It is another scratchy, difficult week for the government. Inflation is up, to 3.8 per cent in July – the highest level since January 2024. Asylum applications are now at record levels with 111,000 applying during Keir Starmer’s first year in office. But the real body blow is the interim High Court injunction to stop migrants from being accommodated at The Bell Hotel in Epping. Unsurprisingly, dozens of councils of the country are now poised to launch similar action.
That creates a very difficult dilemma for Yvette Cooper. The Home Secretary has sought to downplay and depoliticise the housing of asylum seekers, pointing, not unfairly, to the industrial scale under which this occurred for many years under the Tories. But now, it seems, local authorities have reached their breaking point. It is not just Conservative and Reform councils considering appeals: both Tamworth and Wirral – two Labour-run authorities – are reportedly doing the same.
That makes it harder for the government to suggest this is merely partisan gamesmanship. With ministers now scrambling to devise contingency plans, we could potentially be witnessing the complete unravelling of the existing system of dispersing migrants across the country. The obvious resort for the Home Office is to turn from hotels to smaller private dwellings instead, which would fit with the Chancellor’s pledge at the Spending Review to stop using hotels by 2029.
But the risk is in piling even more pressure on the private rental sector, as asylum seekers will add to competition for places among young renters. The government had reportedly been expecting the co-operation of councils in this goal; after Epping, this hope looks increasingly to be a forlorn one. For Cooper and the Home Office, working out where to house the 106,000 asylum seekers in receipt of taxpayer-ended support, is a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.
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