Asylum ruling exposes the fractures at the heart of UK politics

This week has brought another series of significant developments in the UK’s ongoing efforts to manage its asylum system.
A judicial grant of an interim injunction to Epping Forest District Council, to stop the use of the Bell Hotel in the district (site of recent, violent protests) for asylum seeker accommodation, has kept the debate around immigration and asylum going. The move threatens to further expose deep fault-lines across the political system – between the parties, between Westminster and parties at a local level, and between the Home Office and planning authorities.
While the interim injunction against the owner of the Bell Hotel in Epping centred on specific points of planning law – whether a change of use in the hotel had occurred since asylum seekers had started to be housed there, and whether this change of use in turn would require planning permission from the local authority – it nonetheless has significant implications for the government’s overall policy to disperse asylum seekers across the country.
Labour has pledged to stop the use of hotels to house asylum seekers by the 2029 end point of this parliament – a process which this week’s ruling may force to accelerate by a number of years. With a discontented parliamentary party and a rocky first year behind it, needing to quickly change course by placing asylum seekers in alternative forms of accommodation – including in the private rented sector, former military sites, barges or purpose-built holding centres – would come with its own risks. Local residents and opposition parties are unlikely to stop their campaigning, while many Labour politicians will be keen to avoid any policy seen as brutalising people who, it should be remembered, the state is obliged to assist as they would be destitute in the UK otherwise.
The ever-present division between Westminster politics and local authority administrations will also be a key factor in how this eventually plays out. Since the ruling, a cross-party collection of councils including Broxtowe and South Norfolk (both Conservative-led), Wirral (Labour-led), Spelthorne (Liberal Democrat-led) and every Reform council have signalled their intent to explore their legal options in the same way as Epping Forest. If this trend snowballs so that Labour councils across the country begin to appeal against the policy, the effects on Keir Starmer’s party management, and on the cries of “Labour in revolt” from the opposition benches, will be substantial.
Of course, the broader conflict is between the needs of national policy, and those of communities in areas where asylum seekers have been placed. The vast majority of these locations have seen asylum seekers arrive without major controversy (indeed, the judge’s ruling this week noted that both pre-2025 uses of the Bell Hotel, and the use of another of the operator’s hotels in the same area, had passed without incident prior to the recent protests).
Nonetheless, the charge of ineffective communication and consultation with residents can certainly be levelled at the Home Office. Politically minded actors, particularly those linked with right-wing parties, have capitalised, with news and rumours spreading through TikTok and other social media, which government communications has been flat-footed in response to.
While the government and councils consider their legal options, the release today of updated asylum statistics will do nothing to cool the temperature. The number of asylum seekers housed in hotel accommodation is up 8% since Labour took power last July (albeit the numbers are also down on the previous quarter). The asylum case backlog – the root cause of many of the state’s recent troubles on this issue – is below 100,000 for the first time in four years, and Starmer will be hoping that the succession of migration deals inked with France (‘one in, one out’) and countries of origin including Iraq and Vietnam, will have an effect on stemming the tide of people risking their lives in the Channel. Nevertheless, with efforts to “smash the gangs” seemingly having limited effect, and anti-migrant protests now a fixture of the UK political scene, it will have dawned on Ministers by now that any form of quick fix is likely to be off the table.