Today, Epping Forest District Council finally lost its case with the Home Office over migrant hotels. The council had sought and initially secured an injunction against The Bell Hotel — the former residence of convicted sex offender Hadush Kebatu — on the basis that by contracting with the Government to house asylum seekers, it had breached its planning permissions.

Epping Forest’s argument was that a commercial hotel becoming full-time immigration housing constituted a “material change of use”, and thus required fresh planning permission. That is, permission it hadn’t obtained and which few councils in the country would ever grant.

As I wrote at the time, the potential significance of this ruling extended far beyond Epping Forest. If contracting with the Home Office was deemed in law to be a “material change of use”, it would almost certainly plunge the Government’s entire asylum housing policy into chaos. Not only would it swiftly lead to dozens of councils following suit and taking out injunctions against migrant hotels on their own turf, it might even have threatened Labour’s new alternative: housing migrants in flats and houses bought up on the private rental market.

After all, if shifting from taking normal guests to Home Office placements constituted a “material change of use” for hotels, could the same argument not be made if a landlord stopped taking normal tenants? Unfortunately for Epping Forest, the judge appears to have been thinking exactly the same thing. Ruling in the High Court, Mr Justice Mould stated that there was a “continuing need” for asylum accommodation “so that the Home Secretary can fulfil her statutory duties”.

This is undoubtedly true. But one has to wonder to what extent it was this consideration which led to his crucial determination that the injunction was “not an appropriate means of enforcing planning control”, and rejection of the claim that the Bell Hotel’s operators had shown “flagrant or persistent abuse of planning control”.

There is an undeniably scattergun approach to these arguments. If it were the case that owner Somani Hotels had not breached planning rules, that would itself be enough to win the case for the Home Office; discussion of the appropriateness of an injunction, or the Home Secretary’s statutory responsibilities, would be otiose.

But the judge didn’t quite say they had not breached planning rules, merely that they had not done so in a “flagrant or persistent” manner. Could this mean that the Bell Hotel was itself in breach of its planning permissions, but that Somani Hotels simply has other businesses which, by continuing to operate normally, leave the company mostly complying with the rules?

Overall, the impression given by Mould stressing the Home Secretary’s responsibilities is that there was on some level a clash of laws here, and that the planning system gave way to the Government’s higher responsibility to house asylum seekers.

Fair enough, you might think. Yet if that is what happened here, it would be a remarkable exception to the usual rule. The courts do not normally hesitate to uphold efforts to use the planning system in thwarting the activities of HM Government when it comes to things like critical infrastructure, or to rule against the Home Office over deportation efforts in the immigration tribunals. (Although, of course, the Government’s lawyers argued that asylum hotels are “essential national infrastructure”.)

The short-term consequences of this ruling may not be dramatic. Labour has already committed to ending the use of asylum hotels, so this will merely allow it to do so in an orderly fashion. But that is smoke and mirrors. The Government has not changed its commitment to house asylum seekers, so it will be spending the same money to house the same people regardless. The difference is that, in future, it will be buying up rental properties in neighbourhoods around the country — and councils are unlikely to be able to use the planning permission to stop it.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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