The Bell Hotel ruling incentivises the far right

On the surface, the case centres on a planning dispute: Epping Forest District Council contends that using a hotel to house asylum seekers constitutes a “change of use” that requires the consent of local planning officials, while the hotel itself (on Home Office advice) insists it does not.

The dispute is revealing as to the actual operation of asylum “hotels”. The Bell Hotel in Epping Forest has 80 rooms, but is intended to house up to 138 asylum seekers (mostly single men) – meaning almost all residents are sharing a small hotel room with a stranger, with no say over who they share with. 

While asylum seekers are allowed to leave the hotel, they cannot stay elsewhere overnight without Home Office permission, and must sign in every day. The hotel has security contractors assigned to it, who are present around the clock, and its bar and other facilities are closed.

The description of these conditions puts paid to the myth that asylum seekers are kept in the lap of luxury: who among us would wish to permanently share a small hotel room in Epping with a total stranger, for months at a time?

The Bell Hotel was failing as a hotel since 2017, the court ruling notes, and would almost certainly have shut down during the pandemic had it not started housing asylum seekers. It is located on the outskirts of the town, and regular custom had been falling even before the pandemic killed it off. As a result, it has been used, on and off, as an asylum hotel since 2020.

The recent troubles started after two arrests of hotel residents, one on August 8 “for an alleged sexual assault and related matters” and another a few days later “for alleged offences of common assault, battery, and sexual assault”. 

This led at first to lawful protests by local residents disturbed by those incidents, which were later joined by far right groups from around the country who inflamed them into violent disturbances. This, in turn, led the local council to escalate its planning dispute with the hotel – saying that until the dispute was settled either way, no asylum seekers should be housed at the Bell.

The logic that follows is proper angels-dancing-on-the-heads-of-pins stuff. Mr Justice Eyre concedes early on that it is not his role, as a judge deciding whether to grant an injunction or not, to settle the planning dispute itself – that will be decided at a later date. So, the court has not ruled over whether a hotel is still a hotel when its residents are asylum seekers or not.

But, he notes, that question mark over its legal status weighs heavily on his decision. If the hotel is operating lawfully, he notes, the fact that lawful protests were happening outside it could not lead to an injunction – everyone would have to put up with it. Similarly, the fact of “unlawful activity” (violent acts by out-of-town ‘protestors’) would be immaterial.

However, because the operation of the hotel itself may not be lawful, the disruption caused by both the lawful and unlawful protest should be taken into account in his judgment, Eyre ruled. Similarly, the “fear of crime” felt by local residents must be considered, though no direct evidence was taken on whether or not there had been an increase in criminal activity in the area.

It was this combination of the arrest of some hotel residents, the protests – lawful and unlawful – caused by this, and residents’ fear of crime that led to Justice Eyre granting the “temporary” injunction, which requires the Bell Hotel to be emptied of asylum seekers by 12 September, until the planning dispute is decided.

The Home Office has complained that this ruling could cause nationwide chaos and render the asylum system impossible to operate. It has a very good point.

Generally, action is taken in planning disputes after they have been settled one way or another. If someone is accused of building an illegal extension, it is not demolished or evacuated while the courts consider the case.

The Bell Hotel had been operating as an asylum hotel since 2020, but has been ordered to close even though its operations might be found to be entirely legal – for it to close would be to require that UK planning law says a hotel is no longer a hotel, even if no physical changes have been made, once the Home Office is paying the bill.

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But it is the weight placed onto the protests and criminal far right activity that is most significant. By allowing his decision to factor in these aspects, the judge just incentivised protest outside every asylum hotel in the country. 

His ruling essentially writes the far right’s playbook for it: launch a protest outside an asylum hotel and bus in people from across the country to it, and so much the better if some of those who arrive get violent. Once there is violence outside a hotel, get local residents to put pressure on the council to take the hotel to court, and try to secure an injunction. Rinse and repeat.

Whatever his intent, Mr Justice Eyre has just shown to the far right that violent protest works, and he has left everyone else to pick up the pieces. Councils will now have little choice but to launch legal cases against asylum hotels in their area, and police and the government are left to deal with an inevitable new wave of asylum hotel protests – just as attempts to manufacture a summer crisis were winding down.

The handling of the case seems somewhat shambolic. The case was heard on 15 August, but the Home Office did not try to intervene until 18 August, when it seemed to realise the danger it posed. The judge dismissed the intervention as unnecessary, and refused to hear from the government, who will surely try to stay his ruling and overturn it at a higher court, though the judge also refused automatic leave to appeal.

Contrary to the impression given by the headlines, Labour had already been reducing the use of asylum hotels, and was working to phase them out entirely. 

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In the last year of the Conservative government, £3 billion was spent on hotels for asylum seekers. In the financial year that ended this April, that dropped to £2.1 billion. The government was already trying to tackle this problem in an orderly fashion.

Now, that attempt to keep things orderly is in danger. The judge’s intentions in the case were surely good: he was trying to weigh up the interests of the hotel, its residents, the people in the area around it, and those of the council, and insisted his ruling was on narrow issues of fact.

But whatever he says, he cannot ignore the inevitable wider implications of his ruling. This case is a lit match hurled onto a pile of kindling – what remains to be seen is whether the Home Office or higher courts can succeed in putting it out in time.