Sunak Cannot Keep Vow To Deport Channel Migrants

UK only has capacity to remove a tenth of arrivals in 2023

- LIZZIE DEARDEN

The UK has room to detain just 3,000 people under Rishi Sunak's small boats bill - less than a tenth of those who came across the Channel last year, The Independent can reveal. Almost 46,000 people made the crossing in 2022 - with 1,300 arriving on a single day last summer – and internal Home Office estimates warn that the figure could rise to 56,000 this year.

However, even after two new immigration removal centres are opened there will still be little over 3,000 detention places, including just 98 reserved for women. The entire capacity cannot be dedicated to small boat migrants because places are also required for people being deported at the end of prison sentences or for immigration offences.

By the end of last year, almost 1,200 people were already being held in immigration detention, and the new military bases and barges being procured by the Home Office cannot be used as detention centres under current laws. It is also unlawful to hold people in immigration detention unless they are being removed from the country within a “reasonable” period, meaning that the government will be forced to release small boat migrants without a concrete deportation plan.

Stephen Kinnock, Labour’s shadow security minister, said that the figures “just further expose how much of a con this Tory plan really is”. he told The Independent: “It will increase the soaring asylum backlog and increase hotel use, while taxpayers foot the bill.”