The Bell Hotel is a modest hotel on the outskirts of Epping on the Essex/London border. On several occasions since 2020, the Home Office contracted with the owners to provide housing there for people awaiting decisions on asylum applications. Located near the end of the underground Central Line, and close to M25 and M11, the hotel is easily accessible for protestors from all over the country, and demonstrations demanding the closure of the hotel have attracted much media attention.
The campaigning group Hope not Hate have documented the involvement of a number of far right groups. More in Common, the research organisation set up in the wake of the racist murder of Jo Cox MP, has been investigating public attitudes to this issue, with focus groups to test the views of Epping residents, rather than those who have come to the area to protest.
The Bell Hotel ruling
On 19th August, the local authority won a case in the High Court against the hotel owners. The Court gave a temporary injunction requiring that the asylum seekers be removed, pending a full hearing in October on whether it was lawful to change the use from a ‘hotel’, where residents stay for less than 30 days, to a ‘hostel’, providing long term accommodation without planning permission from the council. The Court ruled that, pending the full hearing in October, the hotel should close. This was not a ruling on the use of hotels for asylum accommodation, but on a technicality of planning law. However, other councils are considering similar action.
Since there is a large backlog of people awaiting decisions on applications for asylum, and a third of them are currently housed in hotels, this is a potentially serious problem for the government. But the High Court refused permission for the Home Office to take part, saying that they had left it too late to apply.
Today, the Appeal Court reversed the decision. They ruled that the High Court had wrongly refused to hear submissions from the Home Office; the council had failed to properly deal with the planning issue; the injunction risked encouraging further protests elsewhere; and it failed to consider that the residents would be removed, six weeks before the full hearing of the case, which might allow them to return.
What Epping residents thought
The More in Common focus group participants in Epping were concerned that there had been no consultation with local people about the use of the hotel. This is a common complaint of local councils: that the Home Office deals directly with hotel owners without consulting local residents, or the councils themselves. But Epping residents were also alarmed by the demonstrations in their town. One commented:
“I felt quite ashamed to be British (…) The hatred in people’s faces was quite upsetting.”
Some also objected strongly to their community being singled out by outsiders:
“I just think it got completely out of hand and definitely did attract the wrong people. And it’s not a true reflection of the local residents – or definitely not all of them, that’s for sure.”
“On the protests, there are a lot of extremes. Extreme left, extreme right, some of them imported, some of them local. I mean people turned up with cans of beer and it’s like an afternoon out.”
The national view
Polling shows that, nationally, opposition to the use of hotels for asylum seekers has risen dramatically, from a third of people in 2023 to more than half now. But there is also strong hostility to violence. Only one in ten support violent protest outside council offices or asylum hotels. However, two thirds of people believe that holding peaceful protests outside town halls or council offices should be allowed, and half would support peaceful protest outside the accommodation itself.
By two to one, people think that most protesters want to do so peacefully, but half say that there was a far-right presence at the Bell Hotel. Half of Labour and Liberal Democrat voters believe that this was a strong factor, compared to only a quarter of Conservative and Reform voters.
Among the general public, objections focus mainly on the pressure on local services, the cost of the accommodation, and cultural incompatibility. However, parents place a higher priority on the threat of sexual violence against women and girls, an issue which Reform UK has been keen to promote.
Whether this fear is well founded is unclear. Very few figures are available, and there are no official statistics, although some MPs have made large anecdotal claims, without clear evidence. The number of ‘foreign criminals’ deported in the last year was 5,147, a 14% rise on the previous year – but there is no information about their migrant status or the nature of their crimes. The Migration Observatory says that there is no correlation between migration rates and crime.
On the right, politicians are keen to make immigration a big issue, and recent polling shows that it is now seen as the most important problem facing the country: higher than the cost of living, or the NHS, which dominated most of the last year.
Changes out of control?
But in the end, one Epping resident probably explains much of the public concern:
“I would just say, I think in general a lot of the frustrations and the anger that is shown at these protests – which are definitely not warranted, especially towards the police – but I think it stems really from just a general lack of control when it comes to the government. When it comes to immigration. I think it’s a subject that comes up time and time again. It doesn’t matter which political party we vote for, nothing really changes. And I think there’s just, in my opinion, a frustration at the lack of control or direction of where this is going to go. How is it going to improve? What changes are going to happen?”
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