A senior British minister has admitted that a key court ruling closing an asylum seekers' hotel will affect migrant accommodation across the country.
The Labour government’s policy on housing people in modest hotels has been thrown into disarray after the High Court in London ruled on Tuesday that one such premises in Epping, Essex, must close due to violent protests and allegations of sexual assault by an asylum seeker.
Security Minister Dan Jarvis was asked whether the ruling was a “major concern” for the UK Home Office, potentially affecting the government's ability to house asylum seekers across Britain.
“We're looking very carefully at the judgment that has been made, clearly we are considering the wider ramifications of it,” Mr Jarvis said. “In this specific case we’ll have to look at how those people can be accommodated in an alternative way.”
The Bell Hotel in Epping has become a focal point for anti-immigration demonstrations, with protesters waving St George’s and Union flags, after an Ethiopian asylum seeker was arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl last month.
With police and counter-demonstrators involved, Epping Forest District Council took the hotel to court, claiming that housing asylum seekers at The Bell was a “clear breach of planning permission” because it had effectively become a hostel rather than a hotel.
The judge stated that while lawful protests cannot veto the Home Office's use of hotel accommodation, there was evidence of harm in Epping that had to be prevented and the alleged migrant offences had contributed to this risk.
The estimated 140 migrants, who mostly crossed the English Channel by boat, will have to leave the premises by September 12.
Hotel protests
The serious threat to the government, which has 32,000 asylum seekers in more than 200 hotels, is that other local authorities will take similar action to remove migrants.
Home Office lawyers warned that this could act as a catalyst for further violent protests, with several injunction applications already being made by local authorities.
Local councils will have to show evidence of potential harm at other migrant hotels if they wish to have them closed.
The right-wing Conservative and Reform parties have already indicated that local councils they control will go to court to shut asylum hotels. Nigel Farage, leader of the hard-right Reform party, has called for demonstrations to pressure local authorities to remove immigrants.
“Let’s hold peaceful protests outside the migrant hotels and put pressure on local councils to go to court to get the illegal immigrants out,” he wrote in The Daily Telegraph. “Because now we know that together we can win.”
Mr Jarvis argued that Labour had inherited “a massive asylum backlog” built up by the Conservatives’ failed Rwanda deportation policy which had neglected processing of migrants while focusing on its Stop the Boats campaign.
He claimed the government had increased asylum decision-making by 116 per cent, returning more than 35,000 people who had no right to be in Britain.
Despite improving diplomatic relations with France to prevent small boat crossings, the number of migrants crossing the English Channel passed 50,000 just after Labour's first year in office, a record for that timespan.
The essentials
What: Emirates Airline Festival of Literature
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Information: www.emirateslitfest.com
The Voice of Hind Rajab
Starring: Saja Kilani, Clara Khoury, Motaz Malhees
Director: Kaouther Ben Hania
Rating: 4/5
Sole survivors
- Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
- George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
- Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
- Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.
Evacuations to France hit by controversy
- Over 500 Gazans have been evacuated to France since November 2023
- Evacuations were paused after a student already in France posted anti-Semitic content and was subsequently expelled to Qatar
- The Foreign Ministry launched a review to determine how authorities failed to detect the posts before her entry
- Artists and researchers fall under a programme called Pause that began in 2017
- It has benefited more than 700 people from 44 countries, including Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Sudan
- Since the start of the Gaza war, it has also included 45 Gazan beneficiaries
- Unlike students, they are allowed to bring their families to France
UPI facts
More than 2.2 million Indian tourists arrived in UAE in 2023
More than 3.5 million Indians reside in UAE
Indian tourists can make purchases in UAE using rupee accounts in India through QR-code-based UPI real-time payment systems
Indian residents in UAE can use their non-resident NRO and NRE accounts held in Indian banks linked to a UAE mobile number for UPI transactions
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
The National's picks
4.35pm: Tilal Al Khalediah
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6.20pm: West Acre
7pm: Flood Zone
7.40pm: Straight No Chaser
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Retirement funds heavily invested in equities at a risky time
Pension funds in growing economies in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East have a sharply higher percentage of assets parked in stocks, just at a time when trade tensions threaten to derail markets.
Retirement money managers in 14 geographies now allocate 40 per cent of their assets to equities, an 8 percentage-point climb over the past five years, according to a Mercer survey released last week that canvassed government, corporate and mandatory pension funds with almost $5 trillion in assets under management. That compares with about 25 per cent for pension funds in Europe.
The escalating trade spat between the US and China has heightened fears that stocks are ripe for a downturn. With tensions mounting and outcomes driven more by politics than economics, the S&P 500 Index will be on course for a “full-scale bear market” without Federal Reserve interest-rate cuts, Citigroup’s global macro strategy team said earlier this week.
The increased allocation to equities by growth-market pension funds has come at the expense of fixed-income investments, which declined 11 percentage points over the five years, according to the survey.
Hong Kong funds have the highest exposure to equities at 66 per cent, although that’s been relatively stable over the period. Japan’s equity allocation jumped 13 percentage points while South Korea’s increased 8 percentage points.
The money managers are also directing a higher portion of their funds to assets outside of their home countries. On average, foreign stocks now account for 49 per cent of respondents’ equity investments, 4 percentage points higher than five years ago, while foreign fixed-income exposure climbed 7 percentage points to 23 per cent. Funds in Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Taiwan are among those seeking greater diversification in stocks and fixed income.
• Bloomberg
