Where are asylum seekers supposed to live now?
The News Agents
Global
4.2 • 4.3K Ratings
🗓️ 20 August 2025
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Anti-migrant protesters are celebrating today, with The Bell Hotel in Epping set to close its doors to asylum seekers after becoming a battleground over the summer on the issue.
A High Court ruling ordered The Bell to stop housing migrants on a planning technicality. It did not receive the proper permission to switch its use from short-term stays to people living there for more than 30-day stretches, despite having run as such without incident for more than five years.
A failed last-minute attempt by the Home Office to get the case dismissed laid out the department's concerns. The government barrister warned that any injunction could lead to other councils following suit, a development "that would aggravate the pressures on the asylum estate."
He also warned that granting the injunction would “"run the risk of acting as an impetus for further violent protests".
Those appeals were unsuccessful. And now the government is having to work out where those asylum seekers will now live. If other councils follow suit - and succeed - it could become a major political crisis. Despite all the noise around this issue, are politicians giving any serious thought to alternatives?
Later, more gloomy news on the economy for Labour - is there any way for Rachel Reeves to wriggle out of the fiscal straightjacket she now finds herself in?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:08.1 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:11.6 | We're looking very closely at the judgment. |
| 0:14.4 | Clearly we are in the process of identifying contingency options for what's going to happen to those people who are currently accommodated in that hotel in Epping. What seems the likeliest contingency options for what's going to happen to those people who are currently accommodated in that hotel in Epping. |
| 0:22.6 | What seems the likeliest contingency option? |
| 0:24.6 | Well, with respect, the legal judgment was only handed down yesterday after me. |
| 0:28.6 | It's an HMO, isn't it? If it's not a hotel, it's a flat somewhere or a bed sit. |
| 0:33.6 | Well, as I say, we're looking at contingency options for how those people can be appropriately accommodated. |
| 0:39.6 | But the bigger picture issue is driving down the use of hotels altogether. |
| 0:43.9 | We don't think that that is an appropriate solution. |
| 0:46.5 | And that is Dan Jarvis, the Home Office Minister, struggling to explain what is going to happen to the people who were housed in the Epping Hotel, the Bell, who must now be rehoused. |
| 1:03.1 | The worry for the government, the nightmare scenario for the government, is that this won't only be contained to Epping. |
| 1:10.4 | But rather, this legal judgment will |
| 1:12.4 | be picked up and apply to hotel after hotel in local authority after local authority, which |
| 1:19.3 | leaves a central question that Jarvis was unable to answer. |
| 1:23.5 | Where are all the asylum seekers going to go? |
| 1:26.4 | Welcome to the newsagents. |
| 1:32.6 | The newsagents. |
| 1:34.1 | It's John. |
| 1:34.7 | It's Lewis. |
| 1:35.6 | And you'd have to say that the judgment that came from the High Court yesterday, whilst it may have been anticipated, was probably the last thing |
| 1:47.0 | the government needed right now with its asylum policy, with a record number of people arriving |
... |
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