A court just ruled that asylum seekers can no longer stay at The Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex — and that’s sparked a wave of councils across England looking to take similar legal action.

The case was brought by Epping Forest District Council, who argued the hotel had basically turned into a safety risk and was being used in a way that broke planning rules. The judge agreed, granting them a temporary injunction. Now, other councils — particularly those run by Reform UK and some Conservatives — are saying they want to follow suit.

Nigel Farage, who now leads Reform UK, is encouraging councils and local people to “do everything in their power” to copy Epping. Meanwhile, Broxbourne Council in Hertfordshire has already said it’s urgently getting legal advice to see if it can do the same.

But here’s the tricky part for the government: around 32,000 asylum seekers are currently staying in more than 200 hotels across the UK. If more councils go down this legal route, it could seriously disrupt how the Home Office houses people. Some hotel contracts run until 2029, even though ministers keep promising that hotels will be phased out by the end of this Parliament.

The politics around this are fiery. The Home Office admits the Epping ruling could cause major problems for them. Labour’s Home Secretary Yvette Cooper had actually tried to stop the injunction, but the judge didn’t side with her. Shadow ministers on the Conservative side are pushing the Rwanda plan again, arguing that if asylum seekers weren’t crossing the Channel in the first place, the UK wouldn’t have this hotel issue at all.

Locally, things are tense. The Bell Hotel in Epping has been the site of protests — sometimes turning violent — after an asylum seeker staying there was charged with sexual assault. Another resident of the hotel is facing separate assault charges. Police have had to step in multiple times, and several people have been charged over clashes at protests.

For now, the asylum seekers at the Bell Hotel have until 12 September to leave. The council says this is just the beginning, not the end, of its pushback against the government’s use of hotels. Photo by Richard Kelly, Wikimedia commons.