Rishi Sunak’s deportation plan raises big questions

The prime minister’s speech on immigration in the House of Commons comes three years after his party won a general election telling people the Conservative government would control immigration.

Just eight months ago, the government’s flagship immigration bill promised to “fix the broken asylum system”.

Let’s take a look at some of the key things Rishi Sunak has now promised MPs – and the challenges he faces.

The Prime Minister says the UK’s oversight of the channel has been “very fragmented, with different people, doing different things, being pulled in different directions”.

He is now planning a “Small Boat Operations Command” to bring together military and civilian teams, coordinating intelligence, interception, processing and execution. The new order would use “all available technology, including drones…then prosecute more gang-led boat pilots”.

However, all of this is already being done in some form or form – the UK has a dedicated commander for operations against small boats – so it’s not yet clear what’s changing.

The government wants more prosecutions, but there are unprecedented delays in the courts, so it’s not clear when and how all of these additional proposed cases might be heard.

We have asked the Home Office to clarify when this target applies. One element of this strategy is to resume sharing immigration status data with banks, so they can prevent people from accessing the accounts.

But the Windrush scandal revealed how people who were British, or had the right to be in the UK, had their lives ruined because the Home Office thought they were illegal immigrants – or had no record of their true status. They have lost bank accounts, jobs and homes. The latest progress report on debugging Windrush warned the Home Office earlier this year that this issue has yet to be resolved.

A Home Office spokesperson said a “range of safeguards” had been made for the bank’s data sharing process – including “improved customer contact and service resolution for those who feel they may have been improperly affected”.

It was a long time ago The ambiguity of why the Albanians arrive is a major problem for the Home Office. Ministers can sign an order declaring a particular country safe. Since 2003, Albania has been on the list of safe countries – meaning anyone seeking asylum or protection can be quickly sent back there.

The government says Albanian crime syndicates abuse the process by which people can claim protection as slaves in modern times, and wants to close the loopholes — but evidence of these alleged abuses is in dispute.

The prime minister admitted in parliament that Germany, which takes in far more asylum seekers than the UK, rejects almost all Albanian applicants.

Let’s just assume the government fast-tracks these cases – something Labor says it has long advocated – removing these people takes resources – and it’s not clear that the Home Office owns the cases.

There are more than 100,000 people in the asylum support system awaiting decisions on their cases. About 37,000 are in hotels because the Home Office has run out of homes to put them in. And homes ran out as the case backlog increased (see below).

This government, like the Labor Party before it in the 2000s, faced significant domestic opposition to moving asylum seekers to dedicated centres.

One plan collapsed in North Yorkshire after the two Conservative leadership contenders this summer refused to support it. Is this scheme and the others again?

Each center will need planning permission – and that could mean more campaigns targeting MPs already worried about their seats.

Sunak says this new law will mean people can be “detained and quickly returned” to their home country or to another location – meaning, in theory, Rwanda or an EU destination.

The UN refugee agency says the government’s proposals would deny people access to the legal asylum system because of how they arrived.

There is also speculation that the government wants to revive the “detained fast track” – a labor government scheme that was suspended in 2015 after critics won a legal battle to prove it was unfair. DFT proponents say it has been valuable in getting unsubstantiated claims weeded out quickly.

By the way – the Rwanda scheme is still in the courts and there is no deal to bring people back to the EU because the ministers did not include it in the Brexit agreement.

I have written extensively How is the accumulation going up? since 2018.

Part of the reason is that Home Office staff take longer to handle cases.

Another reason is that since Brexit there have been an increasing number of cases that have not been formally dealt with, so they remain in limbo. (The post-Brexit rule change declared that people from the EU could be prevented from applying for asylum and sent back to the safe country from which they came – but, as mentioned above, the UK does not have a return agreement with the EU.)

The challenge is basically enormous. In 2004, Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair set a much less ambitious target of completing more cases in a given period than new cases joined the pool. It took the Home Office two years to come close to getting there.