Pontins Prestatyn Sands: Considered Asylum Site Proposal

Pontins Prestatyn Sands was a commercial holiday park on the North Wales coast, opened in 1971 on a sand-dune site at the western edge of Prestatyn. By 2022 the park comprised approximately 704 self-catering chalet units, each with bunk beds, a small kitchenette and a compact bathroom. The site sits on Central Beach, Barkby Avenue, immediately adjacent to the Irish Sea shoreline and around two miles from Prestatyn town centre.

Prestatyn itself is a small coastal town of around 19,000 residents in Denbighshire. The town has limited public-service capacity outside the summer tourist season, with primary care and hospital provision concentrated at Glan Clwyd Hospital in Bodelwyddan, six miles inland. The park sits within the Vale of Clwyd parliamentary constituency.

In November 2022 the Pontins Prestatyn Sands site was publicly named in mainstream press coverage as one of several underperforming Pontins camps the Home Office was considering for large-scale asylum accommodation. The reporting placed the site alongside budget cruise ships and student halls in an options paper aimed at moving people out of contingency hotels at a time when the daily UK hotel bill stood at around £5.6 million^[1].

Quoting then Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick on the need to end "Hotel Britain", and a senior Home Office official describing off-season holiday camps as "an attractive idea", the coverage marked the start of a roughly 16-month period in which the site sat on the department's candidate list. The same programme produced the formal large-sites announcements at RAF Wethersfield, RAF Scampton and RAF Linton-on-Ouse, and the 820-chalet Pontins Camber Sands site was also approached by the department during the same window^[5].

On 30 November 2023, the day Pontins announced the sudden commercial closure of Prestatyn Sands with immediate effect, Vale of Clwyd MP Dr James Davies obtained direct confirmation from Robert Jenrick that the government had no intention of using the site to house asylum seekers^[2]. Coverage the same day in North Wales Live carried the same ministerial assurance and noted that earlier reports had listed the site as a potential candidate^[3].

Unlike the parallel proposal at Pontins Camber Sands, the Prestatyn consideration never reached the stage of a formal council approach. The local MP, Dr James Davies, was vocal in opposing any use of the site for asylum accommodation throughout 2022 and 2023, and the Home Office moved away from the option as alternative large sites at Wethersfield, Scampton and Bibby Stockholm came on stream^[5].

The position was put beyond doubt in a March 2024 Freedom of Information response in which the Home Office stated that "this particular site is no longer being considered to house asylum seekers." The response, prompted by a 23 February 2024 FOI request, marked the first written confirmation from the department that the site had been formally removed from the candidate list^[4].

No NAO investigation or Home Office transparency release has put a published figure on the cost of the Pontins Prestatyn consideration. The ~£55,000 shown in the callout above is therefore an estimate rather than a verified total, and is deliberately sized at the lower end of the range used for sites that progressed to a formal council approach. It captures the visible activity at Prestatyn between November 2022 and March 2024: Home Office officer time on options-paper analysis and candidate-site shortlisting, a short-form site assessment of the park, ministerial correspondence with the local MP, and the FOI response handling time in early 2024.

Where the parallel Pontins Camber Sands proposal carries an estimated £250,000 abortive cost reflecting a formal council approach, legal correspondence and surveyor time, the Prestatyn figure is roughly a fifth of that because the consideration appears not to have reached the council-approach stage. It is nonetheless a real cost: every officer-hour spent shortlisting, assessing or correspondence-handling the site was an officer-hour not spent on other casework.

For context, the Migration Observatory's benchmark of around £170 per person per night for hotel-based asylum accommodation^[6] means even a £55,000 chatter cost is equivalent to roughly 320 person-nights of hotel accommodation that the taxpayer could otherwise have funded.