Aylesbury Vale hotel housing asylum seekers set to close following Home Office announcement

A hotel in Aylesbury Vale currently accommodating asylum seekers is set to close in the coming days, politicians have confirmed.

Yesterday (24 October), Buckingham MP Greg Smith confirmed a Best Western hotel being used as a temporary accommodation site was set to close.

Buckingham’s Best Western Hotel is set to be one of the first sites where migrants are moved to new facilities.

In Parliament yesterday Greg Smith revealed the Home Office was planning to close the accommodation by 23 November.

He also revealed that the Home Office had previously stated the temporary site would close by 9 September.

Home Office minister Robert Jenrick said: "I can inform the House that today the Home Office wrote to local authorities and MPs to inform them that we will now be exiting the first asylum hotels. Hotels in all four nations of the UK.

"The first 50 of these exits will begin in the coming days and will be complete by the end of January with more tranches to follow shortly but we will not stop there.

"We will continue to deliver on our strategy to stop the boats and we will be able to exit more hotels.”

It is expected that a number of the people moved out of hotels will be placed on barges by the Government. Yesterday, Mr Jenrick told the BBC that this was a more cost effective way of housing migrants.

In September 2022 asylum seekers were moved into the Buckingham hotel. Bucks Council said it had ‘significant concerns’ with the move at the time, with council leader, Martin Tett, seeking extra assurances from the Government over people’s safety and the logistics of the move.

One month later a Sun report claimed that 31 people were fired when Best Western agreed the hotel would become a temporary accommodation site for the Government.

Analysis from the tabloid publication, which ran a detailed feature on the goings on at the Bucks hotel last year, showed that the project would cost the taxpayer £2.2 million per year, if the hotel remained at full capacity for 12 months.