[2025] EWCA Civ 1134

There is also force in Mr Brown’s submission that the provision of accommodation for asylum seekers pursuant to the Home Secretary’s statutory duty to provide that accommodation is a national issue requiring a structured response. Mr Brown argues that a series of ad hoc interim injunction applications seeking closure of particular sites may each have some individual merit, but the judge’s approach ignores the obvious consequence that closure of one site means that capacity needs to be identified elsewhere in the system. The grant of an interim injunction incentivises local planning authorities who wish to remove asylum accommodation from their area to apply to the court urgently before capacity elsewhere in the system becomes exhausted.

The judge, with respect, appears not to have considered this aspect of the case, again perhaps because he did not have the advantage in reaching his decision on the injunction application of evidence and submissions from the SSHD. We should record that we were not impressed by the argument on behalf of the Council that some evidence was available in the form of the statistics set out by Holgate J in the Ipswich case.