Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the Social affairs myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
A host of UK councils are poised to take legal action against hotels being used to house asylum seekers, after an Essex council won a landmark High Court ruling on Tuesday that ministers fear will set a precedent for further litigation.
Epping Forest District Council was on Tuesday granted a temporary injunction against the owners of the Bell Hotel that will block it from housing asylum seekers, meaning the 138 people already accommodated by the hotel will have to be removed.
Conservative-run Broxbourne Council said on Tuesday evening that it too would “take legal advice as a matter of urgency about whether it could take similar action”, adding that it had “opposed the use of the Delta Marriott [hotel] for this purpose from the outset but was advised that action was unlikely to be successful at that time”.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage also wrote in the Telegraph that his party “will be doing everything in their power to follow Epping’s lead” across the 10 councils it runs.
Anti-immigration protests in the UK in recent weeks have homed in on asylum hotels, including high-profile demonstrations outside the hotel in Epping sparked by allegations that an asylum seeker resident had sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl.
Protests have spread to other hotels, including in Canary Wharf, a financial district in London.
Despite a failed last-minute attempt to intervene in the High Court case on Monday, Home Office officials have been keen to downplay the significance of the ruling, saying that it was only an interim judgment.
One official stressed that the judgment was made exclusively based on whether the use of the hotel contravened planning law, arguing that this meant “it can’t be replicated everywhere”.
They argued that the court case appeared to be politically motivated, noting that the Bell Hotel was opened to asylum seekers in 2022 by a Conservative government, and the Conservative local council did not fight it at the time. “They’re using public funds to fight a Labour government,” the Home Office official added.
Security minister Dan Jarvis said on Wednesday that the Bell Hotel was “a very specific case concerning a hotel which, since it opened to accommodate asylum seekers five years ago now, has been subject to a lot of complaints and protests”.
Asked whether other hotels housing asylum seekers across England have the correct planning permission, he said: “We’ll see over the next few days and weeks.”
The Labour government has promised to close all asylum hotels by the next election but could now face the prospect of having to accelerate plans to rehome thousands of irregular migrants in alternative accommodation.
The government has made no significant progress closing asylum hotels since it came to power — there were 213 in use across the UK in July 2024 compared with about 210 in use today, according to figures provided by the Home Office.
The Epping case is a significant departure from previous legal efforts by local councils to prevent the use of local hotels during asylum processing.
Philip Coppel KC, the barrister representing Epping council, argued that the owners of the Bell Hotel breached planning law by changing the use of the accommodation to house asylum seekers.
He compared the current use of the Bell Hotel to a “borstal” and emphasised the harms caused by “community tensions” and “violent protests” in the Essex town.
In 2022 a judge granted a temporary injunction to Ipswich and East Riding of Yorkshire councils barring the use of hotels to house asylum seekers, but ultimately ruled against closing the sites on the grounds that violation of planning law had not caused significant harm.