The rights involved with the national government housing asylum seekers trumps the rights of local residents represented by their district council, government lawyers told a court on Thursday as they sought to have an injunction against a migrant hotel overturned.
The British government is fighting a rearguard action against a court ruling which, it argues, could collapse the national asylum system by arguing its rights to act trumps local rights, that concerns over migrant crime are not “rational”, and that in any case the asylum system is in the national interest.
The appeal concerns the controversy surrounding the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, which was converted in to what is called a migrant hotel — a government funded accommodation for boat migrants who flout legal routes into the UK to claim asylum — which was subject to an injunction earlier this month. The hotel had been ordered to close to migrants because the local council has successfully argued in a lower court that the hotel was ignoring planning (zoning) laws by acting not as a hotel but as a permanent residence for 138 men without change of use permission.
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The case is, as observed even by the political editor of The Times, the UK’s newspaper of record, “political poison” and “toxic” for the Labour government, given they fought and won a general election last year in part on a promise to close all migrant hotels. Now just 13 months later they are fighting an increasingly bitter legal battle to keep them open, against their manifesto promises.
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