[Applause]
Britain,
>> protect our children. That's all we
want.
>> Yeah. You know, peace.
>> We want some peace. Oh, come over to our
country and respect our culture and our
women and our children. That's all we
ask for.
>> What initially were meant to be
short-term uh you know, one or two week
stays have now become months and months.
Lord, stand clear.
>> And that's not ideal for for anyone,
frankly.
[Music]
>> Hotels being used to house asylum
seekers have become the focal point of
debate and demonstrations. After scenes
like these erupted in Eping, there's now
mounting pressure on local councils and
the government to stop the practice
following an unprecedented high court
ruling. So, how did we get here? What
happens now and what will happen? The
asylum seekers caught up in the debate.
The Bell Hotel in Eping has become the
center of a series of protests since
July, but the issue of asylum hotels has
been building over the last few years.
When there's not enough housing, the
Home Office can move people to
accommodations such as hotels and large
sites like former military bases. but
they're placed there on a no-choice
basis, so they cannot choose where they
live. Since 2020, there's been a greater
reliance on hotels to help house asylum
seekers, particularly in the wake of the
CO 19 pandemic. In 2018, just 4% of
asylum seekers were housed in
accommodation like hotels. By 2024, that
was almost half.
The latest figures show 210 hotels
across the UK are currently housing more
than 32,000 asylum seekers with the
highest concentration in London and the
southeast of England.
In the case of Eping, weeks of protests
began after an asylum seeker staying at
the hotel was charged with sexually
assaulting a 14year-old girl, something
he has denied and is due to stand trial
for later in August. But the wider costs
of using hotels to house asylum seekers
has also sparked anger. In 2025, it
costs on average £170 per person per
night. That's compared to £27 for other
types of accommodation. And the UK
relies more heavily on using hotels than
other European countries such as France,
Germany, and Spain, which have
purpose-built reception centers. We used
to accommodate asylum seekers in Britain
through a mixture of housing
associations and uh and local
authorities. Uh and that basically meant
the local authorities had a a fuller
kind of engagement in the process. Since
2012, we've outsourced that to private
contractors at considerable expense and
they faced a series of challenges in in
effectively procuring enough property to
accommodate asylum seekers across
Britain, particularly in the private
rental sector. And it also meant that
you started to see I suppose breakdowns
in communication particularly between
local authorities the home office
centrally and those private contractors.
So one of the failings here I think is
that you know the story of hotels that
we see today is a story of a lot of
tensions between those different levels
of government but also those contractors
as well. So part of the story starts
there and the second more recent issue I
think around hotels has been that
through the uh the kind of immediate
post-pandemic period um we saw a a
significant slowdown in decision-m from
the home office. So what that meant was
a kind of backlog in the system and that
then meant um increasingly the use of
hotels as a kind of temporary measure to
address that backlog. And what we've
seen is that um on the one hand uh an
expansion of the number of hotels needed
to fill that that gap and secondly
people staying in those hotels hotels
for longer periods of time. So what
initially were meant to be short-term uh
you know one or two week stays have now
become months and months in in many
cases. And that's not ideal for for
anyone frankly. That's not ideal for
communities as we've seen in recent
weeks. But it's also not ideal for those
asylum seekers either who don't
necessarily want to be living in
insecure kind of uncertain hotel
accommodation in the in the longer term.
In Eping, a high court injunction was
sought by the council after weeks of
disturbances outside the hotel which it
said were causing widespread anxiety and
also argued the hotel was unsuitable to
house migrants on planning grounds. This
was granted by the high court with the
Bell Hotel given 24 days to stop housing
asylum seekers.
>> This is a decision that's important to
Eping Forest, but also important to
other councils up and down the country.
>> The home secretary had tried to get the
injunction thrown out, but it was
blocked by the court with the government
saying the judgment will substantially
impact its ability to house migrants in
similar accommodation across the UK. The
concern now is that other local councils
could use this case as an example to
argue against housing asylum seekers in
their own areas. And Reform UK leader
Nigel Farage has already said all reform
controlled councils will follow suit.
>> Crowds of counterprotesters also
gathered in Eping. Activist groups stand
up to racism has accused far-right
organizations of using the issue to whip
up racial hatred. Campaigners and
charities have long argued that hotels
are not suitable environments to house
asylum seekers. The refugee council said
they cost the taxpayer billions, trap
people in limbo, and a flash point in
communities.
Labour has pledged to end the costly use
of hotels to house asylum seekers within
this parliament, which would be 2029, if
not earlier. Ministers say they're
looking at a range of options following
the high court ruling.
>> We're in the process of dramatically
increasing the rate and effectiveness of
asylum making decisions. We inherited a
massive backlog from the previous uh
government. We're working very hard and
we've increased the rate of asylum
decisions by 116%
and we've returned 35,000 people this
year who don't have a right to be here.
So there's a lot of activity working to
to reduce the number of people who need
to be accommodated. But we don't think
that hotels are an appropriate solution
and that's why we're looking at
alternatives. We'll want to identify a
range of contingency options for how
those people can be appropriately
accommodated elsewhere. But in general
terms, we don't think uh hotels is the
right accommodation solution for asylum
seekers.
>> But ultimately, as asylum seekers
continue to arrive in the UK,
accommodation will continue to be needed
to house those waiting for the outcome
of their claims. And without hotels, at
the moment, the options are limited.