The Bell Hotel ruling is an insult to Epping – and Britain

The law has betrayed the people of Epping – and Britain. On Tuesday, the High Court ruled against Epping Forest District Council in its application to prevent the Bell Hotel in Essex from housing asylum seekers. Epping council argued that the use of the hotel as temporary accommodation was such a significant departure from its original purpose that planning permission was needed from the council. The court, however, disagreed.

This outcome is squarely against the wishes of the people of Essex – and of the United Kingdom. But that wasn’t factored into Justice Mould’s 88-page judgement. Nor, incredibly, do the wishes of the public appear to have factored into the thinking of the government, which intervened in the case on the side of the Bell Hotel. The court accepted the argument of home secretary Shabana Mahmood – namely, that the government’s obligation to house asylum seekers outweighed the concerns of local residents. The people of Epping never stood a chance.

The decision, ultimately, came down to planning law – specifically, section 187B of the 1990 Town and Country Planning Act. It hinged on whether using the Bell Hotel to house single male asylum seekers represented a ‘material change of use’ from offering accommodation to paying members of the public, as the Bell Hotel had done for several centuries.

Now, you would think that turning a hotel into a halfway house for male asylum seekers would represent a ‘material change of use’. You would think that if planning law meant anything, it would require such a dramatic imposition on a local area to be subject to some kind of public approval. Not so. The High Court ruled that it was debatable. It admitted that local residents’ concerns, which erupted in July when 41-year-old Ethiopian asylum seeker Hadush Kebatu sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl, were ‘well founded’. But this did not mean that the Bell had been guilty of a ‘flagrant or persistent abuse of planning control’.

There is a cruel irony at the heart of this decision. Anyone who has tried to build a house extension or a greenhouse knows how officious the planning regime can be. Yet here a hotel has gone from being a local inn one day to accommodating 138 asylum seekers the next, and the residents have been told to take it on the chin.

Epping council is far from blameless here. It could have pursued planning enforcement against the Bell in 2020, when it was first handed over to be used for asylum accommodation. But it didn’t bother to intervene. It allowed the change to happen and hoped locals would accept the presence of hundreds of new, undocumented people in their community. Justice Mould noted that the council had not thought it ‘expedient’ to pursue enforcement when it could have done so. This counted against an injunction, which was only sought once the protests kicked off in the summer.

The people of Epping won’t take this decision lying down. They have been protesting against the hotel since July, arguing – quite understandably, given what has happened – that it poses a risk to public safety. They might have been shut out of a decision that has had such a negative impact on their town, but they have successfully moved the issue of asylum hotels into the public consciousness.

This case is not really about planning law – it’s about the principle that local people should not be made subject to the whims of central government. The law might have come down against the brave men and women of Epping on this occasion, but they still have everything to fight for.

Luke Gittos is a spiked columnist and author. His most recent book is Human Rights – Illusory Freedom: Why We Should Repeal the Human Rights Act, which is published by Zero Books. Order it here.