Paul Bristow’s letter to Peterborough City Council, sent after the Epping Forest ruling, drips with urgency. The mayor demands action: the Dragonfly Hotel must be shut down, the planning precedent “relied upon,” the council must consider “all appropriate courses of action.” It reads like a man fighting the good fight for local communities betrayed by a negligent government.
Except it was his own party that built the system he now condemns.
The use of hotels for asylum accommodation wasn’t some Labour innovation. It began under Theresa May when the asylum backlog ballooned after 2015, accelerated under Boris Johnson and Priti Patel as the hostile environment bit harder, and became routine under Rishi Sunak as private firms like Serco and Mears signed fat contracts to warehouse asylum seekers out of sight. Councils were starved of funds, safe routes were slashed, and the system creaked under its own weight. Hotels became “temporary” fixes that lasted years because everything else (housing, processing, support) had been gutted.
So when Bristow, a Tory mayor, demands Labour close the hotels without offering a single alternative, it is hard to miss the opportunism. His own party created this mess: weaponised immigration policy for headlines, handed contracts to private providers, dismantled local government capacity, then left Labour holding the bag. Now Bristow can cite the Epping ruling as if it descended from heaven, rather than being the latest twist in a system his party designed to fail.
But there’s something else at work here: panic. Bristow can read the polls. Reform UK is eating into Conservative turf; Farage turns every hotel into a stage prop for his permanent campaign; Tory politicians know their majorities live or die on who can look “toughest” about migrants. Bristow isn’t writing to Peterborough Council because he believes in planning law. He’s writing because he fears Reform snapping at his heels.
That’s why the language is all injunctions, precedents, legal rights. All dressed-up theatre masking a Farage-style panic. The Dragonfly Hotel becomes a symbol, a chance to look hardline without solving anything, because solving it would cost money, planning, political courage.
This is the dialectic at work. First the Conservatives build the hostile environment: deny safe passage, gut local authority budgets, expand detention. Then the system buckles under the pressure they engineered, hotel contracts, crumbling infrastructure, asylum seekers stuck in limbo. Finally, the very people who caused the crisis reappear as its critics, invoking planning law and local rights while demanding closures with no plan for what follows.
The Epping ruling becomes the hinge on which the whole spectacle turns. Judges talk about material changes of use; mayors invoke legality; councils speak the language of local sovereignty; and the migrants at the centre vanish from the story. If hotels close, where will people go? No one says. The political utility of the crisis depends on that silence.
Bristow’s letter leans hard on planning law, insisting that using the Dragonfly Hotel for asylum seekers is a “material change of use” under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. But this is spin disguised as certainty.
Under the law, a “material change of use” isn’t automatic. Hotels normally fall under Use Class C1; care homes, boarding schools, and similar institutions sit in Use Class C2; ordinary houses in Use Class C3. If a hotel is still run as a hotel (even if the Home Office block-books rooms for asylum seekers) the legal character often remains C1. Councils argue that when a hotel stops functioning as a public hotel altogether, becomes long-term accommodation for a single group, and no longer offers tourist or business services, its character changes enough to trigger planning permission.
Courts have ruled both ways depending on the facts: length of stay, whether it still operates as a hotel, whether facilities change. There is no blanket rule. The Home Office long relied on this ambiguity to keep housing people in hotels without consent, while councils kept testing it in court whenever political pressure rose.
Bristow writes as if the law were clear-cut. It isn’t. His certainty serves the politics of closure, not the messy legal reality where every case turns on specifics, and where the alternative to hotels is almost never provided.
Because this was never about fixing the asylum system. It was about optics: keeping migrants in perpetual motion so no one in power takes responsibility. The Conservatives started it, Labour inherits it, and politicians like Bristow posture over it while offering nothing beyond the next headline. The system fails because it is meant to.
The irony, of course, is that if the Tories were still in power, Bristow’s letter would look like rebellion, a Conservative mayor demanding his own government shut hotels it had filled in the first place. Under Labour, it becomes performance: blame the new ministers, bury the history, pose as the defender of local communities while the men in the Dragonfly Hotel remain voiceless, suspended between legality and homelessness.
This is how Britain manages crisis: a politics of displacement built on the hostile environment, mediated through planning law, stripped of memory, and sustained by the silence over what happens when the hotels close.
