Asylum seekers will be removed from the Bell Hotel in Essex after Epping Forest district council was granted a temporary injunction by the High Court. The legal action comes after a series of protestors gathered outside the venue after a resident was charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.

The council’s lawyers claimed that Somani Hotels had breached planning rules, given the site is not being used for its intended purpose. The barristers argued that the situation ‘could not be much worse’, with Philip Coppel KC adding: ‘There has been what can be described as an increase in community tension, the catalyst of which has been the use of the Bell Hotel to place asylum seekers’. They sought an injunction that would require Somani Hotels to stop housing asylum seekers at the locat

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