Epping Forest council makes case for appeal against use of Bell Hotel for asylum seekers

Epping Forest District Council has launched a legal challenge to a ruling against its plan to stop asylum seekers from being housed in a local hotel.

The Essex local authority wants to appeal against Mr Justice Mould's High Court decision in November not to grant an injunction blocking owners of the Epping hotel from accommodating asylum seekers.

The Bell Hotel had become the subject of heated protests and counter protests last summer.

Barristers for the council told Thursday's hearing at the Court of Appeal in London that there was a "compelling reason" for the challenge to proceed and that the judge's decision was wrong.

Somani Hotels, the group that owns the hotel and the Home Office, which is intervening in the case, oppose the appeal bid, with lawyers claiming that the council was doing an "unjustified disservice to the judge's comprehensive analysis of the law".

Philip Coppel KC, for the local authority, said the turning over of hotels from being open to the public to being exclusively used to house asylum seekers had "become a matter of public concern", over the last year.

That concern was raised because it was done "without any planning consideration".

He described it as "a matter of public and planning concern that, of course, goes wider than just the Bell Hotel episode".

He continued: "You cannot disassociate what we say was the breach of planning control, the gravity of the breach of planning control, and the ramifications of the breach of planning control, from the exercise of discretion to grant or refuse an injunction."

The Bell Hotel was used to house asylum seekers from May 2020 to March 2021, then accommodated single adult males from October 2022 to April 2024, with the council taking no enforcement action, a previous hearing was told.

It became the focal point of several protests and counter-protests last summer, during its third spell housing asylum seekers after a man staying there was charged with sexually assaulting a teenage girl in Epping in July.

The council won a temporary injunction blocking the use of the site last August, claiming that it was a breach of planning rules.

But this was overturned by the Court of Appeal, which found the decision to be "seriously flawed in principle".

Read more on Sky News:
Number of asylum seekers at hotels falls
Legal action planned over asylum seekers plan

Mr Justice Mould then dismissed the council's bid for a permanent injunction, finding that the breach of planning rules was "far from being flagrant" and that it was "not a case in which it is just and convenient for this court to grant an injunction".

In written submissions for Somani Hotels, Jenny Wigley KC said that it "firmly resists" the appeal bid, dismissing the council's grounds for seeking to challenge the ruling as "mere disagreements with the judge" which should not "be entitled to take up court time".

James Strachan KC, for the Home Office, said in written submissions that the council's claim for an injunction was "misguided" and should be thrown out as it had "no real prospect of success".

(c) Sky News 2026: Epping Forest council makes case for appeal against use of Bell Hotel for asylum seekers