Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 4th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I strongly support my noble friend Lady Scott’s amendments, particularly the one in which she requires the asylum provisions to be implemented immediately on the passing of the Bill. I congratulate my noble friend who, by gripping this, demonstrates the urgency of the situation we find ourselves in, in direct contrast to the ponderous approach from a Government, who appear to give greater weight to the process of international law than the well-being of our settled populations.

This is an infrastructure Bill. I alight on a simple truth that hotels are an essential part of an area’s economic infrastructure. Their importance exceeds the turnover of the business and the payroll for the cooks and cleaners behind the scenes and the front of house staff. Hotels accommodate more than weekend tourists. They enable commercial travellers to visit distant customers, provide shelter for tradesmen working on local building sites away from the main base, and drive a huge multiplier effect in holiday hotpots and conference cities. Local restaurants, tourist attractions, coach operators, florists and artisan food chains all benefit. Hotels are a huge economic driver.

 If you take away the liquidity in accommodation that hotels provide, local economies are damaged, especially in rural market towns that might only be able to sustain a single coaching inn. This is a matter of public interest. In the pursuit of growth, it is a matter of national interest. So, we cannot and must not carelessly allow the conversion of hotels into hostels after behind-closed-doors under-the-counter deals between the Home Office and local landlords. I do not blame the owners for entertaining these blandishments, but we cannot allow ourselves to sleepwalk into a situation where these decisions are taken—a connivance between the Home Office and the investors behind the hotels—over the heads of local people, whose justifiable concerns are swept aside and airbrushed away. That just will not do.

A friend of mine who operates a small seasonal seaside hotel with 29 rooms has been offered £40,000 per month for 12 months of the year for three years—£1.5 million in aggregate—for a property that might otherwise have achieved at best £500,000 at auction. She was then offered a fully expensed refurbishment at the end, while having to fire all her staff, who were already costing more because of the national insurance increases. She has not taken the bait, but others have. The contracts and values here are madness. They are economically illiterate. It is distorting whole economies with perverse incentives. These deals are being done right under our noses.

As my noble friend Lord Banner said, the conversion from a hotel to a hostel is not just planning semantics. People staying in hostels have no freedom to choose their accommodation. They stay for months, not days. They are required to check-in with a commissar each night. They share rooms with people they do not know. They do not pay the bill. They have nothing to do but wait. There are many other differences between them—

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. Does he feel a sense of humility given that, by 2023, a peak of 400 asylum hotels had been reached under the previous Government?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

By June 2024, that had gone down to 213. At the moment, there are 2,500 more asylum seekers in those hotels than there were when the Government changed.

[Baroness Laing of Elderslie (Con)]

Will the noble Lord clarify the point? In particular, the argument before us is that some hotels in some places are not suitable for asylum seekers. The previous Conservative Government recognised this point and closed the Bell Hotel in Epping in April 2024. I know because I asked them to do so, and they did so taking into account the opinions and sensitivities of local people, which have been ignored by the current Government.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

Since the noble Baroness provokes me to return to the question, I ask the noble Lord whether he agrees that 400 hotels were in use for asylum seekers in 2023 and that the reduction that took place was met with no change in asylum law that enabled the new Government to address the situation in a constructive way?

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I am grateful to my noble friends for answering some of the technical questions for me. I was not aware of the numbers, but I am better apprised now. The point I was trying to make is twofold. First, I am trying to draw out the distinction between a hotel, a hostel and an HMO. In so doing, I am only repeating arguments that were made in the judgment referred to by my noble friend—the interim injunction in the case of the Bell Hotel in Epping. The noble Lord may wish to throw mud in my eyes, but I am only repeating the authorised judgment of the Court of Appeal and the points that were raised there, and I take no criticism for doing so. It is a matter of public record. There are many of my learned friends in this Committee, including my noble friend sitting to the side of me, and if I have erred in what I have just said, I am sure it will come up.

The point is, and the noble Lord gives me the opportunity to say so, that the movement of a hotel into a hostel is a material change of use for the reasons I just gave. The people who are staying there are not the sort of guests who pay their way and are there for a few days. They are mandated to be there by the state. That is the point we need to make. That is a material change of use. It is plain and simple. There is no denying it. As we have just heard from my noble friend, the planning system exists not just to regulate those changes in use but to arbitrate between the private interests of the hotel owner and the public interest. Let us be clear: there is no denying the public interest in this matter.

I want to make the distinction between the interim provision of accommodation for helping whole family units get back on their feet and the circumstance where that situation morphs in the building into the provision of bedrooms for single, mostly male, economic migrants. The conversion of a hotel to an HMO for the use of family groups is a bit of a lottery that shapeshifts with time. There are areas where a hotel might be converted into an HMO under permitted development rules—that is common—and thence separately from an HMO into a hostel. I want to paint a picture where a hotel has been converted into an HMO for family groups under permitted development but then without notice has flipped into a hostel when the Home Office decides to disperse families out and move in single, unrelated migrants. That is not just a theoretical possibility. It nearly happened in Diss in South Norfolk where I used to be the leader. In that town, a whole generation ago, arms were outstretched to welcome the Vietnamese boat people. Demonstrating that humility, under my leadership, the local council worked to welcome the largest group of Ukrainians in our county. More recently, migrant families—again, under my leadership—settled into a hotel which has, in effect, become an HMO. Please do not suggest that I have any ulterior motive; I have done my bit. Not only that but I have done my bit to smooth over some of the difficulties that certain people on social media and elsewhere have tried to make. You invite me to make these points.

In July—I am no longer the leader now I have taken my place in your Lordships’ House—the Home Office announced without notice that the families that had become settled would be dispersed, meaning that 42 children were going to be removed from the school roll just a few weeks before the start of the new school year. Their families would be taken away from the local GP practice and from the networks that they had created among themselves and with the local community, together with the infrastructure that had been wrapped around them. Again, something put in under the budget that I set was to be removed. No wonder local people were cross. They could see the injustice in that approach. If there was a crime, it was from the Home Office, which thought that sort of behaviour was acceptable. But we were lucky, because it had not been four years since the families were initially welcomed, so the council was able to issue a stop notice to prevent the forced removal of those family groups.

Elsewhere, with the slippery slope from moving from hotel to hostel, a stop notice cannot be issued. That is why I completely support the amendment which would stop the limit on stop notices so that there is no sleepwalking into a system where a hotel goes to an HMO then to a hostel without due process. We should put local people at the heart of decision-making and prevent those with an axe to grind claiming that they do not have a say, which is the source of the community tensions we seek to stop. If they do not have their say, they should just not be smeared as far right activists for expressing proper concerns. This problem has been created by national politicians, but local people need to be heard.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Banner (Con)]

My Lords, as this debate has progressed, there has been increased heat and perhaps a commensurate decrease in focus on some of the issues that were raised. I hope noble Lords will appreciate that I chose my own words extremely carefully when I outlined my legal views on the consequence of these amendments.

I reiterate that one of the key issues of the status quo is the uncertainty due to the fact that currently, there are no bright lines as to whether a change from hotel use to asylum accommodation or an asylum HMO is or is not always a material change of use. There is an advantage in having certainty one way or the other, and I am very deliberately not expressing a view on which way or the other it should be. It is simply that the ambiguity is deeply unsatisfactory. I stress that the extent of that ambiguity has increased in recent years, months and days. The case law—not just in the Epping case, but in earlier judgments by Mr Justice Holgate, which were earlier in the High Court concerning Great Yarmouth and other locations—has developed in such a way that the uncertainty has got greater, which has exacerbated the problem. Very respectfully, I invite any remaining speakers to deal with that point objectively and in a focused and unheated manner.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord, who brings to this House a greater knowledge of planning law than the rest of us added together. It is absolutely right that there is uncertainty, and the uncertainty should be resolved by the Government having a look at whether the changes that he has suggested need to be made, not by the amendments that have been moved. What we have heard this afternoon sounded much more like the other place in action, where constituency issues have been brought to bear to try and deal with what really ought to be rational arguments.