Whether the protests appear peaceful
[Applause]
>> or fearful.
>> Demonstrating outside hotels has been
forceful in making the government move
asylum seekers from this one. But to
where ministers won't say
>> we're looking very carefully at the
court ruling that was handed down
yesterday. will want to identify a range
of contingency options for how those
people can be appropriately accommodated
elsewhere.
>> Yesterday, the high court ruled the Bell
Hotel in Eping had to be emptied within
a month because it wasn't designed for
asylum seekers under planning law. ITV
News has spoken to 223 councils today.
Of those, 19 said they were considering
taking the same legal action, many run
by Reform UK. They also include
conservativecont controlled Broxborn
Burough Council over a hotel in
Chessant, the Labour councils Tamworth
and Whirl and Tory run South Norfolk
where the government's trying to replace
asylumseeking families with asylum
seeking men at a hotel in D.
>> If necessary, are you willing to go to
the high court to fight this issue? if
we need to. Yes, we're hopeful that what
the high court said yesterday validates
the position we already had. You know,
ultimately we think this is a planning
issue. If me or you put up an illegal
shed in our garden, it goes and gets
torn down because it hasn't got planning
permission. We need to be holding these
hotels to the same standard.
>> Eping won its case because of the
disruption the hotel's use was causing
after an asylum seeker here was charged
with sexually assaulting a 14year-old
girl. Now, some are actively encouraging
more pressure via similar protests,
denying that's incendury.
>> Why is peacefully protesting uh
irresponsible? The notion that worried
mom should be told, stay at home, shut
up, don't say anything, we're going to
spend your taxpayers money, not only on
continuing to accommodate these people,
but the problem is getting worse.
>> But there's worry inside as well as
outside the Bell Hotel. Kadam Muhammad
has lived there since arriving from
Somalia 4 months ago.
>> It's a lot of unsettled people in there
because they their life is, you know,
uncertain. Even if they were to take us
to another hotel or to another area,
it's going to be the same. They're going
to be another people, you know,
protesting,
you know, to to get us out of the hotel
or to close the hotel because they have
uh the same uh thing. They are concerned
about us because they see us as
criminals, as as pedophiles, and we are
not. We're not.
>> Nobody in Eping knows where Khadar and
the 100 or so other men will be moved
to. They might not be the last to be
told to seek asylum somewhere else.
>> Well, Paul is here with me. I mean, it's
yet another headache, isn't it, for the
government. Could this, do you think, in
reality, be the end of of migrant
hotels? No, not until 2029 anyway, which
is when the Labor government has
promised to stop using them by and
yesterday's high court ruling will
expedite that policy to some degree. But
whether it takes years or weeks, the
problem is there's just no clear
alternative to these hotels. One option
is you put asylum seekers into houses
and flats instead, but we've seen
protests actually outside blocks of
flats that are housing asylum seekers
before, and it doesn't exactly do much
for the country's housing crisis if they
take that option. Another option is to
use large sites like military bases. We
had that bby Stockholm barge, remember
that one that Labour closed down. Again,
that has been problematic and Labour
said they wanted to scale those back.
Will they do a U-turn on that? Not
really sure. And all of these options
simply move asylum seekers from pillar
to post within the same community. Often
you're not removing them from the
community that is protesting about their
presence. The only way to do that, of
course, is to reduce the asylum backlog
or to stop people arriving across the
channel. The government of course
insists it has lots of policies trying
to do that at the moment. There'll be
some fresh data tomorrow which measures
its performance on some of those metrics
which will be fascinating to pour over.
Uh but really for the short term it
looks politically as though this problem
just becomes more acute. It's not just
reform UK conservative councils. It
could be Labor councils taking Labor
ministers here to court.