Nigel Farage said he will shut down Britain’s asylum system for five years if Reform UK forms the next government.
The plan unveiled on Monday would involve all current applications being voided and any new ones being rejected.
Reform said that individuals would be deported to their home country or a safe neighbouring country, with “maximum diplomatic pressure” applied to make countries take back their nationals.
The sole exceptions would be Ukrainian refugees and Hong Kong residents with British national (overseas) passports, who would only return to their countries “once safe to do so”.
While the announcement is eye-catching, critics have claimed there are a number of flaws in Farage’s plan.
Making countries accept returns
One of the thorniest issues with Farage’s plan for mass deportations is how to ensure countries accept returns. In the 20-page document published by Reform, the party says it will use the visa system and trade policy to ensure compliance.
“For those countries that have a significant legal foreign national presence in Britain, and thus a significant interest in maintaining access to British visas for their citizens, we will institute visa bans,” it says.
“This will include the likes of Pakistan, Somalia, Eritrea, Syria, Afghanistan and Sudan who all have large illegal migrant populations in the UK.”
If this fails to work, Reform is threatening to hit countries with tariffs.
“For those countries that do not have a significant legal foreign national presence in Britain, and thus would not likely be greatly affected by sweeping visa bans, we will institute tariffs on goods and services originating from that country,” the document says.
“We expect this method to be most effective for developing countries with little incentive to take back their foreign criminals, yet which have significant trade relations with the United Kingdom in natural resources and other basic goods.”
It says that if these two measures do not work “we will apply further sanctions, including banning a country’s airline from British airspace and their citizens from transit”.
It is not clear whether such measures would make countries accept returns. Using tariffs could also fall foul of World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, which state that every member must be charged the same tariff with few exceptions, known as the “most-favoured nation” rule. There is an exemption for a war or “emergency in international relations”.
If Britain was found to have broken WTO rules, this could result in retaliatory tariffs from the affected countries, although Farage might see this as a price worth paying.
Problems finding third country hosts
Reform acknowledges that it will not be able to return all asylum seekers to their countries of origin.
As already mentioned, in some cases countries may simply refuse to accept the return of their citizens. In other cases, individuals’ lives could be put at risk if they are deported. On Monday, Zia Yusuf, Reform’s home affairs spokesman, said that the party is “not going to be sending people back to be tortured or killed”.
In both such cases, Reform has said it will “negotiate deals with third countries allowing for their deportation”. “Afghans will be sent to a safe third country where it’s not appropriate to return them to Afghanistan,” the policy document says.
However, finding other countries to accept deportees will not be straightforward. In the past, many countries have baulked at the idea of hosting migrants being deported from Western countries, although the last Conservative government was able to agree a deal with Rwanda.
As in that case, a Reform government would have to pay hundreds of millions, if not billions, to persuade countries to take migrants.
Building enough detention centres
Reform’s plan will require a substantial amount of accommodation for asylum seekers to be housed in while they are awaiting deportation.
However, the party has also committed to ending the use of migrant hotels and dispersal accommodation in the community. Instead, Reform has promised to build “baseline detention capacity for up to 24,000 illegal migrants”. It has previously suggested that it would locate these detention centres in areas that vote for the Green Party of England and Wales.
The practicalities behind building such capacity have been questioned. New centres would undoubtedly face local opposition – something which Reform has said it would circumvent with a mass deportation law giving the home secretary the power to stop councils blocking new sites. It would also take time and a considerable amount of money to build.
Reform has said that people sent to the centres would not be able to leave and would stay there for about two weeks prior to deportation. Currently it costs about £500,000 per bed to build such “closed” facilities in the prison sector. An immigration detention estate involving 24,000 places would therefore cost around £12bn.
Legal obstacles
Reform’s plan would face multiple legal hurdles under the UK’s current laws and international treaty commitments. To make possible the mass deportation on the scale which Farage is planning, Reform has said it would repeal the Human Rights Act 1998, leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and disapply the 1951 Refugee Convention.
Reform speaks breezily about making these changes. On Monday, Yusuf said: “Government can change the law. It’s a cool feature that government has.” He added that Reform would have “thousands of pages of primary legislation ready to go” at the time of the next election.
However, the legal revolution which Reform is plotting would not be consequence-free. For example, leaving the ECHR would have implications for political stability in Northern Ireland because it is enshrined in the Good Friday Agreement, and it could also affect Britain’s trading relationship with the EU because the convention is written into the post-Brexit UK-EU Trade and Co-operation Agreement.