There is one clear political winner from the Epping asylum hotel ruling: Nigel Farage. True, the technical victor, as so often in English life, may be the Town and Country Planning Order (the owners of the Bell Hotel failed to apply for new planning permission). But that’s not something Farage felt obliged to mention, hailing “a great victory for the parents and concerned residents of Epping”.
That’s a message that will resonate with an electorate increasingly wondering whether to gamble on the Reform leader (Farage’s party has led every opinion poll since May). It was the Bell Hotel that became an emblem of a dysfunctional model after one migrant living there was charged with sexual assault (a second asylum seeker was arrested last week). Confronted by the case between Epping council and the hotel’s owners, Home Office lawyers sought to intervene, warning that any injunction could “substantially interfere” with the department’s statutory duty to house asylum seekers and risked “acting as an impetus for further violent protests”.
But the judge, who acknowledged that recent arrests “form a basis for the local concern”, ruled that Somani Hotels, which owns the Bell Hotel, “sidestepped the public scrutiny and explanation which would otherwise have taken place if an application for planning permission or for a certificate of lawful use had been made”.
The Home Office is barred from appealing and now has less than a month to find alternative accommodation for the hotel’s residents. But this practical challenge could be far outweighed by the potential unravelling of the asylum hotel model.
Farage has vowed that the 12 councils controlled by Reform will explore similar legal action to Epping, and shadow home secretary Chris Philp has said he would welcome other local authorities doing the same (Labour accuses the Tories of “rank hypocrisy”, noting that Philp was the first immigration minister to move asylum seekers into the Bell Hotel and that Robert Jenrick was the second).
Labour knows just how politically toxic the asylum hotel policy – emblematic of the UK’s profligate outsourced state – is. Aides speak with authentic outrage of the “absolute wreck” of a system they inherited as the Conservatives’ doomed Rwanda deportation scheme saw processing ground to a halt. The number of asylum seekers accommodated has fallen from a peak of 56,042 in 400 hotels in September 2023 to 32,345 in 210 hotels (with costs falling from £3bn to £2.1bn), and the government intends to end their use entirely by the time of the next election in 2029.
But even before yesterday’s ruling, some in Labour were warning that far faster action was required. Last month, one influential MP told me that the government should “requisition Duchy of Lancaster land and build temporary Nightingale accommodation” (along the lines of the hospitals constructed during the Covid-19 pandemic). That same MP now blames a “vacuum of leadership” for leaving the courts to rule on what voters see as a “moral and political matter”.
For Labour, the painful irony of the ruling is that it comes just as the government is trying to tell a better story on immigration. Last month, ministers agreed a “one in, one out” asylum deal with France that they hope will deter Channel crossings and only today announced a new agreement with Iraq to return illegal migrants. Instead, Labour is left to rue the slow breakdown of a system that it did not design but must now own.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: Zarah Sultana reveals a fault line in Your Party]
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