Yorkshire Gateway Hotel, South Milford

The Yorkshire Gateway Hotel is a roadside three-star establishment on the Great North Road at Ledsham/South Milford, sitting on the side of the former A1 at Junction 42 of the A1(M). The site is in the Selby District of North Yorkshire, on the boundary with Leeds City Council. It is roughly 12 miles south-east of Leeds city centre and 10 miles west of Selby town centre, surrounded by countryside with no shops, GP surgery or English-language teaching provision within walking distance.

Yorkshire Live reported that Marwa Koofi, an Afghan refugee who fled Kabul when the city fell to the Taliban, had spent roughly a year living in the Yorkshire Gateway Hotel as part of the post-Operation Pitting bridging accommodation programme. She described the site as a place where she had wasted a year of her life because the remote location made it impossible to reach work, English classes or integration services^[1]Press.

The same coverage stressed that residents had to walk miles to access basic services along a stretch of the former A1 with no pavements for long sections. Local councillors described the suitability of the building as poor for any extended occupancy, particularly for families with school-age children.

In 2023 Yorkshire Live reported that single asylum seekers were due to be housed at the Yorkshire Gateway Hotel after the Afghan families had been moved out. The article carried the line that the men were to be dumped at the site by the Home Office, with North Yorkshire councillors raising concerns about the suitability of the location after the well-documented experience of the previous Afghan residents^[2]Press.

Selby District Council and Leeds City Council were both named in the coverage as raising the lack of consultation with the Home Office before the change of cohort, with the council also noting the hotel had no realistic transport options for residents to attend asylum legal appointments in Leeds, York or Sheffield.

Using a 120-bed estimated peak occupancy at the £170 per person per night system benchmark used by the Migration Observatory and the National Audit Office, the Yorkshire Gateway Hotel would have run at roughly £20,400 per night, £143,000 per week and £7.4 million per year while in active Home Office use^[3][4]NAO.