Australia, insurance, car, home, live, holidays

A man holds a flare during a protest outside The Bell Hotel in Epping in July.Credit:Getty Images

The court decision requires the government to move about 140 asylum seekers fromthe Bell Hotel in Epping,an area north-east of London,where residents have rioted outside the hotel.

With local people increasingly opposed to the asylum seekers in their streets,the Epping Forest Council argued the border control policy breached planning laws because it changed the use of the hotel – and the High Court agreed.

Farage has seized on the decision,urging other councils to use the same arguments to shut down asylum seeker hotels in their areas.

“Let’s hold peaceful protests outside the migrant hotels,and put pressure on local councils to go to court to try and get the illegal immigrants out;we now know that together we can win,” Faragewrote in the UK’sTelegraph newspaper.

“No doubt we will be attacked as ‘far Right’ provocateurs for daring to suggest that people follow the lead of Epping’s parents and residents by protesting peacefully.”

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch also asked her party colleagues on local councils to try to shut down asylum hotels,setting up a wave of court cases that could wreck a policy used by previous Conservative governments and inherited by the current Labour government.

Two councils run by Labour majorities,in Wirral and Tamworth,are also considering court action.

But the owner of the Bell Hotel has argued that the government contract to house asylum seekers was a financial rescue for the hotel,and it will take the case to the Court of Appeal.

With a key border policy at stake,the UK government is considering whether to join the appeal.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has blamed the previous governments for the problem,given that the Conservatives ruled from 2010 to 2024 and asylum seeker arrivals continued over that time.

“I am determined to smash the business model used by people smugglers,and I’m taking joint action with our allies to make it happen,” he saidon social media following the court decision.

Starmer has heraldedan agreement with French President Emmanuel Macron to return some of the asylum seekers to France,and a partnership with Iraq to deter people from starting out on the journey to Europe.

The asylum hotels are part of a broader “dispersal” policy for asylum seekers to spread them across the country. There were 38,000 asylum seekers in hotels at the end of last year,with another 65,000 in “dispersal” housing such as private flats or hostels run by companies for the government.

The UK does not use large-scale detention centres such as those funded by Australia on Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea over the past two decades.

Official figures from the Home Office data show that 50,271 people have claimed asylum over the past year after crossing the channel by boat – usually small inflatable craft launched on beaches near the French city of Calais.

This was 35 per cent higher than the arrivals in the year before Labour took office,but it was in line with some of the peaks in the arrivals when the Conservatives were in power.

The BBC reported that there were 53,587 arrivals by small boat between October 8,2021 and November 14,2022.

With Reuters

Get a note directly from our foreigncorrespondentson what’s making headlines around the world.Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.

License this article