Victory for the Home Office! The Court of Appeal has this afternoon overturned the interim injunction granted to Epping Forest District Council last week, which allowed it to demand the closure of the Bell Hotel after its owners leased the whole establishment for the housing of asylum seekers.

It’s important to be clear what has and has not been decided today. The Government still has to contest a full hearing in October on the council’s case — to wit, that taking a commercial hotel and turning it into a de facto immigration detention centre constitutes a “material change of use” and thus breaches planning permission. In fact, one of the reasons given by the appeal judge for overturning the interim injunction is that it was unnecessary, given that the issue is going to be properly resolved at full trial within a couple of months.

Ministers therefore aren’t entirely out of the woods yet. However, other parts of the Court of Appeal’s ruling will give them hope — in particular, the judge’s argument that local residents’ concerns about crime are “outweighed by the undesirability of incentivising protests and the desirability of maintaining the status quo”.

The Government must also worry that today’s legal victory has, in political terms, a rather pyrrhic quality. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper could probably do without official pronouncements about the desirability of the status quo when her department is explicitly committed to ending the use of hotels.

Nor will ministers have welcomed the press attention lavished on the arguments of Edward Brown KC, the Home Office’s counsel. His arguments to the Court of Appeal not only suggested that asylum hotels are “essential national infrastructure”, but also the following extraordinary line: “In a free society … we are all obliged to put up with a degree of perceived nuisance.”

Many people might agree with that sentiment, in the abstract — although it is hardly the spirit in which modern Britain, land of outdoor smoking bans and heavy-handed licensing, is actually governed. But in this case, the “perceived nuisance” is not people being rowdy in the street or pressure on local services. Instead, it is the alleged sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl, for which an asylum seeker has been charged by prosecutors. Brown is a lawyer rather than a politician, but that line is nonetheless a gift to the Government’s opponents: a serious crime dismissed not just as a “nuisance”, but merely a perceived nuisance.

So, where do things go from here? With the Government already committed to ending the use of hotels, at stake in October will be mostly whether that happens on the Home Office’s timetable or whether councils, via the planning system, are given a powerful tool to collapse the current accommodation system.

Yet Cooper’s focus on “ending the use of hotels” is wilfully and misleadingly pedantic. Like those who propose to end Channel crossings by letting everyone in legally, the Home Secretary is focusing on a symptom and conflating it with the actual problem. The Government argued in court that it has a duty to house asylum seekers, so where are they going to go?

Beyond “clearing the backlog” by rubber-stamping approvals, the other option for ministers is using private accommodation. That means buying up homes from the social, council, or private-rented housing sectors, in the middle of a housing crisis. Not only does that threaten a bigger impact on local communities, it will probably cost more to boot. Today’s judgment might look like a victory for the Government, but its work is only just beginning.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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