The Oak Hotel, Ramsgate

The Oak Hotel sits on Harbour Parade overlooking Ramsgate harbour. The property had recently been sold to a local property business when the Home Office approached the new owner about using the building, alongside the adjacent Restaurant 66 site, as asylum accommodation under the South East regional contract held by Clearsprings Ready Homes.

Isle of Thanet News reported in January 2023 that an approach had been made on behalf of the Home Office in late October 2022, and a second approach in early 2023, asking the new owner to use The Oak Hotel and Restaurant 66 building to provide asylum seeker accommodation. Owner Dayne Gooding publicly declined, telling the paper that asylum accommodation was “not something” he currently planned to take forward. Clearsprings Ready Homes declined to comment on the approach to the paper^[1]Press.

The Oak Hotel is one of a small number of documented sites where the asylum proposal was refused at the property owner level rather than through council injunction or planning refusal. The case sits alongside Maycliffe Torquay and Northop Hall Flintshire as examples of refusal points outside the standard council and Home Office stand off.

Because the owner declined the approach outright, the documented public spend on The Oak Hotel is small. The callout above estimates around £25,000 covering Home Office and Clearsprings Ready Homes contracting and surveyor time, plus initial legal and processing overhead. Even this lower bound is real money, however, and forms part of the wider pattern noted by the National Audit Office of asylum accommodation spend that delivers no bed nights^[3]NAO.

At the £170/person/night Migration Observatory benchmark^[2], the £25,000 estimate is equivalent to about 147 person nights of asylum hotel accommodation that the taxpayer did not receive in return for the spend.