Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has begun drafting legal challenges to shut down and block the opening of migrant hotels in the areas that the party took control of at the England council elections earlier this month.
Reform said on Saturday that it has hired legal counsel and has begun writing up judicial challenges against the Labour government’s Home Office to prevent further migrant hotels being established and to shut down the accommodations for supposed asylum seekers in the ten councils the party now controls.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Reform chairman Zia Yusuf said: “We will resist the dispersal of thousands of illegal migrants into local communities, which is a huge betrayal of everyone who voted Labour and everyone in the UK.
“We have a [King’s Counsel] leading a team of lawyers, working from his chambers in Temple. We have some of the best lawyers in the country working for free to resist this awful government.
“We will fight Labour in every possible way we can to protect constituents inside Reform-controlled councils from their horrendous agenda.
“By doing so we are going to put landlords and hoteliers on notice – if you’re a hotelier or landlord in a Reform council area, do not expect an easy ride if you are betraying your country.”
The landslide victory by Reform at the local council elections earlier this month gave the Farage-led party full control over 10 councils in England. Councils have the legal right to bring challenges against government actions that would impact their locality and use taxpayer money to do so.
Some councils have previously successfully blocked the government from installing migrant hotels in their constituencies, including in Great Yarmouth in 2022, which argued that a migrant hotel would negatively impact tourism in the area.
However, other judicial reviews have sided with the government, including a case brought by the West Lindsey district council in Lincolnshire, which was shot down by a judge who found that the need to house migrants represented an emergency.
The use of hotels to house migrants, which began under the former Conservative government, is currently costing the taxpayer £4,191,780 every day.
According to data from the National Audit Office (NAO) published by the Daily Mail, the costs have more than tripled their initial estimates and are now on course to hit £15.3 billion over the decade from 2019 to 2029.
The Labour government of Sir Kier Starmer is reportedly set to vastly expand the use of private homes to house migrants by offering five-year rental contracts to landlords. The use of private accommodations is considerably cheaper, however, critics have noted that their use further drives up the cost of housing.
Meanwhile, Reform said that it has established an Elon Musk-style “directorate of government efficiency” which will seek to cut waste and save costs in the councils they control. The party also plans on cutting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) spending and “abolish positions which are focussed on unmeritocratic hiring.”
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