and is owned by Britannia Hotels, which acquired it in November 2002. From late 2022 the hotel was withdrawn from public booking and used by Serco as Home Office contingency asylum accommodation^[1]Broadcast.

In October 2022 Stoke-on-Trent City Council issued a public statement objecting to the Home Office plan to use the privately operated North Stafford for asylum dispersal accommodation, arguing that Stoke had taken more than its fair share and asking other parts of the UK to match that contribution^[2]GOV.UK. The same week the council secured a without notice High Court interim injunction over a separate Stoke hotel; Mr Justice Linden refused to extend that injunction at a hearing on 2 November 2022^[3]Press.

The Serco contracts at the North Stafford and the Best Western were the subject of a Westminster Hall debate in February 2023 led by Stoke MPs Jonathan Gullis and Jack Brereton, who pressed for the contracts to be wound down. The Home Office later confirmed in the House of Commons that use of the North Stafford for asylum accommodation would end^[4]GOV.UK.

At the £170 per person per night Migration Observatory benchmark^[5], an 88 room hotel implies headline taxpayer exposure of about £14,960 per night. Across the roughly 17 month closed period that totals an estimated £7.6 million, sitting comfortably below the £5.84 million annual per hotel mean recorded by the May 2025 NAO contract review^[6]NAO.