Asylum seekers will be removed from the Bell Hotel in Essex after Epping Forest district council was granted a temporary injunction by the High Court. The legal action comes after a series of protestors gathered outside the venue after a resident was charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.
The council’s lawyers claimed that Somani Hotels had breached planning rules, given the site is not being used for its intended purpose. The barristers argued that the situation ‘could not be much worse’, with Philip Coppel KC adding: ‘There has been what can be described as an increase in community tension, the catalyst of which has been the use of the Bell Hotel to place asylum seekers’. They sought an injunction that would require Somani Hotels to stop housing asylum seekers at the location within 24 days – which lawyers for the hotel owners fumed would be a ‘draconian’ move.
The government staged an unsuccessful eleventh-hour intervention, with Edward Brown KC insisting for the Home Office that the injunction ‘runs the risk of acting as an impetus for further violent protests’. And now ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe has written to Yvette Cooper, making a series of demands on Keir Starmer’s administration. The letter states:
Hotels were never a sustainable solution… They have become flashpoints of migrant disorder, hostility and in some case serious criminal allegations. It is pure chaos.
In short – DETAIN, DEPORT. That is how we stop the boats.
It’s certainly a significant decision – and one that poses tricky questions for the government down the line…
Comments