Epping: They Did Everything Right

The lawful route

A hotel in Epping was used to house asylum seekers. A man living there was arrested, and later jailed, for sexual offences including against a fourteen-year-old girl. The town objected. There were protests, some of them ugly.

And then something happened that ought to be praised more than it has been.

The local council went to court instead.

Epping Forest District Council applied to the High Court for an injunction. It argued the hotel was being used in breach of planning rules. It pointed out that there were five schools and a care home nearby, and that as far as it was aware nobody living there had been criminal record checked. Its leader said plainly that they should not have had to take the fight to the High Court, but that they had been left with no choice.

That is the system working exactly as we tell people it should. Angry town, elected representatives, lawyers, judge. No bricks. No masks. A council spending public money on a barrister rather than a town spending its evenings outside a hotel.

They won.

Then they lost

The Court of Appeal overturned the injunction, calling the decision seriously flawed in principle. The council tried again. A second set of judges upheld the reversal and refused permission to go further.

The reasoning deserves attention, because it is the sort of thing that sounds reasonable until you turn it over. The judges said the council had long been able to use ordinary enforcement powers, and that an injunction was therefore not justified.

Read that carefully. The council had gone to court because the ordinary route was too slow to help anyone. It was told it had lost because the ordinary route existed. The remedy that works is refused on the grounds that a remedy that doesn't work is available. This is not a legal argument most people would recognise as justice. It is a door marked exit that opens onto a wall.

And then they got the bill

The council spent five hundred and sixty-six thousand pounds of public money on the case.

Then it was ordered to pay the Home Secretary's costs. And the hotel owner's.

Stop on that. A district council, acting for residents who were frightened, using the only lawful instrument available to it, was ordered to write a cheque to the very government department it was objecting to. The taxpayers of Epping paid twice: once for their own barristers, and once for the Home Office's.

Whatever else that is, it is a price list. It tells every council in the country what it costs to try this, and it tells them in a language nobody in local government can ignore, which is money.

What this teaches, and to whom

Consider who learned what.

The Home Office learned that it can house people wherever it likes, that objections can be litigated into the ground, and that the cost of doing so falls on the objector.

Councils learned that the lawful route runs to half a million pounds and ends in a bill from the government.

And the residents of Epping learned the thing that should worry everybody. They were told, for months, by ministers and commentators and their own council, to stop protesting and use the proper channels. They used the proper channels. The proper channels sent them an invoice.

This is what we meant when we wrote last week that this government answers to the pressures that can punish it. The Home Office can be taken to court and win. A hotel chain can recover its costs. A frightened parent in Epping has no instrument at all — and now we know that the instrument her council reached for on her behalf doesn't work either.

Nobody in that story broke the law. That is precisely the problem.

Where the power actually sits

The uncomfortable truth underneath all of this is constitutional, and it is not really about immigration at all.

In this country the people have no legal power to say no to their own government. None. Not as a town, not as a county, not as a nation between elections. Parliament is sovereign, which means whatever it decides, or whatever a department decides under powers Parliament handed over years ago, stands until Parliament changes its mind. There is no clause you can point to. No threshold of local objection that triggers anything. No mechanism by which fifty thousand angry residents become a legal fact rather than a news item.

We are permitted to protest, which changes nothing. We are permitted to petition, which produces a written reply. We are permitted to vote every five years for a party that will inherit the same machinery and be captured by it in the same way. What we are not permitted to do is decide.

That is not a British tradition worth defending. It is a design flaw we have grown used to.

A constitution that placed sovereignty with the people rather than with Parliament would change the arithmetic entirely. Not mob rule — the opposite. Clear thresholds, written down: a level of local objection that forces a binding local vote. A right for a community to require a proper hearing before a decision is imposed on it, not after. Limits on what a department may do without asking. And crucially, powers a future government cannot quietly repeal because it finds them inconvenient, which is the fate of every safeguard we currently have.

The warning nobody wants to give

There is a reason this matters more than the usual constitutional debate, and it should be said plainly rather than hinted at.

If the lawful route is closed, people do not stop being angry. They stop being lawful.

We have already seen where that goes. Hotels have been attacked in this country. Masked men have tried to force their way into one. During the disorder of 2024, buildings with people inside them were set alight. Those are crimes, they were rightly prosecuted, and this paper has no time whatever for the people who committed them — the residents of a hotel are not responsible for the policy that put them there, and anyone who cannot see that is not thinking, they are indulging themselves.

But it is not a defence of arson to observe why it happens. When people believe that objecting properly achieves nothing, a minority of them stop objecting properly. That is not a threat. It is one of the oldest and most reliable observations in politics, and every inquiry into every riot in British history has arrived at some version of it.

So the case for a real constitutional right to say no is not sentimental. It is the practical case. A lawful channel that actually works is the thing that keeps disorder rare. Close it, price it at half a million pounds, and send the bill to the people who used it, and you are not preserving order. You are quietly dismantling the reason anybody bothers with it.

The government has a straightforward choice, and not much time to make it. Give people a lawful way to be heard that occasionally produces the answer they want. Or keep the current arrangement, in which the only two options are compliance or the street, and discover which one a frightened town eventually chooses.