Royal Beach Hotel, Portsmouth

The Royal Beach is a Victorian seafront hotel on St Helens Parade in Southsea, directly opposite South Parade Pier. Portsmouth News reported that the hotel cancelled all its commercial bookings to be block-booked by the Home Office for asylum accommodation, prompting public anger from displaced customers^[1]Press.

Portsmouth City Council confirms that the Royal Beach is the only asylum hotel in use in the city and that it is operated as family accommodation including young children. The published Home Office data point at the time of writing was 73 asylum seekers in hotel accommodation in Portsmouth, all at this site^[3]GOV.UK.

The Diocese of Portsmouth published a 2025 case study of an asylum-seeking family with two sons aged 8 and 6 placed at the hotel. The family had not been interviewed by the Home Office in the nine months since arrival; residents are not allowed to work, have to stay in the hotel most of the time, are forbidden from having visitors, and are given an allowance of around £8 a week with reheated or sandwich food^[2]Press.

From summer 2025 the hotel became a focal point for anti-asylum protests, with groups gathering near South Parade Pier opposite the building and calling for the hotel to stop housing asylum seekers. The Diocese of Portsmouth case study reports that the family it interviewed described flashbacks triggered by the protests outside their accommodation^[2]Press.

At the £170 per person per night Migration Observatory benchmark^[4], a hotel reported as housing 73 residents implies headline taxpayer exposure of about £12,410 per night and roughly £4.5 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.