Peterborough By Verve

The Peterborough By Verve, known locally simply as The Verve, is a 54 bedroom hotel on Newton Way in the Boongate industrial and retail belt just east of Peterborough city centre. It is one of a small portfolio of mid market hotels run under the Verve banner. The Verve was the second Peterborough hotel taken into Home Office asylum use in 2022, following the Great Northern Hotel at Station Approach^[1]Press.

Peterborough Telegraph reporting in November 2022 confirmed that the Verve had been booked through Serco, the regional accommodation contractor for the Home Office, to take in asylum seekers being moved out of the Manston short term holding facility in Kent. About 150 people were placed across The Verve and the Great Northern Hotel over several days from 11 November 2022 as the Home Office worked to clear the backlog at Manston^[1]Press.

Residents living near Newton Way told Peterborough Telegraph they were angry that the change of use had been imposed with no prior consultation, and called on the Home Office to rethink the placement^[2]Press.

Then Peterborough MP Paul Bristow used coverage of the twin Peterborough hotel placements to call on the Prime Minister to declare a national emergency over the use of hotels for asylum seekers, naming The Verve and the Great Northern as the two sites in active Home Office use in his constituency^[3]Press.

At the £170 per person per night Migration Observatory benchmark^[4]and a 54 bedroom site run at full asylum occupancy, the Verve implies headline taxpayer exposure of about £9,180 per night and roughly £3.4 million per year. The May 2025 NAO contract review put the average per hotel run rate across the wider portfolio at about £5.84 million per year^[5]NAO.