The need to house asylum seekers in hotels is more important than local objections to their presence, a UK court has been told.
The British government is appealing against a decision by a judge to stop the owner of a hotel from using the property to accommodate asylum seekers.
The Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, became a flashpoint for local protests after an Ethiopian asylum seeker was charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.
A judge granted an interim injunction to Epping Forest district council preventing Somani Hotels from using the property to accommodate asylum seekers beyond September 12.
The decision could throw the system of accommodating asylum seekers into chaos as other councils weigh up similar legal action in the face of opposition among local communities.
There are around 32,000 migrants in more than 200 UK hotels. The Labour government has promised to halt the use of such accommodation by the end of this Parliament.
The Home Office and Somani Hotels are both now seeking to challenge Mr Justice Eyre’s ruling at the Court of Appeal in London. The government department is also attempting to appeal against the judge’s decision not to let it intervene in the case.
In papers submitted to the court, Home Office lawyers said the Home Secretary represents the public interest for the entirety of the UK, whereas Epping Council represents local planning interests.
Edward Brown KC, for the Home Office, said the Court of Appeal should discharge that interim injunction and said it was “wrong” for Mr Justice Eyre not to allow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper to intervene in the proceedings.
He argued that the decision “substantially interfered” with her legal obligation to house “very large numbers of, potentially, destitute asylum seekers”.
Mr Brown said the legal action taken by the council “was broadly speaking triggered by protests and arrests in the individual cases” and it had done nothing over the previous five years when asylum seekers had been housed there.
The protests outside the Bell Hotel were “not realistically” about planning, he said, claiming that they were instead “driven by a range of grievances, and they include animosity towards asylum seekers”.
“In the real world, it is not realistic to think that the objective of the protests is compliance with the planning regime,” Mr Brown said.
He said claims by Epping Forest district council about fear within the community of asylum seekers staying in hotels “arises from a very small number of specific incidents, which are acknowledged to be serious”.
But asylum seekers did not have a “greater propensity” to commit crime, he said. “That was not a conclusion that can or should have been reached at all, and we say was not one that Epping was able to advance,” Mr Brown added.
Becca Jones, director of asylum support at the Home Office, said in a witness statement that the department “understands that local residents have concerns about the use of the hotel, which have been heard”.
“However, those concerns must be viewed in the context of demands on the accommodation estate,” she added.
Philip Coppel KC, for Epping Forest District Council, said in written submissions that the judge who provided the injunction was not dismissing “the impact of the claim on the Secretary of State’s statutory duty to support asylum seekers”.
The mounting discontent over the use of asylum hotels is reflected in a recent poll that showed 71 per cent of voters believe Prime Minister Keir Starmer is handling the issue badly.
In contrast, the right-wing populist Reform party has seen its popularity surge on the back of a promises to end small boat crossings to the UK, including by deporting 600,000 illegal migrants.
