On Friday 29 August 2025, in Somani Hotels Limited v Epping Forest District Council [2025] EWCA Civ 1134, the Court of Appeal (Bean, Nicola Davies and Cobb LJJ) allowed the appeals of a hotel owner and the Home Secretary against two orders made by Eyre J ten days earlier at the behest of a local council.

Eyre J had

(1) granted the council a temporary injunction against the hotel owner. This require the owner to cease accommodating asylum seekers in its hotel from 12 September 2025 pending trial of the council’s case against the owner. It’s argument is that the planning permission in place for operation as a “hotel” does not extend to allowing the hotel to be used to accommodate asylum seekers on behalf of the Home Secretary in fulfillment of her statutory duty to do so; 

(2) refused to allow the Home Secretary to intervene in the case in order to file evidence and make submissions.

A summary of reasons for allowing the two appeals was issued by the Court of Appeal on 29 August, with the full judgment being provided the following Monday, 1 September. The matter has attracted a lot of political attention. This article discusses the main points of legal interest, followed by some contextual observations.

Background

For the factual and procedural background, see my 27 August 2025 article on Eyre J’s 19 August 2025 written judgment. 

Two important topics addressed in the Court of Appeal’s 1 September 2025 judgment but not covered in Eyre J’s written judgment are:

(1) The fact that Eyre J also gave directions for the trial to start on 15 October 2025, just a few weeks after the temporary injunction to vacate the hotel was to come into effect.

(2) Eyre J’s reasons for refusing the Home Office’s application to join. He gave those orally on Tuesday 19 August 2025 as the application had only been made the day before, after the conclusion of the temporary injunction hearing the previous week. This oral judgment is summarised at paras 57 to 63 of the Court of Appeal’s judgment.

The three factors relied upon by Eyre J as tilting the balance of convenience in favour of an injunction were

(1) what he regarded as the owner’s “deliberate” (albeit, he accepted, “open”, “in good faith” and not “flagrant”) conduct in proceeding to accommodate asylum seekers at the hotel without seeking planning permission;

(2) his opinion of the strong merits of the council’s case, though he was of course not deciding this definitively until trial; and

(3) to a more limited extent, local fear of crime and the recent protests against the use of the hotel to accommodate asylum seekers, though he emphasised that he took into account for this purpose only the lawful protests, not the unlawful elements (e.g. violent disorder) at some of them.

The Court of Appeal’s view on the balance of convenience

The Court of Appeal gave a single judgment to which all three judges contributed.

After rehearsing the well-established rule that it could interfere in the grant of a temporary injunction only if satisfied that Eyre J had erred in law or principle, the court concluded that Eyre J had made indeed made several errors of principle:

(1) His conclusion about “deliberateness” and related criticism of the owner for not having applied for planning permission was “illogical” (paras 110 to 114).

(2) If anyone was to be criticised, it was the council in applying for a temporary injunction upon only a few days’ notice on 11 August 2025 despite

– never having attempted conventional planning enforcement proceedings, even though the hotel had openly been used for accommodating asylum seekers for three substantial periods since 2020, and

–  the fact that the owner had made clear some three months earlier, in May 2025 that it would not be seeking planning permission, a point to which the council had never responded.

“The tactics used on the Council’s behalf were not only procedurally unfair to [the owner], but ought to have reinforced the argument that the delay was a significant factor in the balance against interim relief” (para 125).

(3) He had failed to consider that to allow an injunction applied for by a council only when faced with protests would be to incentivise

– such protests – the outbreak of these “should not have been regarded as a relevant factor” (paras 116 to 119), and

– local councils to undermine national policy by racing to seek such injunctions “urgently before capacity elsewhere in the system becomes exhausted” (paras 120 to 121).

(4) He also failed to consider the benefits of maintaining the status quo pending a trial which would be only a few weeks later – this point had “oddly little resonance with the judge” (paras 122 to 123).

The court held that Eyre J’s exercise of discretion was therefore vitiated and should be exercised afresh. Of the factors he relied upon, all parties and the court were in agreement that residents’ fear of crime was relevant, albeit of limited weight. The court considered, however, that it was clearly outweighed in the balance of convenience by the other factors mentioned above. The injunction was therefore discharged.

The Home Secretary’s appeal

The Court of Appeal also allowed the appeal of the Home Secretary against Eyre J’s refusal to allow her participation in the case, noting that he had erred 

(1) in law by stating that the test was whether joinder was “necessary” when the established test is simply whether it is “desirable” – a point which the court considered from context was clearly more than just a verbal slip in his oral judgment (para 85), and

(2) in principle in his (alternative) reason for exercising his discretion against joinder, because he gave undue weight to the fact that her application had been made rather late.

On that second point, the Court of Appeal ruled (paras 73 to 87) that

(1) the council should have notified the Home Office of the intention to seek an injunction so that the matter could be properly considered, 

(2) the delay of several days in the Home Secretary’s application to join was unfortunate, but this was clearly outweighed by the desirability of hearing her submissions and evidence on the wider context and the public interest issues at stake, 

(3) it was no answer to say that the Home Secretary had not been a party to similar injunction proceedings brought by other local councils (though the Home Office’s outsourced main contractor had been included as a defendant in such cases), or that the owner could file evidence originating from the Home Office: “provision of key evidence by someone outside of the litigation to someone within the litigation hardly meets the expectation of a ‘right to be heard’” (para 83).

Contextual observations

The political context of a legal case which is fairly obvious to people in a certain time and place becomes obscure with distance in space and time. Let me try to capture a little of this one, as objectively as I can.

The UK currently has a Labour government, elected in mid 2024 with a healthy majority, and not facing another general election until 2029. Before that, there was a Conservative government for some 14 years. The case has attracted much campaigning attention from the two highest-polling right wing UK political parties (a new party, Reform, is currently well ahead of the Conservatives in the polls) and related media coverage. On the same afternoon that the Court of Appeal’s reversal of Eyre J’s decision was announced, the Conservative national leader is reported to have continued to encourage councils controlled by her party to commence actions similar to the Epping one.

The Epping Forest council itself, under Conservative control, rapidly asked the Court of Appeal for permission to appeal to the Supreme Court, but this was denied on 2 September 2025. Unusually, the council issued a press release the same day disputing various aspects of the Court of Appeal’s judgment. It then decided on 3 September 2025 to apply to the Supreme Court for permission to appeal. The issue(s) of law of general public importance (a requirement of such appeals) which the matter is said to raise have not yet, so far as I can determine, been published.

The council also announced on 3 September 2025 that an unnamed High Court judge had already dismissed the Home Office’s applications for (i) a 6 week delay to the trial date and (ii) a split trial, i.e. a trial of liability then a separate trial on remedy if liability is established. There is no mention of any recusal application.

Presumably the great rapidity with which the matter is coming to trial, coupled with the political attractiveness of the topic, and the fact that Eyre J stated, in his 19 August judgment, that he leaned in favour of the council’s case on the merits, will weigh in favour of other councils considering having a go. But perhaps, given the costs of such actions, some at least will await the outcome of the Epping case.

The Court of Appeal refused to address Eyre J’s view of the merits in its 1 September judgment. It noted that, while the owner and Home Secretary had argued orally that Eyre J had committed a further error in this regard, they had failed to do so in writing prior to the appeal hearing and that the council was therefore justified in objecting to them raising this point (para 105). An officious bystander might perhaps infer a judicial sigh of relief at not having to get into that point in a politically contentious appeal brought to hearing and decision at great speed.

Whether or not the owner and Home Secretary succeed in shifting Eyre J’s preliminary view of the merits at trial in October 2025, there is presumably likely to be an appeal against that to the Court of Appeal and to the Supreme Court, given the practically important point of planning law arising about the concept of a hotel. If Eyre J’s decision is in favour of the council, there will also presumably be an application to stay any injunction pending the appellate outcome. The possibility also exists legally of the government issuing delegated legislation to clarify the concept of “hotel” though this will no doubt have a political cost. The government has also indicated an intention to accelerate use of disused military and warehouse sites for accommodation and drawn attention to the fact that the number of asylum seekers housed in hotels is already down from its 2023 peak of 56k to 32k in mid-2025.

An illustration of a tendency to interpret the decision in political terms is a Sky News report on 29 August 2025 that 

– Bean LJ, the most senior of the three judges sitting in the Court of Appeal, was, prior to his appointment to the High Court in 2004, chair of a Labour party-affiliated lawyers’ group in 1989-90, and

– Eyre J was, prior to his appointment as a judge in 2021, a Conservative party candidate for election to Parliament four times between 1987 and 2004.

Now, the case certainly illustrates how differently judges sometimes characterise undisputed facts or exercise a discretion. It is also no doubt the case that the world views which attract someone to a particular political party will sometimes influence the approach to such topics in a legal case. But there are a host of other factors in play when judges decide cases, and in the absence of any reasonable basis for suggesting that either judge decided for partisan reasons, I would question the wisdom of simplistic party affiliation-mining such as that in the Sky News piece. 

Meanwhile, on 1 September 2025, a debate in the House of Commons included a statement by the Home Secretary about asylum policy. The debate started with this statement by the Speaker:

“I should like to say something about the House’s sub judice resolution. The case of Epping Forest district council v. Somani Hotels is still active and before the courts, but because the case concerns wider issues relating to the planning consent required for hotels to house asylum seekers, I have decided to grant a waiver so that Members are free to refer to it in proceedings. However, I remind the House that there are other active criminal prosecutions related to disorder around the Bell hotel and elsewhere, as well as one prosecution of an asylum seeker for alleged sexual offences. Hon. Members may refer to the general issues relating to asylum accommodation, but should avoid discussing any specific criminal cases.”

On the government’s behalf, the points were made that policy remained to stop the use of hotels for asylum seekers as soon as possible, and to develop a statutory interpretation of article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights in the immigration context. As a matter of political cut and thrust, the point was also made that it was the Conservative Shadow Home Secretary who, as a Home Office minister, had written to local authorities in 2020 to indicate that their consent would no longer be sought for the use of hotels to house asylum seekers. 

Without delving further into this political blame-apportionment, I mention it as an important part of the background to the case. The Court of Appeal understandably emphasised at the outset of its judgment that it was “not concerned with the merits of Government policy in relation to the provision of accommodation for asylum seekers, in hotels or otherwise” (emphasis in original).

Featured image: Sign for the Bell Hotel, Epping Forest by J Thomas, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0). Reproduced with thanks.