Ask yourself who carries the burden when Whitehall treats every provincial hotel as a holding pen? It is not the permanent secretary or the minister, it is the shopkeeper whose trade changes overnight, the family whose street becomes a protest route, the police officer stuck on overtime outside the Bell Hotel. Planning law is one of the few tools by which localities can say that a particular use is simply too much for a particular place. By brushing that aside in favour of what officials call a continuing need, the court signals that national pressure always outranks local consent. That is a dangerous doctrine, especially in a year when tempers over migration are already raw.