Britain’s cross-party consensus on ignoring the public’s views about immigration can at times seem impregnable. But it may have just picked a fight with one of the few forces in the land which is more powerful: the planning system.

Epping Forest District Council’s victory over the Home Office is, at the moment, provisional. It could yet be overturned on appeal. Nonetheless, it has secured an interim High Court injunction forbidding Somani Hotels Limited from leasing the Bell Hotel to the Government for the purpose of housing asylum seekers.

If that decision is upheld, it could have profound implications for the Government’s asylum programme — although it might prove a pyrrhic victory for those who want a tougher response from ministers.

At the crux of the case was the council’s argument that, by agreeing to let the Home Office contract the entire Bell Hotel as asylum accommodation, the owners had breached the hotel’s planning permission. Switching from a normal hospitality venue to an outpost of the asylum estate, the council argued, constituted a “material change of use”.

Should this decision be upheld, it could at a stroke make the use of hotels by the Home Office almost impossible. Unsurprisingly, they are never popular locally — and planning is largely in the gift of local authorities. All of a sudden, residents would have a powerful vector for shutting down hotels.

The Government could plausibly dig itself out of this hole through central action. This could involve passing new legislation, or perhaps taking control of granting planning permission for hotels which wish to become Home Office dormitories, using a mechanism such as development orders.

But the former would mean dedicating scarce parliamentary time to setting the hotel scheme on a legal footing, when ministers insist they are going to end it. Meanwhile, the latter would require the secretary of state to take personal ownership of every single hotel, which would be very difficult politically. Neither seems plausible.

However, those celebrating the ruling should keep their eye on the ball. The critical question is what the Home Office might do instead — and that isn’t likely to be good news. Labour has abandoned the previous government’s position that people who have entered Britain illegally should not qualify for asylum. Keir Starmer is not one to break existing legal obligations, and shows no sign of trying to reform them.

We should thus expect, in the first instance, a renewed focus from ministers on “clearing the backlog”. We are already seeing this from refugee advocates, for the obvious reason that they understand “clearing the backlog” as code for letting tens of thousands of people into the country.

Crucially, many of them will continue to receive public support, in the form of welfare and housing, once they do. This makes “money saved by scrapping the use of hotels” a substantially illusory figure, although it will be trotted out by ministers regardless. As for people still in the asylum system, the state is obliged to house them. So where, if hotels are off the table, can it do so?

The best solution would be, as it has always been, a purpose-built asylum estate combining accommodation, medical facilities, and immigration officers, on controlled sites outside major settlements. But while this would be cheaper in the long run than buying beds from the private sector, it would have an up-front capital cost, so the Treasury won’t do it.

This means a return to Labour’s absurd plan to distribute tens of thousands of asylum seekers around thousands of privately rented homes. The scheme will be harder to police and expensive, as well as taking housing out of the market during a time of severe shortage. Still, at least it won’t require planning permission.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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