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One of the Tories’ most strident proponents for cracking down on small boats migration to the UK, Natalie Elphicke, cited the government’s failure to “keep our borders safe and secure” when she defected to the Labour party on Wednesday.
The prime minister’s press secretary questioned whether the MP for Dover believed Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer really had a better plan.
Labour’s rapidly-evolving policy on tackling irregular migration hinges on returning the system to the way it operated before the Tories’ attempts to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Addressing this issue will be key for Labour in winning over voters in the UK general election, expected later this year.
How would Labour address small boat crossings?
Labour has said it will crack down on the people smuggling gangs that run the networks transporting asylum seekers across the English channel, including by creating a new cross-border police unit working in the UK and across Europe to “tackle gangs upstream”.
Critics in the Tory party point out that the government has already been working closely with France and the EU to try to disrupt the smuggling networks. That work has proved challenging. Nearly 1,500 people arrived in the UK by small boat last week alone, taking the total so far in 2024 to more than 8,500 — 36 per cent higher than the same period last year.
A former government insider poured cold water on the idea Labour could more effectively tackle networks of people smugglers, saying simply: “What does Labour think we’ve been trying to do? You can’t just stop the gangs.”
What would happen to the Rwanda scheme?
Starmer has been categorical that he would end the Rwanda scheme as soon as a Labour government comes to power, irrespective of whether flights had already started taking migrants to Kigali.
Labour argues it would not be necessary to repeal the Rwanda bill that received royal assent last month as the legislation does not compel officials to send people overseas.
The party also says it would scrap a new government scheme that allows asylum seekers to voluntarily opt to move to Rwanda for £3,000 in cash, because it is too costly.
How would Labour deal with the backlog of asylum seekers?
The Illegal Migration Act — which passed last year — bans anyone who arrived in the UK ‘illegally’ after March 2023 from claiming asylum, meaning there are now tens of thousands of people stuck in limbo in the system.
There are more than 40,000 people that have arrived in the UK since the IMA was passed whose claims are currently deemed ‘inadmissible’, according to Home Office officials, and this number could double by the end of the year.
Labour says it would start processing these cases soon after coming to power. To do this, legal experts say it would have to repeal or disapply parts of the Illegal Migration Act that prevent the Home Office from processing the claims.
To deal with this backlog, Labour says it would recruit over 1,000 Home Office caseworkers, on top of the 2,400 already hired by the government by the end of last year.
Would Labour’s plans reduce the number of small boat arrivals?
Critics of Labour’s plans say that repealing the Illegal Migration Act and terminating the Rwanda scheme will remove the only plausible deterrents to irregular migration.
But Labour says it will devote energy and resources to creating new returns agreements, both with the EU and bilaterally with states where large numbers of asylum seekers are coming from.
Returns of migrants have plummeted over the past decade. Migration experts say this is in part because it has become prohibitively expensive to transport people against their will overseas, with the government having to rely on costly charter arrangements after a backlash against the use of commercial flights.
One person who has advised Labour on its migration strategy said the party would have some “crunchy and immediate” decisions as soon as it comes to power. They conceded that negotiating new returns agreements with EU countries may not reduce the overall number of people coming to the UK to claim asylum.
But they said this would still be an improvement. “People arriving in a planned way on ferries is a very different proposition to people pitching up on a beach.”
Colin Yeo, an immigration barrister, argued that it may not be necessary for a Labour government to reduce the net number of asylum seekers entering the UK if it can reduce the reliance on costly asylum hotels and show it had significantly increased the number of migrant removals overseas.
This, he argued, was more “realistic and humane” than the current government’s strategy. “It’s part of a plausible public policy response in a way that Rwanda just isn’t,” he said.
