OYO Lakeside Haydock Hotel, St Helens

The OYO Lakeside is a 200 room conference and lakeside hotel on Lodge Lane in Haydock, Newton-le-Willows, in St Helens borough on the Merseyside / Greater Manchester boundary. The Home Office began using the site as contingency asylum accommodation under Serco from June 2021 and it remained the only borough site in continuous operation through to the announced 2026 closure^[2]GOV.UK.

In August 2025 the OYO Lakeside became one of the regional flashpoints of the 2025 anti-asylum protest wave. A protest outside the hotel led to two arrests, and St Helens Labour issued a statement calling for community cohesion and confirming the site as the borough's only Home Office asylum hotel^[5]Press.

In December 2025 the building was vandalised, with damage reported by national outlets in coverage of the broader wave of incidents at hotels facing closure. St Helens Borough Council subsequently published a Don't Be Misled page rebutting online disinformation about the site and its residents^[2]GOV.UK.

St Helens Borough Council confirms that the Home Office informed it in early February 2026 that the OYO Lakeside contract would end, with the hotel ceasing to be used as asylum accommodation before the end of April 2026. Residents are being relocated by Serco to other parts of the asylum estate^[2]GOV.UK.

The Government announcement of 15 April 2026 listed the OYO Lakeside as one of eleven asylum hotels closing in the first batch, alongside the Britannia Hotel Wolverhampton, the Madeley Court Hotel and the Marine Court Hotel in Bangor^[1]GOV.UK. LBC reported the closures were expected to save £65 million annually and bring the total number of asylum hotels below 190 from a peak of around 400^[4]Press. St Helens North MP David Baines publicly welcomed the closure^[3]Press.

At the £170 per person per night Migration Observatory benchmark^[6], 200 residents imply headline taxpayer exposure of about £34,000 per night and roughly £12.4 million per year at full occupancy. Across the June 2021 to April 2026 contract window of nearly five years, cumulative spend at the benchmark rate would be in the region of £58 million. The May 2025 NAO contract review put the average per hotel run rate across the wider portfolio at about £5.84 million per year^[7]NAO, so the OYO Lakeside ran at well over double the national average for a single Serco North West site.