Read the Epping asylum hotel court decision in full

Epping Forest District Council had been granted an interim injunction by the High Court, stopping the hotel’s owner, Somani Hotels, from using the hotel to accommodate asylum seekers beyond September 12.

The Home Office and Somani Hotels had been seeking to challenge this.

Following today's ruling, asylum seekers can now stay in the Bell Hotel after the previously given September 12 deadline.

Read the Court of Appeals' decision in full:

The Court of Appeal grants the Home Secretary's application for permission to appeal against the decision dismissing her application for party status and further grants the Home Secretary intervenors status in the litigation between the Council and Somani.

The Home Secretary has clear statutory duties towards asylum seekers in this country under the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. These include the duty to provide support to them and their dependents and to prevent destitution among this cohort. Given these duties, in addition to her constitutional role relating to public safety, the Home Secretary is plainly directly affected by the issues in this case and specifically by the grant or not of an injunction to restrain the provision of accommodation for the asylum seekers at the hotel on an application for party status.

The Court will consider whether it is desirable to add the new party so that the court can resolve all the matters in dispute in the proceedings.

Civil Procedure Rule 19.22.

The judge failed to give this rule the wide interpretation it required, which led to his erroneous finding that the Home Secretary's application should be refused. He failed to have any or any adequate regard to the range of issues which would be likely to arise if the injunction were granted.

These included, but were not limited to:

• The significant practical challenge of relocating a large number of asylum seekers in a short space of time, and possibly only for a matter of a few weeks between 12 September and mid October when the trial is to take place.
• If the Council's application were to fail at trial, the hotel would be permitted to continue to operate as it is at present.
• The judge denied himself the opportunity to consider the wider range of public interest factors which would be relevant to this application.
• These, in our view, rendered it more than just merely desirable that the Home Secretary be enabled to participate in the court process.
• The judge needed to put himself in a position to determine the application from the most informed perspective.
• The Home Office was in a strong position to provide evidence relevant to the disputes and issues before the court at this interim stage and at the final hearing.
• We were unpersuaded that it would be sufficient for the Home Office to provide evidence for Somani to file.

The provision of key evidence by someone outside the litigation to someone within the litigation hardly meets the expectation of a right to be heard.

Moreover, the judge appeared to appeal apply a test of necessity to the question of joinder, which placed the bar for joinder too high. While the judge was entitled to be concerned that the Home Office had applied very late for the Home Secretary to be made a party to the litigation that did not, in our view, justify excluding her from the proceedings.

We turn now to the substantive issue of whether an interim injunction should have been granted.

This court takes as its starting point that an interlocutory injunction is a discretionary remedy. It is not open to this court to set aside the exercise of the judge's discretion simply because the three of us would have exercised it differently.

It is our role to review that decision and only interfere with it if we identify a flaw or flaws in the judge's treatment of the question to be decided, such as an error of law, a gap in logic or a failure to take account of some material factor which undermines the cogency of the conclusion.

We conclude that the judge made a number of errors of principle which undermine his decision the wider picture, the provision of accommodation for asylum seekers pursuant to the Home Secretary's statutory duty is a national issue requiring a structured response.

Ad hoc interim injunction applications seeking closure of particular sites may each have some individual merit, but the judge's approach ignores the obvious consequence. The closure of one site means that capacity needs to be identified elsewhere in the system and may incentivise local planning authorities who wish to remove asylum accommodation from their area to apply to the court urgently before capacity elsewhere in the system becomes exhausted. The potential cumulative impact of such ad hoc applications was a material consideration within the balance of convenience that was not considered by the judge, perhaps because he did not have the advantage of in reaching his decision of evidence and submissions from the Home Office.

The written arguments on behalf of the Home Secretary in this appeal included the contention that, quote, "the relevant public interests in play are not equal" and that one aspect of this is that the Home Secretary's statutory duty is a manifestation of the UK's obligations under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This point was not pursued in oral argument.

Any argument in this particular context about a hierarchy of rights is, in our view, unattractive.

The incentivisation of protests

We were told by counsel for Epping that the protests operated as a trigger for the application for the injunction. The fact of protests outside a building is not obviously a matter falling within planning control. While we accept that the judge was right to exercise considerable caution before attaching weight to the fact of the protests, including unlawful protests outside the hotel, he nonetheless gave weight in his evaluation to the fact that protests were occurring and weighed them in the balance as a factor in favour of granting the injunction.

These are worrying aspects of the judgement. If an outbreak of protests enhances the case for a planning injunction, this runs the risk of acting as an impetus on incentive for further protests, some of which may be disorderly around asylum accommodation.

At its worst, if even unlawful protests are to be treated as relevant, there is a risk of encouraging further lawlessness.

The judge does not appear to have considered this risk again, perhaps because he had denied himself the advantage of hearing submissions on the merits from counsel for the Home Secretary.

Further, and in any event, in this regard, the judge failed to consider whether there would have been alternative measures to mitigate the disruption, such as the use of police powers under the Public Order Act 1986 or an application by the council to restrain unlawful protests.

Epping's delay for much of the period of four years

From 2020-24 Somani had been running the hotel as accommodation for asylum seekers without enforcement action from the council when in 2023, Somani sought planning consent to change its use for over a year. Epping did not process the application, notwithstanding the statutory duty upon it to do so within eight weeks. The council was aware by 2025 that that the hotel was once again to be used to house asylum seekers, and by its letter of 15 May 2025, Somani made clear that it had been advised by the Home Office that a planning application was unnecessary. The Council took no steps in response to this letter, whether by issuing an enforcement notice or otherwise. There was no threat of court proceedings. Somani was first made aware of any step of this kind when it received the court papers and the court bundle running to over 1,600 pages, together with a detailed skeleton argument prepared by leading and junior counsel.

The tactics used on the Council's behalf in this regard were not only procedurally unfair to Somani, but ought to have reinforced the argument that the delay was a significant factor in the balance against the grant of interim relief.

Somani's actions wrongly (were) characterised as deliberate

The judge found as a fact that Somani had acted, quote, deliberately in declining to seek change of use permission under planning law after April 2025. He was critical of them for taking this line. He was wrong in both respects. Those undeserved criticisms, which were repeated several times in the judgement, plainly played a material part in the judge's ultimate decision. If the council had considered Somani to be in breach of planning laws, it could have taken enforcement measures provided for within the 1990 Act. It did not do so. In short, the judge's exercise of discretion in this case was seriously flawed by his erroneous reliance on the deliberate breach as a significant factor in favour of the grant of an interim injunction.

The temporary nature of the injunction

We emphasise here, as we did at the outset, that the issue for the judge in August was whether to grant a temporary injunction until the trial in October. The judge appears to have given very little weight to the desirability of preserving the status quo until that point. The risk of injustice to the residents of the hotel by being dispersed by 12 September, when the trial of the claim was to take place only some six weeks later, seems to have had oddly little resonance with the judge. In all of the circumstances. We consider on these issues that the judge's approach to the balance of convenience exercise was seriously flawed in principle. The exercise of his discretion can therefore be reviewed on appeal.

The Epping resident's fear of crime was properly taken into account by the judge as a factor in favour of the grant of an injunction. He described it as being of limited weight. The appellants do not say it was irrelevant. The counsel does not say it should be decisive. We agree that it is relevant, but in our view it is clearly outweighed in the American Cyanamid balancing exercise by the undesirability of incentivizing protests, by the desirability, in the interests of justice, of preserving the status quo for the relatively brief period leading up to the Fourth Congress trial and by the range of public interest factors which we have discussed in our judgement.

Therefore, we grant permission to appeal both to Somani and to the Home Secretary against the grant of the interim injunction. We allow the appeals and we set aside the injunction imposed on 19 August 2025. The case management directions given by the judge can remain in force subject to any amendment necessitated by the joinder of the Home Secretary as an intervenor. We direct that submissions on costs are to be exchanged and filed by 12 noon on Monday from 1st September, along with any suggested typographical or factual corrections which come to Council's attention. We end by recording our gratitude to Council for their helpful submissions.