Housing asylum-seekers

There is so much loathesome, hateful stuff around at the moment that it is difficult to know where to start sometimes, and I cannot pretend that the narratives in play at the moment don’t make me angry (forgive the double negative).

I’m going to make that start by considering the reports that one of the political parties introduced a motion at Cardiff Council seeking to stop the use of hotels for asylum-seekers and “proposed “taking all steps” to “make it clear that Cardiff will no longer house asylum seekers that have entered the United Kingdom illegally”.  At least, that is the report in Wales Online.  The best that can be said about this is that it enables us to clear some of the misreadings and misunderstandings, as well as raise hopefully some serious considerations about the balance of housing in Wales.  Because, the report suggests that at least some of the discussion was that “there is ‘often frustration’ about the use of hotels because they are housing ‘unvetted individuals’ when it ‘should actually be a commercial hotel'”.  And, rather than use hotels, we should be using the private rented sector.

First, it’s important to provide a summary of the case law, such that it is which exists at the moment.  In R(Somani Hotels) v Epping Forest DC [2025] EWCA Civ 1134, the Court of Appeal discharged the interim inunction made by the High Court on a range of different grounds.  This was unusual in the sense that they were overturning a discretionary decision made by the Judge,  but they did so based on serious flaws in his reasoning.  The substantive matter remains live, as far as I understand it, but there is no temporary injunction in place.  It certainly was surprising to find a temporary injunction being put in place to stop an action which had apparently been ongoing for four years, rightly or wrongly, and for which the Council could have exercised its enforcement powers (but had not done so).  Somani had received advice from the Home Office that they did not need to apply for planning permission and there was no “plain breach of planning control” [112].  .  There were also much bigger interests at play than the housing of 70+ asylum-seekers at the Bell Hotel, as that raises the national policy response of using hotels for these purposes – the Judge refused permission to allow the Secretary of State to intervene, and that was wrong in these proceedings for that reason (the judge was also said to have applied the wrong test about joinder: [85]).  Equally, giving way to unlawful protests feels wrong in law.

Next, Cardiff Council doesn’t really have any power here, beyond planning and enforcement.  It is a contractual relationship between the hotel and the Home Office, as a result of the duties imposed on the Home Office by the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999.

Then there are the comments about providing hotels to unvetted individuals – I don’t know about you but, when I stay in a hotel, I usually book through an online search engine which doesn’t vet me; and “commercial hotel”, which is how many of these hotels remain commercial through providing this service under a commercial contract; and the idea that asylum seekers enter the country illegally is bizarre (I know that it is common currency) but it is difficult to fathom in international law at least how, once asylum is claimed, their method of entry is relevant or “illegal”.  All of this is just a nonsense and needs careful attention to detail, not the promotion of stupidity.

Finally, and the serious point here (perhaps – or, at least, we can make it a serious point), there is the suggestion that the private rented sector should be used for the provision of accommodation to these unvetted households.  I’m all in favour of the provision of decent accommodation to households claiming asylum who have potentially been the subject of terrible abuses.  That is a humane response.  But, the reason why hotels are being used is because there is hardly a surfeit of private rented accommodation, even the worst quality stuff which is generally used by the Home Office for these purposes.  Indeed, many of the posts on this blog are lamenting the supply side deficit, and much policy-making and thought is going in to considering how we can increase supply.  These people should listen to themselves, and consider the hypocrisy of the positions they are adopting, rather than making knee-jerk political responses to individual issues.  This is Cardiff Council, after all, the council which is re-considering how it uses the private rented accommodation available to it for housing homeless households.

In short: grow up.