It’s really not about planning law is it: Epping Forest District Council, interim injunctions under s.187B of the Town and County Planning Act 1990 and housing asylum seekers in the Bell Hotel

Epping Forest District Council attracted considerable media attention in mid-late 2025 when it initiated legal proceedings in the High Court in an attempt to prevent asylum seekers being accommodated in a privately owned hotel in its area. The action was formally brought under s.187B of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, which empowers the High Court to issue injunctions (both interim and final) to restrain actual or anticipated breaches of planning control. The Epping litigation followed on the heels of a cluster of similar actions brought by other councils in recent years. This paper suggests that almost of these cases have nothing or little to do with what can credibly be described as ‘planning’ issues, but are rather a paradigmatic example of the legal system being used (or better put perhaps, abused) by local government bodies to make political arguments, both in the horizontal sense of seeking to garner electoral advantage and in the vertical sense of seeking to place pressure on central government policymaking.