Part One: The Legal Obstacles to Mass Deportations

Legal Obstacles to be Cleared by Repeal (I)

Despite the fashionable focus on the mischief caused by international law, many of the legal obstacles to mass deportations are in fact homegrown. Assuming a motivated future government with a strong majority in Parliament and the political will to rein in judicial activism (see Section VI), these legal obstacles can and must be cleared. What follows is a brief, non-exhaustive list of the laws to be prioritised for repeal and/or amendment.

Immigration and Asylum Act (1999)

Repeal the following:

S. 95, which gives support to asylum seekers and their dependants. In s. 95 itself ('Persons for whom support may be provided'), it is presented as a power to be exercised at the discretion of the Secretary of State. However, when read in tandem with s. 122 ('Support for children') and Regulation 5 ('Asylum support under section 95 or 98 of the 1999 Act') of the Asylum Seekers (Reception Conditions) Regulations (2005) 13, it amounts to an obligation. Any support enjoyed by illegals must be of the bare minimum variety and contingent upon their surrender to detention pending deportation.

Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act (2002)

Repeal the following:

Part 2, which provides for the housing of asylum seekers in accommodation centres. Instead, there should be a statutory duty to detain and deport.
Part 5, which sets out Britain's immigration tribunal provisions, including in respect of 'Protection and Human Rights Claims.' In addition to subsequent bits of the text like Part 5A, much of this would fail to survive withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights and/or repeal of the Human Rights Act (see Section III below).

UK Borders Act (2007)

Repeal the following:

The relevant parts of s. 33 that override automatic deportation for foreign criminals where their removal would 'breach (a) a person's Convention rights, or (b) the United Kingdom's obligations under the Refugee Convention.' Much of this is necessarily addressed below in Section II and Section III.

Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act (2009)

Repeal the following:

S. 55, which forces the Home Office to consider the best interests of the dependants of immigrants when making asylum decisions. This might sound innocuous, but such decisions should be freely formed by an elected Home Secretary, answerable to Parliament, without additional pressure from a sentimental statute.

Equality Act (2010)

Repeal in full:

The Equality Act mandates the active pursuit of egalitarian goals across the public sector, including as a matter of government policy. It does so by prohibiting both 'direct' and 'indirect' discrimination against people with so-called 'protected characteristics.' Some exceptions are made for immigration enforcement, where certain forms of discrimination - such as on the basis of nationality - remain technically legal. However, mass deportations are likely to be frustrated if the Act remains in place. As the New Culture Forum proposed in a recent list of pledges put to MPs, the

Equality Act should be scrapped altogether and replaced with a simple non-discrimination duty. 18

Illegal Migration Act (2023)

Amend the following:

Certain parts of s. 12, some of which sought to overturn two of the four so-called 'Hardial Singh' principles while putting the other two on a statutory footing. All four principles are rooted in a common law ruling from 1983. 20 In applying consequential limits to the detention of immigrants, including illegals, they present a clear obstacle to mass deportations. Reform UK have vowed to create powers of detention that would be free of such constraints. ²¹ We welcome this move, but it is vital to ensure that the previous government's decision to incorporate two of these principles into our domestic law is also undone. This would require full repeal of s. 3a and s. 3b, as well as s. 4, of the Illegal Migration Act (2023). Illegals who dislike detention can be deported home or removed to a third country at any time if they cooperate.

UN Refugee Convention (II)

Britain possesses a 'dualist' system of law, encompassing both homegrown legislation and agreements on the world stage. Homegrown legislation always takes precedence. As the constitutional specialist Amar Johal explains, '[any] international obligations we've agreed to regarding the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees don't automatically apply in UK law; rather, they only apply to the extent that they've been implemented in domestic law.' 22

Though not incorporated wholesale into our domestic law, the United Nations Refugee Convention (UNRC) of 1951 finds its essential principles reflected in all sorts of legislation from the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act (1993) to the Nationality and Borders Act (2022). It is through our courts, interpreting and applying these principles, that the UNRC assumes legal force within Britain. Our continued adherence to it lies at the foundation of our current asylum system. Yet with each passing day, the evidence mounts that this no longer serves the interests of the nation, nor the demands of the time.

Suella Braverman was the first mainstream politician in Britain to draw attention to the disruptive effects of UNRC-based law as it operates today. In a speech to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in 2023, she argued that it is 'incumbent upon politicians and thought leaders to ask whether the Refugee Convention and the way it has come to be interpreted through our courts, is fit for our modern age or in need of reform.' 23 We take the view that it is in need of serious reform, if not radical overhaul.

As we hinted in parts of Section I, every binding reference to the UNRC or its principles that lawyers are able to identify in our domestic law - along with similar references to other relevant 'non-refoulement' treaties such as the Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, the UN Convention Against Torture, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights - should be repealed.

It might be supposed that Article 31 of the UNRC makes it clear that self-described asylum seekers have no automatic right to travel through multiple safe countries on their way to some preferred destination. The text reads:

'The Contracting States shall not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened in the sense of Article 1, enter or are present in their territory without authorisation, provided they present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence.' 24

We add the emphasis ourselves because, in practice, no British government in recent years has yet taken the italicised qualification as a licence to cut off bogus asylum claims at the root. The overwhelming majority of 'asylum seekers' continue to be assessed in good faith, as if having paid a criminal gang to be smuggled into Britain from the safety of northern France is not reason enough for rejection. We may have duties to our closest neighbours, but we cannot reasonably be expected to serve as a lifeboat to the entire world. Apart from anything else, the mass movement into Britain of millions of men, all from alien cultures, would soon enough make us less like a functioning lifeboat than a godforsaken slum.

Policy Exchange has recommended that Britain should be more proactive in accepting a capped number of genuine refugees each year from the most troubled regions of the world, doing so 'through safe and legal routes once the problem of illegal routes has been brought under control.' 25 Our view is that this is well beyond our reasonable duties as a small and struggling nation. After all, we are not at the beginning but at least halfway through a reckless demographic experiment and accordingly in grave need of a sustained period of time devoted to reversing, not boosting, mass immigration.

To repeat, we are not the world's lifeboat. At Restore Britain, our goal is to move towards a new global asylum system, fit to address the special challenges of the 21st century. Given the danger of clashing civilisations amid mass international travel, nations should be expected to take care of their own backyards and refugees required to seek asylum in their continent of origin. This will reduce cultural conflicts, give third-world leaders a stronger stake in the stability of their own regions, and lighten the load of the Western countries upon which the rest of the world, in fact, depends for humanitarian resources and invaluable research and innovation. If the West goes under, the rest will suffer, too.

As such, we believe that the standards for qualifying as a person in need of asylum should be raised considerably higher. ²⁶ Indeed, the standards should be set so high that only someone in legitimate fear of their life and arriving from a neighbouring country (Ireland, France 27, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Iceland) should be eligible for asylum - and no more than temporary asylum at that, without the prospect of British citizenship and with a right to remain here only until such time as it is safe for them to return home. Everyone else, having passed through at least one safe jurisdiction, should have their claims rejected as a matter of principle. If possible, they should be returned to their country of origin. If for whatever reason this is too difficult, they should be removed to a third country.

Reform UK have suggested that the UNRC should be disapplied in Britain's domestic law for a period of five years. However, it would be more in Britain's interest, as we suggest, to repeal every trace of the UNRC in our law altogether, before pushing for a longer term global settlement whereby the international treaty itself is either amended or rewritten. Ideally, such changes would impose a positive duty on refugees to apply for asylum, if at all, in their continent of origin.

An amended UNRC should also uphold the right of host nations to reject 'asylum seekers' who have passed through multiple safe countries. Of course, this would require a great deal of diplomatic work, in all likelihood led by the United States, but we see no reason why Britain should not kickstart the process.

For the time being, it is enough that we simply clarify in our own domestic law along the lines of s. 37 of the Nationality and Borders Act (2022) 28 - that British courts are duty-bound to discount ipso facto the claims of any 'asylum seeker' for whom Britain is not a first port of call. S. 37 on its own is too weak, because it makes a point of shielding from penalty any illegals - even if they have passed through safe countries - who report their presence without delay and claim somehow to have been unable to seek refuge anywhere else. It does so with an eye to Article 31 of the UNRC. In our view, this is too lenient. First and foremost, we believe that a legitimate asylum seeker must have entered the host nation directly from an unsafe country. Self-reporting is the bare minimum. To take seriously the claims of many illegals who have in fact shopped around Europe before deciding upon Britain, simply because these illegals have made their arrival known to the authorities and profess to have had no luck elsewhere, is therefore misguided. Unless they are seeking asylum from a neighbouring country, they should be detained and deported.

In positive terms, then, it should be specified in our law that persons seeking asylum from anywhere other than Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Norway, or Iceland - all of which neighbour us to varying degrees - will have their claims automatically dismissed, unless the Home Secretary of the day sees fit to argue before Parliament that an exception ought to be made in some particular case. Unauthorised break-ins shall then be classed as straightforward illegal immigrants, to be detained upon arrival and deported at the earliest opportunity. Given that Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland all qualify as 'safe countries' under Schedule 3 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act (2004), this would in effect amount to scrapping Britain's asylum system. ²⁹ It has been gamed for far too long. We need a considerable breather.

ECHR-Related Obstacles (III)

As Dominic Cummings reports of his time in government, the obstacles to border control are not operational, but legal:

'I went through the boats in great detail in 2020 with both a) the military and b) the best lawyers inside and outside government and the conclusion was absolutely clear: operationally stopping the boats is very simple and could be done in days but CO legal advice endorsed by external experts is that the PM cannot do this simple thing lawfully because the courts will stop him using the HRA/ECHR. (In simple terms if the PM tried to order the Navy to stop the boats in a serious way, the courts would state that the PM's orders are unlawful under the HRA therefore the Navy cannot execute them and the Cabinet Secretary would tell the PM that he cannot insist on his orders being obeyed as, in extremis, both the PM and officers could be arrested for contempt. The core operational and political problem of 'stop the boats' could be solved by simple primary legislation explicitly whacking the HRA though the broader issue of the Strasbourg court and other international law angles requires deeper action. I won't go into the details of this 30

here.)'

No less a figure than Tony Blair has also admitted - perhaps unwisely given his ideological sympathies - that the post-war legal order has had a devastating impact on Britain's national sovereignty. As he writes in his 2010 memoir,

'The combination of the courts, with their liberal instinct, the European Convention on Human Rights, with its absolutist attitude to the prospect of returning someone to an unsafe community; and the UN Convention on Refugees, with its context firmly that of 1930s Germany meant that, in practice, once someone got into Britain and claimed asylum, it was the Devil's own job to return them.' 31

As we can see, Blair singles out the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) of 1950, the empowerment of Britain's domestic judges to refer to and develop this body of law through his own Human Rights Act (HRA) in 1998, and the UNRC (see Section II above) for paralysing any system of effective border enforcement. In short, whereas the influence of the UNRC forces us to treat bogus asylum claims seriously, the ECHR and the HRA prevent us in various ways from removing illegals who try their luck.

Much of what the ECHR does, as Cummings says, takes the form of an unquantifiable chilling effect. Given the ever-present threat of judicial challenge, existing human rights law does not only shoot down government decisions in mid-air, but dissuades many acts of political daring before they can even get off the ground.

The ECHR was drafted in the aftermath of the Second World War. It preceded our entry into the European Economic Community in 1972 and also survived our exit in 2020. Unlike the European Union (EU), the ECHR is not about pooling national sovereignty to achieve collective goals across borders. It is an international code of fundamental rights, interpreted and upheld by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg.

During the 1970s, the ECtHR was seduced by a dramatic shift in jurisprudential fashion. In 1978, the Strasbourg judges first made use of the so-called 'living instrument' metaphor, ruling in Tyrer v. UK that the ECHR 'must be interpreted in the light of present-day conditions.' 32 This has since encouraged them to be more creative and less grounded in their interpretation of written laws. Over time, they have expanded on the original text of the ECHR in ways never imagined by those who drafted it, resulting in the effective judicial creation and establishment of an indefinite number of new rights. Like all rights, these burden the state, make intrusive claims against the taxpayers who are forced to fund its liabilities, and undercut the deliberative nature of the democratic process.

As the legal philosopher John Finnis has noted, talk of rights carries with it a 'conclusory force.' 33 That is to say, it has a tendency to rebuff any form of counter-argument in advance, because to affirm the existence of a right is to make an unusually absolute assertion. This gives rights an inherently anti-democratic thrust that becomes more alarming still when they are instituted, via the living instrument doctrine, by unelected judges.

Lord Jonathan Sumption argues that this permission structure has conferred upon the ECtHR a more or less unbridled 'power to review the whole range of [Britain's] domestic law.' 34 Their adventurous decisions have been made less in line with evolving circumstances, such as the development of new technologies, and more in line with evolving values. This may sound harmless, but in a free and self-governing society any changes in our values will tend to find their way into law over time regardless of any pronouncement handed down by judges. The problem with the living instrument doctrine is that it empowers a small judicial oligarchy to make such decisions for us. As Finnis writes elsewhere,

'The 'living instrument' method ensures that much of the time, the Court is instead interpreting not text or agreement, but 'attitudes', that is, opinions (not least prejudices and ideologies, 'memes' and 'tropes') that have emerged since the Convention was adopted and won favour among transnational elites and a majority of the Court.' 35

In doing so, it usurps the role of representative institutions, among them our own Parliament. Yet it is in these very settings that our collective values are best negotiated. That way, the exercise may take place in full transparency of the public and with due regard for their opinions.

Nowhere is judicial usurpation more dangerous than when it obstructs the state in its duty to protect national borders against unarmed invasion. Yet the ECtHR has evolved to treat Article 3 of the ECHR (intended to prevent torture) and Article 8 of the ECHR (intended to safeguard family life) as so absolute in their application, they can be cited to block even the most urgent deportation efforts. In Chahal v.

United Kingdom, the ECtHR ruled that even foreigners who pose a grave danger to public safety cannot be deported if they are thought to face a serious risk of ill-treatment in their home country or elsewhere. Their conduct while in Britain, however monstrous, was judged to be irrelevant:

'The prohibition provided by Article 3 (art. 3) against ill-treatment is equally absolute in expulsion cases. Thus, whenever substantial grounds have been shown for believing that an individual would face a real risk of being subjected to treatment contrary to Article 3 (art. 3) if removed to another State, the responsibility of the Contracting State to safeguard him or her against such treatment is engaged in the event of expulsion … In these circumstances, the activities of the individual in question, however undesirable or dangerous, cannot be a material consideration.' 36

In other words, any scope for countervailing interests or considerations has been removed. This reflects a larger trend in modern human rights law: the conversion of rigid moral absolutes into burdensome legal commands, even at the expense of national sovereignty, democratic legitimacy, and public safety.

Crucially, the ECHR is often used by activist lawyers to prevent the deportation of illegal immigrants. In June 2022, the first and last flight of illegals to Rwanda was grounded due to an interim measure hailing from Strasbourg. The ECtHR ruled that the human rights of those due to be deported could not be guaranteed away from European soil. While 'interim measures' of the sort issued in the Rwanda case may perhaps be sidestepped by a change in the law, the ECHR makes it clear that 'final judgments' are just that: final. As Article 46 reads, signatories are required to 'abide by the final judgment of the court in any case to which they are parties.' 37 To make matters worse, Article 32 makes it clear that Strasbourg enjoys full judicial discretion to make binding decisions in the event of dispute. Even if the dispute is over the limits of their own power, the final say is theirs. 38

Given that these powers have long been exercised with reckless abandon and against Britain's interests, we believe there to be just two options for restoring our national sovereignty. In short, we face a choice between full withdrawal and selective disobedience.

First, there is the option of full withdrawal. The ECHR is a dynamic treaty. As Lord Sumption explains in Trials of the State (2020), this means that it 'does not just say what our domestic law should be, but also provides a supranational mechanism for altering it and developing it in future.' 39 It is a simple fact of our membership, provided we take it seriously, that some degree of legislative power is transferred to an international body outside of Britain's constitutional framework. Under the terms of our membership, only by giving notice of our intention to denounce and withdraw from the ECHR under Article 58 can we reclaim our sovereignty in full. ⁴⁰ So, unless we decide to shirk our obligations under a treaty we signed in good faith and to which we remain signatories by choice, there is no way around the fact that final judgments by the ECtHR continue to apply.

However, shirking these obligations - on a selective basis at least, not as a matter of course - technically remains a second option. Up until now, our naturally law-abiding intuitions have prevented us from doing so. But contrary to the terms of Article 46, selective disobedience is often exercised by some of our fellow ECHR members and has been proposed as a more simple course of action than full withdrawal by some in Britain. This we might call the 'neither need nor care for your permission' policy. We address the respective merits of full withdrawal on the one hand and selective disobedience on the other in our conclusion to this section.

Before we get there, it should be noted that the HRA is less compromising of British sovereignty than our membership of the ECHR, but its disruptive effects should not be downplayed. Its explicit purpose was to make us more answerable at home to whatever fashions prevail in Strasbourg. As the New Labour government's Rights Brought Home (1997) paper admitted, the HRA was designed to ensure that the ever-evolving obligations imposed upon us by the ECHR could be 'far more subtly and powerfully woven into our law.' 41

Indeed, the HRA instructs British courts to take the ECHR - as well as its expanding body of case law - into account when assessing the legality of government acts. It empowers domestic judges to strike down any rule of common law, any regulation, and any government decision they find to be incompatible with the ECHR. It even goes so far as to require public bodies, including courts, to give maximal possible effect to the ECHR in their reading of domestic legislation, which at times has been taken by judges as a licence to make changes of their own to written statutes. However, should an irresolvable conflict arise between the ECHR and a full act of Parliament, our courts are entitled to do no more under s. 4 of the HRA than issue a declaration of incompatibility. ⁴² Parliament is free to ignore it, unless Strasbourg involves itself with a 'final judgment' of the sort described in Article 46. The deeper problem, then, is Article 46 - a legal obstacle that will continue to exist, assuming we continue to respect ECtHR rulings as obedient members, even if we throw every scrap of paper Blair ever passed through Parliament onto the bonfire.

To conclude, we have mentioned a choice between full withdrawal on the one hand and selective disobedience on the other. As should soon become clear, the truth is that whether a motivated future government should leave the ECHR and repeal the HRA - as opposed to simply disobeying the former and overruling decisions rooted in the latter on a selective basis under our envisioned Great Clarification Act, described further down (see Section VI) - very much depends on how much of an appetite its leading figures have for dealing with the ramifications for Northern Ireland and our relationship with the EU.

Below, in Section IV and Section V respectively, we make recommendations for how we believe this could be managed. However, anyone who is put off by the complexity would be wise to resist any temptation to leave the ECHR or repeal the HRA. Instead, they should simply make use of Parliament to assert our right as a sovereign state to ignore judgments from Strasbourg and shoot down

HRA-based judicial decisions at home on a discerning basis under our Great Clarification Act (again, see Section VI). To shirk our duties under a self-binding treaty such as the ECHR may grate against the natural sense of fair play in the British character, but it would be justified and no doubt popular if Strasbourg continues to get in the way of mass deportations. If a future government has full confidence in its ability to deal with the Northern Ireland- and EU-related fallout, ideally along the lines we suggest in Section IV and Section V, they should leave the ECHR and repeal the HRA.

Alongside such actions, an information war must be waged. Cummings has recently suggested as much, calling for classified information about the ways in which our human rights legislation is abused even by terrorists to be made public:

'Terrorists literally being hunted from cave to cave in Afghanistan by JSOC (US classified special forces) have used satellite phones to procure London barristers to bring legal cases against the MoD [Ministry of Defence] for 'human rights' abuses and won secret payouts of millions while on the run. Such grotesque cases are classified by the Cabinet Office to stop MPs knowing what the ECHR actually does and close to zero MPs are informed of such lunatic dynamics. (Hence my advice to Sunak to declassify the ECHR/HRA effects on security, take them out of red STRAP files and publish them.)' 43

Sunak lacked the stomach for this nuclear option. However, refraining from full disclosure of such details serves only to benefit the various vested interests opposed to ditching Britain's untenable human rights framework. Any future government intent on restoring Britain's sovereignty should declassify the lot. Apart from anything else, public opinion is prone to being fickle at the best of times, let alone when it operates in an information vacuum friendly to power. For this reason, the British people should be kept maximally informed by those in the know throughout the entire process of clearing the legal obstacles to mass deportations.

The Northern Ireland Problem? (IV)

Concerns have been raised that Britain cannot reasonably leave the ECHR or repeal the HRA (see Section III) without undermining the Belfast Agreement (BA) and risking a renewal of tensions in Northern Ireland. The present Labour Government has said as much itself: 'Britain will continue to remain a member of the ECHR. It underpins key international agreements, on trade, security and migration, including the Belfast Agreement.' 44 Lord Sumption also claims that, while he favours withdrawal on the part of the British mainland, the human rights protections envisaged in the BA mean that we would be forced to leave Northern Ireland within the ECHR system. ⁴⁵ Simon Harris, the Deputy Prime Minister of Ireland, made it clear that this was also the Irish position in a recent Oxford address:

'The ECHR is a fundamental safeguard in the Good Friday Agreement. It is a core part of the delicate balances in that agreement. It reflects Ireland and the UK's shared status as founder members of one of the key parts of the European legal and political architecture that emerged from the shadow of the Second World War: the Council of Europe. The ECHR's guarantees cannot be negotiated away, despite what some politicians might claim.' 46

Of course, the Irish Government is not an oracle, but an association of fallible human beings. We should never ask Irish officials or any other foreign dignitary for permission to pursue Britain's best interests. However, those interests do include amicable relations with Dublin and the maintenance of peace in Northern Ireland. Any future withdrawal from the ECHR or repeal of the HRA will therefore present political and diplomatic, though not legal, difficulties.

Reform UK's plan, Operation Restoring Justice, fell short of addressing any of them. It contained no mention of the problems around leaving the ECHR or repealing the HRA as regards Northern Ireland. We take the view that this is a mistake. The Northern Ireland question should be approached with care.

We look to history to understand why the question ever arose. As Johal explains, 'deliberately or negligently, dependencies have been embedded across the system that need to be worked through.' 47 The link between the ECHR/HRA on the one hand and the BA on the other is one such embedded dependency. We must face up to the fact that, rightly or wrongly, this interweaving relation exists. Fortunately, we believe that it can also be resolved in a way that maintains peace in Northern Ireland while clearing the legal obstacles to mass deportations.

The Northern Ireland peace process consists of two parts. First we have the British-Irish Agreement between Britain and the Republic of Ireland. Second we have the Multi-Party Agreement between the various parties north of the Irish border. Together, they add up to the BA, but only the British-Irish Agreement being a treaty between states - is properly binding as a matter of international law. The Multi-Party Agreement is different in containing explicit references to the ECHR, but it is also different in carrying no force in international law, let alone in our own domestic law should we decide to change it. We are committed by the terms of the British-Irish Agreement to do no more than 'support and, where appropriate, implement the [Multi-Party] agreement reached by the participants in the negotiations which shall be annexed to the British-Irish Agreement [Emphasis ours].' 48

So, what does the Multi-Party Agreement say about the ECHR? The crucial passage, contained in the 'Rights, Safeguards, and Equality of Opportunity' section, reads as follows:

'The British government will complete incorporation into Northern Ireland law of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), with direct access to the courts, and remedies for breach of the Convention, including power for the courts to overrule [Belfast] Assembly legislation on grounds of inconsistency.' 49

This is taken by some to imply either continued British membership of the ECHR or continued legal effect for the HRA's ECHR-based protections - perhaps just in Northern Ireland, but nevertheless on sovereign British territory. Withdrawal from the ECHR and/or repeal of the HRA could therefore be interpreted as undermining the spirit, if not necessarily the letter, of the BA - particularly by communities in Northern Ireland, many of whom view the ECHR and its domestic reinforcements as a cornerstone of the peace process.

In the last few months, two high-profile papers have dissented from this conclusion. The first paper was co-authored for Policy Exchange by Conor Casey, Richard Ekins, and Sir Stephen Laws. They argue from the letter and context of the BA as follows:

'The commitment on the part of the UK to incorporate the ECHR complete with 'direct access to courts', in the context of the incorporation of rights into Northern Ireland law, clearly refers to access to domestic courts and not to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Only domestic courts could provide remedies in domestic law, such as overruling 'Assembly legislation on grounds of inconsistency' or quashing executive and administrative decisions that infringe Convention rights. The Strasbourg Court cannot overrule Assembly legislation, executive action, or administrative decisions on grounds of inconsistency; only a domestic court can do that.' 50

This legal reasoning forms the basis for their conclusion: 'UK withdrawal from the ECHR would not constitute a breach of the Belfast Agreement.' 51

The second paper was co-authored for the Prosperity Institute by Suella Braverman and Guy Dampier. They equally maintain, for much the same reason, that the BA 'need not pose an obstacle to ECHR withdrawal.' 52

Now, it may not breach the BA, but this is no guarantee that any future decision to withdraw from the ECHR and/or repeal the HRA will not give rise to non-legal problems in need of careful handling. Political difficulties and legal impossibilities are not the same thing. What we have on our hands here is an example of the former, not the latter. And given the domestic focus of the BA's reference to rights protections that neither Policy Exchange nor the Prosperity Institute at any point deny, these political difficulties arise more in connection with the prospect of a repealed HRA (given its incorporation of the ECHR into our domestic law) than with withdrawal from the ECHR itself.

Both Policy Exchange and the Prosperity Institute do their best to propose solutions to such problems. For reasons that should become clear, we are not fully satisfied with either of their recommendations.

Needless to say, the BA was never meant as a total blueprint for settling British-Irish relations for the rest of time. Its purpose was to establish a basis for peace upon which further developments could always be laid in accordance with changing circumstances. Braverman and Dampier are correct to point out that the BA has already been built upon and updated at least five times, typically to address fresh challenges relating to the fine balance between the sovereignty of Britain and peace on the Irish mainland. In view of this record, they express full confidence that our obligations under the BA - which, to repeat, do not include permanent membership of the ECHR, but merely guarantees in some form of appropriate rights in Northern Ireland - should be met 'through domestic mechanisms, including the common law.' 53 In other words, we should fall back upon long-standing precedents that gave practical force to 'human rights' in our domestic law before the words themselves were ever uttered.

It is significant, they argue, that the language of the BA focuses more on outcomes, such as the guarantee of rights protections, than the precise means by which such outcomes are to be achieved. In principle, therefore, their recommended resort to 'domestic mechanisms' - up to and including changes to the BA itself - need not violate the literal terms of the BA. The Policy Exchange authors appear to dissent from any common law-based fallback option, hinting instead at fresh guarantees in statute law of human rights in Northern Ireland. After leaving the ECHR, they suggest, 'there would be an opportunity to revive discussions about a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland or to consider enactment of more specific rights that address in detail the concerns that the parties may have.' 54

We believe that the need for any such common law fallback or statutory reworking would be avoided altogether if, upon leaving the ECHR and repealing the HRA, we were to go about the matter in a different way. After all, the BA was not signed to deal with problems in, say, Portugal or Estonia, but to settle unique 'troubles' on the Irish mainland - crucially, between Catholic communities bent on unification with the Republic of Ireland and Protestant communities eager to remain part of the United Kingdom.

Given this ultra-specific background, there can be no doubt that the vast majority of ECHR case law is wholly irrelevant to the rights-related challenges that the BA sought to address. We therefore recommend that a future government intent on clearing the legal obstacles to mass deportations should resolve the Northern Ireland question by maintaining in Britain's domestic law only the small slither of ECHR precedent that has a bearing on the rights of Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland.

We maintain that this would be less compromising to British sovereignty than might be assumed at first glance. For one thing, the list of ECHR precedents with any reasonable link to the unique circumstances of Northern Ireland is negligible compared to what we have already incorporated into our law through the HRA. For another, it is the general principles conducive to peace in Northern Ireland, not the totality of the ECHR itself, that the BA is concerned to uphold. And given that such principles are transferrable, the form of their incorporation and the means by which they are made to apply are very much secondary.

In our view, the optimal form of incorporation would be simple: retain a select fraction of ECHR precedent, specifically cases relevant to Northern Ireland insofar as they draw on Article 9 (freedom of religion) and Article 14 (non-discrimination). This would involve much less hassle than working to formulate a brand new Bill of Rights or gambling that common law precedent on its own will be enough to satisfy both communities in Northern Ireland within the space of a few months. ⁵⁵ Retaining a fraction of ECHR precedent post-withdrawal from the Convention and post-repeal of the HRA would also ensure maximal continuity of the legal standards that already regulate disputes over religious rights, state neutrality, and social cohesion in Northern Ireland.

Our suggestion would have two related virtues: the body of ECHR precedent to be chosen for retention in our law would be specific enough to remain relevant to Northern Ireland's peculiar history and slim enough to deny much of an opening to human rights radicals intent on blocking mass deportations. Under our vision, there would be no more than around a dozen ECHR cases incorporated into our domestic law. Consider the following list of potential examples:

Darby v. Sweden (1990). In this case, the ECtHR ruled that discriminatory taxation favouring the Lutheran state church constituted a violation of Article 14. Given the long-standing perception in Northern Ireland of state partiality in favour of Protestant communities, this would also be relevant to the sensitive issue of state neutrality.
Kokkinakis v. Greece (1993) & Larissis and Others v. Greece (1998). In these two related cases, the right to proselytise was held by the ECtHR to be a legitimate outgrowth of religious freedom, so long as proselytisers refrain from coercion. This would remain very relevant to Northern Ireland, where parades of ethno-religious identity have so often provoked sensitivities and continue to serve as potential flashpoints for violence.
Sambata Bihor Greek-Catholic Parish v. Romania (2010). In this case, the ECtHR upheld the right of Catholic communities to access property for worship under Article 14. It would remain relevant to potential disputes in Northern Ireland over shared spaces, community halls, and contested heritage sites.
Schüth v. Germany (2010). In this case, the right of individuals to freedom of conscience was upheld over the right of a particular religious institution to enforce its own doctrinal standards by means of dismissal. In a later case, Fernández Martínez v. Spain (2014), the very opposite conclusion was reached.

Both could be drawn upon whenever controversies arise in Northern Ireland over navigating the optimal boundaries between individual rights and institutional autonomy.

Lautsi v. Italy (2011). In this case, the ECtHR upheld Italy's display of crucifixes in schools on the grounds that it did not actively infringe on the rights of other denominations. This case would have no serious bearing on the mass deportation of illegal immigrants, but it could continue to serve as active precedent, available to our domestic courts, for guaranteeing state neutrality and religious freedom in Northern Ireland, helping to defuse any tensions that may ignite sectarian conflict.

This is not meant as an exhaustive list so much as an encouraging guide. The major advantage of such a policy is that all of the cases listed above and any others we may venture to retain are already incorporated into Britain's domestic law - and by extension into Northern Ireland's - by the HRA. Both communities in Northern Ireland have been content to put up with such arrangements. Consequently, they cannot in good faith protest at their being kept in place. After all, no positively new situation would be made.

This is not true of the less cautious proposal put forward by Dampier and Braverman. 'Any meaningful withdrawal from the ECHR,' they concede as a consequence of their common law fallback option, 'must confront the legal asymmetry embedded in Article 2 [of the Windsor Framework, about which see Section V ], which has effectively preserved a second-tier legal regime in Northern Ireland.' 56 By their own testimony, this would require a total overhaul of the '[Windsor] Framework and its constitutional base in the Belfast Agreement.' 57 Failing that, we run the danger of provoking further concerns over a split legal order between the British mainland and Northern Ireland. Both paths are fraught with risk.

As far as our recommendation is concerned, the only change would be negative: an unapologetic removal of the vast majority of ECHR case law that is wholly irrelevant to the peculiar circumstances of Northern Ireland. We would thus avoid the difficulties that are bound to arise if we gamble on falling back, as Braverman and Dampier suggest, upon an older common law rights framework that somehow succeeds in pleasing all of the major interests in Northern Ireland within the space of a transition period that would last no longer than six months. This strikes us as not enough time to bet on an improvised legal foundation, whether customary or statutory, for long-term peace. Such a short interim period would also no doubt incentivise many of the more strident sectarian interests in Northern Ireland to press the advantage by running down the clock. The logistics of getting Brexit over the line caused serious upheaval when we had over three years to sort out the details. It is fanciful to suppose that a mere six months to hammer out a contentious settlement in Northern Ireland, when we could simply keep the best of what already exists while throwing out the rest, would somehow lead to less upheaval or none at all. 58

To repeat, the ECHR case law that is relevant to Northern Ireland remains exceedingly small. It would have no reasonable bearing on a policy of mass deportations. Anything that might obstruct such an agenda would therefore be removed, leaving us with no more than the merest sliver of ECHR case law in our domestic corpus. This case law would be interpreted and applied by British courts, not the foreign one in Strasbourg, thus maximising sovereignty over our own border while keeping the peace in Northern Ireland.

Crucially, it would be the specific details of the judgments themselves, not the extendable ECHR Articles that these judgments cite, that are specified to have legal authority. Otherwise, we risk enabling yet more interpretative wish-casting by those in our own domestic judiciary who remain wedded to the living instrument doctrine. So far as is possible, judges should be prohibited from such methods of interpretation by a new law - much along the lines of a British Sovereignty Act, defended in detail by Douglas Carswell - ordering all judges to form their conclusions solely on the basis of common law precedent and parliamentary statutes, the latter of which under our suggestion would of course include some small remaining sliver of ECHR case law. ⁵⁹ However, no case law with any binding mention of Article 8 or Article 3 of the ECHR - too often weaponised to bring immigration enforcement to a halt - should be included. ⁶⁰ Judicial oligarchy is no better for bossing us around at home than from abroad. Parliament must reassert its sovereignty.

In short, there is nothing in the BA detailing exactly how human rights protections in Northern Ireland should be instituted. Since the BA was signed prior to the full passage of the HRA, none of the relevant parties can reasonably insist on the HRA as the sole mechanism by which to deliver the goods. In that spirit, if withdrawal from the ECHR and/or repeal of the HRA is to be attempted, we suggest a partial maintenance of what is already incorporated - attentive to the unique history of Northern Ireland - along the lines detailed above, complete with a full power for the British government under a Great Clarification Act (see Section VI) to defeat unpopular judicial decisions by a simple majority in Parliament.

This last bit is crucial. Indeed, if ever this tiny body of retained ECHR case law is somehow leapt upon by domestic judges to prevent mass deportations, the Home Secretary, acting at the pleasure of the Prime Minister, should be granted full power in primary legislation to overrule them (again, see Section VI for further details) with a swift Correction Bill. If ever this power is thought to have been abused or invoked for bad reasons, at least voters will be able to put a name on the officials responsible and make their disapproval known at the ballot box. This would be an undoubted improvement on what we have at the moment.

Windsor Framework & UK-EU Trade Deal Problems? (V)

There are further concerns that withdrawal from the ECHR and/or repeal of the HRA (see Section III) would jeopardise our relationship with the EU. Once again, Northern Ireland is the awkward hinge upon which such concerns turn.

The initial Withdrawal Agreement between Britain and the EU included a special Protocol to address Northern Ireland's anomalous position. Having caused disputes, this Protocol was later refined by the Windsor Framework. Article 2(1) of the Protocol, unchanged by the Windsor Framework, requires us to 'ensure that no diminution of rights, safeguards or equality of opportunity, as set out in that part of the 1998 [Belfast] Agreement entitled Rights, Safeguards and Equality of Opportunity results from its withdrawal from the Union, including in the area of protection against discrimination.' 61 Given that this assurance was given in the context of the terms of our withdrawal from the EU, fears have been raised that leaving the ECHR and/or repealing the HRA would force us to unpick the entire post-Brexit settlement.

The problem is thought to be exacerbated by the so-called Dillon issue. In Dillon v. Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (2023), the High Court in Northern Ireland ruled that any government decision or domestic law that breaches the Windsor Framework, including Article 2(1) of the original Protocol, should be disapplied. ⁶² The fear, of course, is that ECHR withdrawal and/or repeal of the HRA would be classed as a diminution of rights under Article 2 and thus prevented by the courts from taking effect in Northern Ireland, if not in Britain as a whole.

However, the legal academic Christopher McCrudden has made it clear that the means by which rights are upheld is irrelevant, so long as they continue to operate in some satisfactory form:

'While the substance of the rights in existence before withdrawal [from the EU] and underpinned by EU law must be retained in Northern Ireland, there is no obligation to retain specific EU measures themselves, but article 2 [of the Windsor Framework] obliges the UK to achieve the functionally equivalent result: it has some discretion (within limits) over how to achieve that result.' 63

We wish to make two further reassurances. One relates to stability in Northern Ireland, the other to British sovereignty. First, we believe that our proposal for resolving the Northern Ireland question (see Section IV) will by virtue of resolving that also go some way to resolving fears around a potential breach of Article 2 of the Windsor Framework. To repeat, our central proposal in Section IV was to supplement continued rights under common law with an added continuity of some statutory rights under a tiny slither of retained ECHR case law. This small body of law would be kept in place for the express purpose of satisfying communities in Northern Ireland with stronger guarantees than common law precedent can provide on its own.

Despite our envisioned withdrawal from the ECHR and overwhelming repeal of the HRA, the substance of the rights most relevant to Northern Ireland would therefore be maintained, not diminished. Second, the organising focus of the proposals we make below (see Section VI) for restoring Britain's judicial system is to reassert parliamentary sovereignty. More than anything else, the powers reclaimed by Parliament under our proposed Great Clarification Act would give MPs full confidence and ability to shoot down disruptive interpretations of the law by our own judges. Such parliamentary powers would apply as much to judicial interpretations of the Windsor Framework as anything else, so even if judges were not satisfied that we had kept our word as it relates to the non-diminution of rights, Parliament would enjoy the final say. In short, the Windsor Framework does nothing to abrogate Britain's right to trigger Article 58 of the ECHR. Nor does it infringe upon our right to exercise parliamentary sovereignty over the effect and scope of the HRA in domestic law.

Last of all, there are concerns that we may have to renegotiate our trading relationship with Brussels. This stems from the observation that our present UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (UK-EU TCA) - covering everything from goods and services to combatting international crime - includes a joint aspiration in Article 763:

'to uphold the shared values and principles of democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human rights, which underpin their domestic and international policies. In that regard, the Parties reaffirm their respect for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the international human rights treaties to which they are parties.' 64

As we saw in Section IV, Lord Sumption acknowledges the force of the Northern Ireland problem. However, he sees no damage being caused to our trade deal with the EU by British withdrawal from the ECHR. 65 As with the Windsor Framework, we are committed only to ensuring satisfactory arrangements, one way or another, for upholding human rights. Once again, the agreement contains no specifics over the precise means by which such rights are to be upheld.

Indeed, our commitment in the UK-EU TCA to 'respect human rights' is heavily qualified in Article 772, which reads as follows:

'The Parties [the UK and the EU] consider that, for a situation to constitute a serious and substantial failure to fulfil any of the obligations described as essential elements in Article 771 [part of which reaffirms Article 763], its gravity and nature would have to be of an exceptional sort that threatens peace and security or that has international repercussions.' 66

one part, and the European Union and the European Atomic Energy Community, of the other part (Brussels and

London, 30 December, 2020), Article 763, Democracy, rule of law and human rights.

See Jonathan Sumption: Britain should quit the intrusive ECHR | SpectatorTV

Trade and Cooperation Agreement between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, of the

one part, and the European Union and the European Atomic Energy Community, of the other part (Brussels and

London, 30 December, 2020), Article 772, Fulfilment of obligations described as essential elements.

In other words, it would be an ultra-dramatic move for the EU to cancel an existing trade agreement and thus damage the prosperity of their own citizens particularly given that our proposals around the ECHR and the HRA would make no serious threat to international peace and security, but would afford us greater control over our borders. And in any event, the EU is free to pull out of the UK-EU TCA for any reason at any time, as indeed are we. To point out that Brussels may exercise this freedom in shock at a future British withdrawal from the ECHR and/or repeal of the HRA is no more alarming than to point out that they may do so for any other reason.

In Part Three of the UK-EU TCA, explicit mention is made of what would happen if ever one of the parties to the TCA should opt to withdraw from the ECHR. In short, the result would be a partial suspension of the overall agreement. This may sound dramatic, but the relevant section, Article 692, makes it clear that such a suspension, being partial, would apply only to Part Three of the UK-EU TCA, which deals not with trade relations but with 'law enforcement and judicial cooperation in criminal matters.' 67 As Article 692 reads,

'if this Part [namely, Part Three where Article 692 is contained] is terminated on account of the United Kingdom or a Member State having denounced the European Convention on Human Rights or Protocols 1, 6 or 13 thereto, this Part shall cease to be in force as of the date that such denunciation becomes effective or, if the notification of its termination is made after that date, on the fifteenth day following such notification.' 68

In other words, our trade with the EU - addressed in Parts One and Two of the UK-EU TCA - would be unaffected by any such denunciation. This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that, under the legal maxim expressio unius est exclusio alterius 69, the UK-EU TCA cannot be interpreted as requiring the suspension of the entire agreement in the event of one party choosing to withdraw from the ECHR, given that it explicitly refers only to Part Three. Since Article 692 clearly envisages a potential denunciation of the ECHR by at least one of the parties to one part, and the European Union and the European Atomic Energy Community, of the other part (Brussels and London, 30 December, 2020), Part Three, Articles 522-701.

Trade and Cooperation Agreement between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, of the

one part, and the European Union and the European Atomic Energy Community, of the other part (Brussels and London, 30 December, 2020), Article 692.

the UK-EU TCA, it follows that fears of a total implosion of our post-Brexit settlement in the event of such a denunciation are overblown. Nevertheless, in saying as much we do concede that withdrawal from the ECHR and/or repeal of the HRA would mean having to take a second look at the terms of our cooperative relationship with the EU on matters unrelated to trade. This would be less economically and socially disruptive than a full implosion of the UK-EU TCA, but it would demand delicate diplomatic work all the same.

Needless to say, we should do our best to make sure that any such diplomatic rifts are offset by a determination on the part of any future patriotic government to pursue greater cooperation with our European neighbours across the board.

Some have pointed to the pre-Brexit Dublin procedure, which arranged for common rules within the EU for processing non-European asylum claims, as evidence that our departure from the EU has already locked us out of any collaborative relationship with the continent on border control and much else. In truth, the much-vaunted Dublin procedure long ago declined to the status of a dead letter. This is because it operated only in cases where illegals had sought to increase their chances of indefinite residence in a first-world nation by making at least two asylum claims in at least two different countries. In the final year of our membership of the EU, the terms of the Dublin procedure, then in force, required us to accept 882 incoming transfers while empowering us to remove just 105. 71

Even assuming Brussels would let us, it would therefore do Britain little good to opt back into the Dublin procedure under some bilateral arrangement with the EU. If anything, what we need are brand new forms of creative collaboration with our European neighbours - particularly Germany, France, and Italy - as they move further to the Right on these issues themselves.

As far as continental cooperation is concerned, the status quo across Europe is already inadequate. We are therefore undeterred by observations that withdrawal from the ECHR and/or repealing the HRA would bring forward the day when this status quo comes to be reassessed with an eye to the most pressing challenges of the 21st century.

Restoring the Judicial System (VI)

In What's Wrong With Rights? (2020), the moral philosopher Nigel Biggar argues that a right should be understood as a paradigmatically legal concept. Like all manmade laws, this means that rights are only as good as the finite resources - political, fiscal, logistical - that can be brought to bear upon reinforcing them at a pragmatic level. 70

The present status of human rights in British law has tested the bounds of practicality beyond all reason. We have foreign ECtHR judges ruling from abroad, combined with a judicial oligarchy empowered by the HRA at home, effectively holding the British people to ransom. In the process, such judges escape any responsibility for having to deal with the logistical challenges, social stresses, or public discontent that often results from their own decisions.

It is high time that we restore the sovereignty of Parliament. This cannot be done without reining in judicial activism. We therefore recommend that a Great Clarification Act (GCA), together with the swift, ultra-responsive Correction Bills (CBs) that this GCA would be designed to enable on a flexible basis, should be passed as soon as possible to get around the problem of politicised lawfare and judicial overreach.

There is no strict category of 'Clarification Act' in British law. However, there have been numerous occasions in our history when Parliament has stated or restated its understanding of the law in order to clarify its operation in a given context. Examples include the Declaratory Act (1766), which stressed the right of Parliament to legislate for the Thirteen Colonies in America after our embarrassing climbdown from the Stamp Act, and the British Nationality Act (1948), which elucidated the immigration status of the Crown's subjects around the world.

Clarification acts can be wise or foolish, but their essential function is to dispel legal ambiguity. The purpose of our GCA would be to re-emphasise the sovereignty of Parliament, explicitly underscoring its right to overturn judicial decisions with an instant CB, provided it wins a simple majority in the House of Commons. The balance of interest should be further specified to count in favour of the Commons while the CB in question is assessed in the Lords, precisely in order to avoid the sort of tactical delays pursued by activist lawyers.

Paradoxically, such a GCA would both require and cause a revival of self-confidence among those who sit in Parliament. No longer will ministers or MPs be able to wash their hands of our problems by outsourcing the business of government to off-stage actors. They shall have full power, reinforced in primary legislation by a well-worded GCA, to shoot down judicial decisions in real time. Complaints that this would somehow violate 'the rule of law' should be dismissed as fatuous. After all, the GCA would simply give renewed practical effect to a principle that already prevails in theory: the right of Parliament to make the laws that govern us. Since laws would continue to govern us under our envisioned plans, there would be no such violation.

The powers reasserted by the GCA would no doubt prove useful, as we noted earlier, if ever the small sliver of ECHR case law that we have suggested should be retained to address non-legal difficulties in Northern Ireland (see Section IV) is cited by domestic judges to obstruct mass deportations. Too often, previous governments have preferred to tinker around the edges of Britain's problems by making mild tweaks to primary legislation, invariably leaving far too much at the discretion of our highly politicised judiciary. For instance, s. 19 of the Immigration Act (2014) 71 sought to specify in elaborate detail how our judges should apply Article 8 of the ECHR, but did so in such a way that has continued to invite the sort of preposterous rulings we see in news headlines every week. A GCA would also help to anticipate obstacles to any form of indefinite detention, whether done offshore or at home or some mixture of the two, if ever our judges were to rule in favour of a domestic challenge to such a policy.

Of course, under the circumstances we envision they would have considerably less wiggle room to form such judgments, not least because Section I and Section II both call for a positive law defining illegal entry into Britain as an intolerable breach of national security, meriting detention until such time as the individual breaching it is removed from our territory. However, a GCA should still be passed because it would serve as a vital last-ditch tool. Our view is that it is more reasonable to give lawmakers the confidence to shoot down ridiculous rulings in real time than expect them to anticipate such absurdities in advance by mere repeal of select legislation.

For our remaining three recommendations on urgent changes to Britain's judicial system, we are indebted to some vital suggestions first made by Douglas Carswell.

First, he has proposed a Judicial Review Reform Act. At present, judicial review applications are too easily allowed to frustrate the flagship policies of elected governments. The Conservative government was hampered by such lawfare when trying to implement the Nationality and Borders Act (2022). This has obvious implications for the extent to which mass deportations will be tenable in future. Under Part 54 of the Civil Procedure Rules, activist lawyers are permitted very wide scope - phrased in terms of 'sufficient interest' - to launch challenges to policies that enjoy a popular mandate. Carswell's Judicial Review Reform Act would be designed to refocus judicial review on breaches of statute as opposed to mere policy disputes. Pursuant to that end, the Act would replace the loose 'sufficient interest' standard with a far stricter alternative: 'Only those personally and materially affected by the decision may apply.' 72 Needless to say, our GCA and the Parliamentary sovereignty that it reasserts would always exist as an essential back-up power if ever even this improved system of judicial review were abused to block mass deportations.

Second, Carswell has proposed a Judicial Conduct and Tenure Act. S. 11(3) of the Senior Courts Act (1981) allows the government to remove judges from their posts, but only ever on grounds of incapacity to perform the job or some kind of disgraceful behaviour. ⁷³ This is appropriate, of course, but so high a threshold does nothing to check judges whose activist rulings flout statutory text, eroding public trust in the rule of law. The purpose of Carswell's Judicial Conduct and Tenure Act would give full power to the Lord Chancellor to relieve senior judges of their office if they are thought to have displayed a persistent record of putting their own personal prejudices before the clear meaning of legal texts. Britain's legal system is fast falling into discredit among an otherwise instinctively law-loving British people. By forcing judges to keep their focus on statute, this reform would help to restore faith in our judiciary. 74

Last of all, Carswell has proposed a Judicial Appointments Reform Act. The Lord Chancellor once served as a very useful bridge between the government ministers tasked with running the country and the judges entrusted to make sure they did so with maximal regard for the state of written laws. However, Blair's Constitutional Reform Act (2005) stripped the office of Lord Chancellor of many of its responsibilities. These used to be discharged by a single person, accountable to Parliament, in full view of the public. Instead, these responsibilities - including judicial appointment powers - were handed under Part 4 (s. 61-138) of Blair's Constitutional Reform Act (2005) to an unelected Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC). 75 In theory, the idea was to make judicial appointments less political, but in practice it has simply made the political nature of such appointments less subject to democratic pressures and therefore less open to public scrutiny. Carswell's Judicial Appointments Reform Act would abolish the JAC, restore the Lord Chancellor's authority - answerable, of course, to Parliament - and demand that all future appointees prove rigorous fidelity to statutory text over judicial activism. ⁷⁶ If an unwise appointment is made by a single person, at least we know who to blame. If an unwise appointment is made by a captured system full of multiple different actors, we are at a loss to identify fault and trust in our judiciary consequently suffers.

Our justification for such changes is simple. Before the sweeping constitutional reforms enacted by Blair, Britain had a remarkable track record of effective government. Above all, this was because the people in power, though of course powerful, were held to account by our unique parliamentary system. This has been gradually undermined and replaced by a subtle dispersal of power among a far less visible set of often faceless actors, including among figures in the judiciary. If we are to restore Britain's constitution, we must have the courage to stop allowing our adversaries to conflate the rule of British law with the rule of their favourite judges.

Conclusion

The ongoing invasion of Britain by illegal immigrants is extortionately expensive. This is to say nothing of the far graver social, cultural, and demographic costs, not to mention the total damage of public trust in the rule of law and democratic politics that our immigration catastrophe continues to wreak.

In the 1950s, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower embarked upon a policy of mass deportations. Dubbed Operation Wetback, the end result was that more than a million illegal immigrants were removed from the American homeland. Many were evicted by force, but the vast majority acted in accordance with changed incentives and chose to leave of their own accord.

If this could be done then, it is even more doable today, particularly given the improvements in transport, the existence of helpful datasets, and the ease with which new digital apps may be brought online. Beyond this, it is simply a matter of political will.

All law has a non-legal source. This is the basis of Restore Britain's case for a realist attitude to our existing legal framework around human rights and state capacity. As Jen Spahn, a mainstream politician in Germany, has conceded, 'It is not ordained by God that we have to be a member in all these things.' 77 The ECHR, the HRA, the UNRC - all such legal mechanisms and the extent to which they shape our lives are the result of collective human agreement. They can therefore be changed, updated, or even cancelled altogether by the same force that brought them into being.

This is not to say that any of what we suggest should be undertaken without care. But if the state of the law obstructs national welfare, the relevant obstacles should be cleared. Once that is done in our own case, we shall at last be free to begin work on what it will take to restore Britain's borders. Assuming an optimal legal environment of the kind we have sketched in Part I, Part II lays out what these practical measures ought to be.

Part Two: The Practical Logistics of Mass Deportations

Understanding the problem

There is no definitive figure for how many people we have living illegally in Britain.

Despite repeated requests by Rupert Lowe MP and others, the government refuses to undertake such a study. In response to a written parliamentary question from Rupert Lowe MP, the Home Office Minister responsible answered:

'By its very nature, it is not possible to know the exact size of the irregular migrant population.' 78

Needless to say, this is a concerning admission for any government to make.

In 2020, the National Audit Office criticised the Home Office for failing to update its estimate of the size of the illegal migrant population for 15 years. ⁷⁹ The first step for any incoming government committed to an agenda of mass removals is to commission a serious residual modelling project that makes use of data held by UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI), the Office for National Statistics (ONS), and the Home Office.

The most recent estimate, produced by Pew Research, initially placed the figure in 2017 between 800,000 and 1.2 million, before revising it downwards to 700,000-900,000. 80 However, it is the contention of Restore Britain that this revision was based on a faulty understanding of the number of foreign nationals with Indefinite Leave to Remain, and their inclusion in population estimates. Furthermore, since 2017 Britain has been afflicted with a worsening small boats crisis and, owing to the abandonment of exit checks, and growing number of visa overstayers.

It is imperative that any government intent on ending Britain's illegal immigration catastrophe sets to work creating a new hostile environment. This would serve two important functions. First, it would make it easier to identify those living among us illegally. Second, it would produce conditions under which illegals find life in Britain so uncomfortable that, even if we cannot find them, they choose to leave voluntarily. Those who fail to do so must be pursued by the authorities and then removed by force.

Assuming a world in which the legal blockages have been cleared, we now explore the optimal means by which our illegal immigrant problem should be resolved.

Our strategy is divided into two parts: voluntary and involuntary returns.

Voluntary Returns (VII)

Voluntary returns must play a significant part of any mass removal programme for the entirety of its duration.

Of course, the physical detection, detention, and deportation of illegal migrants is an essential stream of work that has to be undertaken. Section VIII of this paper will address the measures necessary to make dramatic improvements to such functions. However, enforced deportation cannot be the only means of departure.

Most of the available evidence suggests that mass voluntary returns would have to represent the bulk of removals from Britain. That said, this will also work best in tandem with a parallel operation of enforced removals, because forcible deportations have a positive secondary effect: they pressure other illegals at large in the system to make their own way to the exit rather than risk apprehension and reduced freedom of movement themselves.

In the United States, the number of voluntary returns has outstripped deportations at a rate of 4:1, with 1.6m 'self-deporting' compared to 400,000 forced deportations. ⁸¹ In Britain, between 2010 and 2024, the ratio of enforced returns to voluntary returns was 1:2 and by 2023 this ratio had grown to 1:3. 82 Moreover, the cost of voluntary returns is much less prohibitive than the cost of enforced deportations, reflecting the fact that it involves no use of detention facilities or paid staff. Some estimates suggest that, while the cost of enforced deportation is roughly £15,000 per person, the logistical costs of a voluntary return amount to just £1,000, though this does not include reintegration payments made to the migrant. 83

E-visas

The government has recently announced that it plans to introduce mandatory digital IDs for everyone resident in the country. It is claimed that the measure is needed to clamp down on illegal working and make everyday life less convenient to those without the right to remain. However, this ignores the huge apparatus that has recently been unfurled by the transfer of Britain's physical visa system to e-visas.

Online identification documents for foreign nationals, which confirm their immigration status and eligibility to live and work in Britain, are already replacing physical immigration documents such as Biometric Residence Permits (BRPs), Biometric Residence Cards (BRCs), passport stamps, and vignettes. This was a long-winded process, taking over six years, and with the deadline twice extended for individuals with physical documentation to transfer onto this system.

Considerable efforts were made to ensure that all eligible migrants registered. £4 million was allocated to publicising and promoting this transfer and a range of charitable sector groups were contracted to provide outreach and ensure compliance. ⁸⁴ The result has been significant pickup, with just 200,000 holding a legal right to reside in Britain yet to obtain an e-visa as of July 2025. 85

At Restore Britain, we believe that e-visas must serve as the only accepted proof of residency for non-British and Irish citizens. A final deadline for transfers must now be set and, after that date, any individual not in possession of an e-visa - even if they do possess physical documentation attesting to settled status - shall then be determined not to have any right to reside in Britain. This online documentation ought to be used during checking processes by employers, landlords, banks, GP surgeries, and NHS Trusts when determining someone's legal residency.

Employment

Improved Right to Work (RtW) checks must lie at the cornerstone of any future 'hostile environment.' At present, s. 15 of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act (2006) places the onus on employers to make sure that they are not allowing illegal migrants to enter the job market as payrolled employees. 86

The law stipulates that any business found to be directly employing an illegal migrant must demonstrate that they took all reasonable steps to ascertain whether the individual in question had a legal right to work. Under the new system of e-visas, this obliges the employee to provide a 9-digit sharecode, which must be checked by the employer against the Home Office's online database. If an employer found to have employed an illegal migrant is unable to supply evidence that they conducted this check, sanctions must follow.

The utility of such checks is obvious, but they need to be significantly expanded. The Home Office must provide employees and employers with greater information to help ensure long-term compliance. This should include information on the expiry date of existing visas, the name of any business or familial sponsor, and the visa type.

However, the law as written contains a troubling loophole that undermines the rigour of implementation. At the moment, employers are under no legal duty to conduct RtW checks on contractors or self-employed individuals, having been told by the Home Office that 'where the worker is not [their] direct employee (for example, if they're self-employed), you are not required to establish a statutory excuse.' 87

This leaves a large number of people who are working in Britain outside the scope of RtW checks, as they are not direct employees. HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) believes that 1.6 million people - 5% of the working population - are presently working in the gig economy through a variety of alternative employment statuses. ⁸⁸ Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures suggest that as many as 4.4 million people are self-employed. 89

These individuals, when contracted by businesses, currently fall outside the scope of the relevant provisions in the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act (2006). Earlier this year, the Home Office published an Impact Assessment on adjusting laws to require employers to conduct RtW checks on all employers and contractors, not just direct employees. Estimates indicate that the cost of conducting these additional checks could be as little as £1.75 per employee. 90

Indeed, there can be little doubt that there exists a correlation between those industries with the highest number of self-employed people and those industries most likely to attract illegal working. HMRC intelligence concludes that 'industries with higher prevalence (for illegal working) include catering, care, agriculture and construction.' 91 Data from the ONS suggests there are approximately 1,415,000 self-employed individuals working in these sectors - all of whom, as we have seen, face no obligation to undergo RtW checks. 92

May, 2025.

SELF-EMPLOYED INDIVIDUALS WHO HAVE NOT UNDERGONE A RIGHT-TO-WORK CHECK

SOURCE:OFFICEFORNATIONALSTATISTICS

This backdoor to illegal employment must be slammed shut. Businesses and employers who do business with self-employed persons must be required to conduct RtW checks, just as they would for a standard payrolled employee.

The extension of RtW checks to all individuals, not just those brought on as direct employees.

Facial recognition and real-time RtW checks

The nature of work has changed rapidly since the Covid-19 pandemic. A move towards more flexible arrangements has undoubtedly resulted in a proliferation of illegal working. We see this most acutely in the food delivery sector. Companies like UberEats and Deliveroo have long been known to facilitate high rates of illegal working.

Estimates drawn from the Labour Force Survey - likely, if anything, to understate the scale of employment in this sector - suggest that over 80,000 people currently work in food delivery. 93

There has been a slew of news reports in recent months indicating that those individuals residing in migrant hotels have been hiring the accounts of registered delivery drivers. Freedom of Information requests show that in 2023, 42% of food delivery drivers stopped by police were found to be working illegally. ⁹⁴ This was further seen during Operation Equalize, conducted over the course of a week in July 2025, where 1,780 individuals were stopped and questioned, with 280 being arrested for illegal working. That yields an arrest rate of 15%. 95

Quite evidently, such flexible working arrangements, where individuals are self-employed yet working on behalf of large food delivery companies, pose significant problems. In July, the Home Office began closer cooperation with food delivery companies, ensuring that real-time identity and RtW checks are implemented as standard, the ambition being to clamp down on illegitimate account use by non-verified delivery riders. 96

But this is far from sufficient. The Home Office must engage in an extensive audit of all delivery food companies by requiring companies to issue a push notification to those working through their mobile phone application, requiring the completion of an e-visa verification process. A grace period of several weeks must be allowed while this is undertaken, but thereafter accounts should be suspended until the appropriate steps have been completed.

The location of migrant hotels has also been shared with these companies, allowing them to identify when a delivery driver is based in hotel accommodation, and thus suspend the account. However, this does not yet extend to other forms of accommodation, including Houses of Multiple Occupancy (HMOs) that also serve as illegal immigrant hotspots. Over two thirds of so-called 'asylum seekers' (see Section II) receiving support are housed in non-hotel accommodation. ⁹⁷ The location and address of these other accommodation types must also be shared with food delivery companies.

Facial recognition and Right to Work spot-checks must be implemented for all food delivery accounts.

Increased sanctions

Businesses must view the risks associated with employing an illegal migrant as intolerable. The threat of sanctions is key to ensure appropriate diligence when conducting RtW checks. More than anything else, raising the probability of punishment will deter enterprises knowingly employing illegal migrants from doing so.

As we shall soon see, this calls for an increase in physical inspections of business premises, a dramatic spike in immigration enforcement raids, and greater utilisation of local government and regulatory bodies. But first, the punitive consequences of falling afoul of these arms of the state must be greatly uplifted.

Between January and March 2025, there were 321 companies fined a total of £19.559m, with an average fine of £60,931.46. 98 Fines currently sit at £45,000 for a first breach and £60,000 for each subsequent breach, having been raised three-fold as a result of measures introduced by the former immigration minister, Robert Jenrick. ⁹⁹ The scale of fines in the first three months of this year, therefore, suggests that some of the businesses recently fined will have been repeat offenders. For

See Immigration Enforcement, Illegal working civil penalties for UK employers: 1 January 2025 to 31 March 2025, 29 August, 2025.

example, the construction company, OKE Development LTD - a company now in liquidation - faced a sanction of £320,000. 100

The level of deterrent must therefore be increased. Initial fines must be dramatically uplifted, to £200,000 for a first breach and £400,000 for each subsequent breach. At this level, for small businesses, the risk effectively becomes one of liquidation. Moreover, responsible company directors must face indefinite disqualification from directorship, rather than temporary bans. In 2023/2024, there were 1,222 directors disqualified - many as a result of breaching immigration law. 101

Legislation also makes provision for criminal prosecutions against directors, with a five-year prison sentence being the maximum possible sentence, although in practice that outcome is very rare. The law must be updated to ensure that directors who are foreign nationals face repercussions regarding their own immigration status, which can range from the forfeiture of settled status to the requirement to declare their business mispractice in any future naturalisation applications.

Targeted Nudge Letters

Home Office research suggests that there is widespread understanding amongst businesses that the responsibility for RtW checks rests with the employer, with 89% of those surveyed recognising their obligations. However, nearly half (47%) incorrectly believed that bank statements or utility bills were an acceptable form of documentation that proved an individual's right to work. 102

It is therefore incumbent upon the Home Office to clarify to businesses the nature of their responsibilities, as well as the potential ramifications if they are not discharged. The use of employer 'nudge letters' is presently used by the Home Office, in cooperation with HMRC, to alert businesses when there is a suspicion that an employee does not have the legal right to work in Britain.

Home Office Research, Employer awareness of, and self-reported compliance with, Right to Work Checks, 1

A government committed to a programme of mass removals must - at the start of the undertaking - issue correspondence to each of the 5.5 million private sector businesses outlining the aforementioned change to RtW checks and the toughening of the sanction regime. This should include the instruction to directors that they require all employees and contractors to produce evidence of British/Irish citizenship or produce an e-visa sharecode. It should also include clarification that former forms of legal residency, including BRPs and BRCs, are no longer statutory excuses against prosecution for illegal working.

Indeed, there is clear scalability to the use of e-visas to conduct RtW checks. In 2020, just 179,782 digital RtW checks were conducted but this had reached over 7.2m by 2023. 103 Home Office ministers serving in a government committed to mass removals must, during the initial stages of the undertaking, commit to see 12m RtW checks conducted within the first few months. This would reflect the fact that 6 million EU and non-EU nationals were payrolled at the end of 2023, and that millions more will be engaged by multiple businesses through self-employment. 104

Correspondence that businesses receive from HMRC must also be appendaged with relevant information regarding their responsibilities to conduct RtW checks and how they can be conducted. The simple inclusion of several brief summary paragraphs that set out the RtW regime will greatly improve Home Office interface with businesses. For example, in the last 12 months HMRC sent out over thirty so-called 'one-to-may' letters to businesses, regarding topics ranging from corporation tax relief to online marketplace sales. ¹⁰⁵ The expropriation of a few inches of space on an HMRC letter is a cost-free approach to greatly raise awareness of the stipulations included in the RtW regime.

Government Supply Chains

The government must also use the weight of its public procurement expenditure to ensure that service providers, and those businesses in accompanying supply chains, are not employing illegal migrants. Around 70,000 such contracts are awarded each year. ¹⁰⁶ Having spent £194.8bn enlisting the services of private companies in 2023, £40bn of which was given to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), there is significant scope to increase RtW checks within this ecosystem. 107

Indeed, recent evidence suggests that government departments have entered into lucrative public sector contracts with companies that have failed to conduct proper RtW checks. Back in August, it came to light that Sodexo Ltd had been fined £55,000 as a result of an illegal working liability. ¹⁰⁸ In 2018, the company operated 156 government contracts, and currently provides services for police forces, NHS Trusts, the MoD, HMRC, schools, and prison facilities. 109

Government procurement must be reoriented to prioritise the eradication of illegal working among their social values. This would mirror similar measures now in place to bolster environmental and equality objectives through state spending. The Social Value Act (2012) should be amended, along with the Social Value Model that makes a passing reference to modern slavery but makes no mention of the need to eradicate illegal working. By placing this consideration at the heart of state procurement, the anticipation would be that private companies seeking contracts from government bodies, local authorities, or NHS Trusts would begin to goldplate existing RtW requirements with additional measures, in an effort to convey social value. This could include the completion of RtW checks on those in their supply chains, a preparedness to allow the contracting body to conduct RtW checks on their staff, or the emergence of a 'legal working' accreditation network.

29 August, 2025.

Housing

With the illegal migrant population likely far exceeding one million, there are obvious negative implications for Britain's strained housing market. HMOs have become a topic of political discourse in recent months. Our asylum system now uses these converted properties to accommodate tens of thousands of individuals who have entered Britain on small boats.

Restore Britain sent freedom of information requests to 185 local authorities, the public bodies responsible for dealing with the registration and regulation of HMOs. The data we received shows that the number of registered HMOs surged by 23% between 2020 and 2024 from 54,443 to 66,847. Of the councils surveyed, 126 (69%) saw an increase in the number of registered HMOs.

The ten local authorities that saw the largest increase in registered HMOs are unsurprisingly all areas with large populations, most of them London boroughs:

Islington: 3,456. Lambeth: 1,883. Westminster: 1,759. Birmingham: 1,693. Newham: 522. Hackney: 490. Glasgow: 415. Tower Hamlets: 407. Hammersmith & Fulham: 390. Kensington & Chelsea: 370.

Three quarters of migrants who have been in Britain for fewer than five years are in private rented accommodation, but this proportion will be far greater among those without legal status in the country. ¹¹⁰ Efforts must be made to identify as many illegals as possible among the 4.6 million households that make up the private rental sector. 111

An amendment should be made to the Homelessness Reduction Act to include a clear statutory exclusion for those with no legal right to reside in the UK. This amendment should create a Joint Protocol between the Home Office and local authorities to ensure immediate referral of any homelessness claim involving a person without legal status.

Councils should be under no obligation - legal, financial, or moral - to house, assist, or prevent homelessness for illegal migrants. Instead, responsibility should fall directly on the Home Office, which can provide holding accommodation pending removal.

Sanctions

The same intensified deterrence factors must be applied to landlords. At present, there is a marked disparity between the sanctions faced by rogue operators in business and the sanctions faced by rogue operators in the private rental sector. Between 2018 and 2023, for instance, 5,000 civil penalties were laid against employers for illegal working, yet just 320 civil penalties were filed against landlords for illegal letting. ¹¹² In other words, the existing incentive structure does very little to deter landlords from housing illegal migrants.

The accumulated revenue generated by landlord fines totalled just £215,500 over a seven-year period (an average of £673). This reflects not just the present inadequacy of Right to Rent (RtR) checks, but also the fact that fines against landlords were previously incommensurate with the scale of the offence, with sanctions of just £80 per lodger and £1,000 per occupier. Given that landlords can generate these sums in just a matter of weeks, it is appropriate that they were increased in 2024 (to £5,000 per lodger and £10,000 per occupier). Repeat offences now bring fines of

£10,000 for lodgers and £20,000 for occupiers. But so far, no landlord has received a custodial sentence for unscrupulous practice.

Initial fines must be dramatically increased to offset the potential benefits accumulated by landlords through illegal renting, which include the avoidance of tax on rental income and the unlicensed use of a property. A starting sanction of £20,000 per occupier is more reflective of the fact that illegal renting can, over a period of time, be a significant revenue stream. Repeat offences must include the possibility of asset forfeiture.

Right to Rent checks

While landlords have a responsibility to check that all tenants and sub-tenants have the right to rent, existing laws have failed in practice to prevent large-scale illegal occupation.

We have every reason to suppose that compliance with RtR checks sits at a lower level than other statutory requirements, such as registration with a deposit protection scheme. There is plenty of scope to intensify the pressure to remain on the right side of the law. For example, a Home Office report published in April 2025 suggests that just 72% of single property landlords and 87% of those with larger portfolios were conducting these checks. ¹¹³ Over a fifth (22%) of all landlords had not carried out RtR checks on their most recent tenancy. ¹¹⁴ In a similar manner to business RtW checks, there is a clear need, upon commencement of a mass removal programme, for the Home Office - utilising HMRC data systems and local authority records of licenced properties (especially HMOs) - to contact landlords reminding them of their obligation to conduct RtR checks and to update them of the toughened sanction regime.

Furthermore, RtR checks are often only conducted once the rest of the tenancy agreement has been agreed and thus, at this stage of the proceedings, the incentive structure is geared towards looser adherence. If a rental agreement has been thrashed out in principle, there is a natural reluctance from both parties to allow the 'final hurdle' to undermine the work conducted. As such, Part 3 of the Immigration Act (2014) must be amended to reorient this process, by requiring private landlords and letting agents to conduct RtR checks at the commencement of negotiations, not at the end, and at least 14 days before the intended start of any tenancy.

Healthcare

The ease with which illegal migrants are currently able to access primary, and indeed secondary, healthcare remains a significant factor behind the large unauthorised population.

As set out by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, 'GP practices are not required to ask for proof of identity, address or immigration status from patients wishing to register. NHS guidance on how to register with a GP surgery clearly outlines that a practice cannot refuse a patient because they do not have proof of address or immigration status.' 115

GP surgeries

There has been a proliferation of so-called 'safe surgeries' in Britain, a scheme launched by the activist charity Doctors of the World. Over 1,000 GP surgeries now actively guarantee that those without immigration status, or proof of address, are able to register for primary care services. ¹¹⁶ Alarmingly, this is a scheme that NHS trusts and local councils make an explicit point of promoting. For example, Lambeth Borough Council boasts with pride on its website that over half of the GP surgeries within the local authority area are 'safe surgeries.' 117 The North East London Integrated Care Board does likewise. ¹¹⁸ Government quangos also advertise this scheme, and the support available to both migrants and GPs that Doctors of the World is able to provide. Needless to say, at a time when many taxpaying British nationals struggle to secure GP appointments, the 'safe surgery' regime must be comprehensively dismantled.

October, 2023.

The dual announcements that all GP surgeries must offer online appointments throughout the day, and the government's stated intention to introduce NHS 'online hospitals' by 2027, offer logistical opportunities to ensure that healthcare is only accessible to those with a right to reside in Britain. These are services that will be provided through the NHS app, which already has over 34 million users, and could potentially expand significantly over the course of the current Parliament. Access to this app is already contingent on certain verification steps, but upon completion of the e-visas rollout, this must become the sole means through which foreign nationals are able to access these services.

Secondary treatment

Those with an 'irregular' immigration status are usually unable to access free secondary healthcare and are required to pay up-front for such treatment. This in itself has been a source of much consternation among activist groups like the taxpayer-funded Doctors of the World, which received over £600,000 in support from public bodies between 2019 and 2023. 119 It is imperative that the Blair-era changes to charities law, many of which broadened the definition of 'charitable purposes' to include highly politicised agendas around 'human rights' and 'community cohesion' are reversed, and that hundreds of millions of pounds worth of grants to open-border entities are stamped out. 120

Research by Restore Britain, across 137 NHS Trusts, has revealed that between 2018 and 2024 there were 112,390 patients receiving secondary care - including procedures for long-term illnesses and diagnostic work - classified as falling within 'charging category F.' This includes those who 'require leave to enter or remain in the United Kingdom but do not have it' (illegal immigrants) and 'persons who have leave to enter or remain in the United Kingdom for a limited period' (tourists and those on transit visas). Although health tourism is a known problem, it is unlikely that it represents the bulk of those falling within this category for secondary care. The total value of the treatment provided by the NHS to these 112,390 individuals was over £842m.

Equally worrying was the lack of enforcement activity taking place at many NHS Trusts. Overseas visitor managers (OVMs) are tasked with ensuring that those who are not exempt from secondary care fees, including illegal migrants, are properly identified as such and that measures are put in place to secure payment.

Through this work OVMs have access to Home Office data systems, which allows them to identify the legal status of anyone seeking treatment. The opportunities, then, for the identification of illegal migrants to take place during this process are manifold. However, over a third of all Trusts surveyed by Restore Britain (52) did not have a single OVM staff member on their payroll, and several Trusts confirmed to us that they do not implement the charging policies that are set out in the National Health Services (Charges to Overseas Visitors) Regulations (2015). 121

There is clear scope for the hostile environment to be ramped up with respect to the provision of healthcare. All NHS Trusts must be forced to employ several OVMs tasked with ensuring compliance. Those patients who are identified as falling within charging category F and unable to make advance payment must be directed towards services that can facilitate their return to their country of origin and told they are unable to access this nature of healthcare for free. This would have two major benefits. First, it would end the ongoing scandal whereby British taxpayers are forced to cough up for the abuse of our welfare system by illegal immigrants, all because Trusts lack the due diligence to secure payment in advance for non-emergency and diagnostic treatment. Second, given that illegals are more likely to fall into lower income brackets, it would incentivise many of them to self-deport to places where they may have greater luck free-riding.

Banking and Finance

S. 40 of the Immigration Act (2014) prevents banks and building societies from opening current accounts for illegal migrants and requires them to check a customer's immigration status against the Home Office's 'disqualified persons list' (DPL), which is updated on a weekly basis. ¹²² However, the list operates on a negative basis, with the Home Office only sharing data of those not eligible, rather than those with legal residency. During the Know Your Customer process, this must be extended to include biometric checks against data held by UKVI and the use of e-visa share codes. This would allow banks to confirm that an applicant has an active legal immigration status. Legislation must be introduced to mandate these biometric checks for all new current, savings, and digital accounts being opened by non-British/Irish nationals.

The Home Office must, through a third-party anti-fraud organisation, allow banks to access a centralised verification portal to conduct these eligibility checks. The benefit of this database access is that banks, through the updated e-visa portal set out above, would be able to ascertain how long the individual has legal residency in Britain and advise accordingly. This, of course, would only prevent new bank accounts from being opened.

Retrospective analysis of bank accounts must also be rolled out at scale. Such a system already operates to some extent, as is required by amendments made to the 2014 legislation in 2016. Between April and December 2023, there were an average of 60,000 to 70,000 records of potential illegal migrants shared with banks each week, and in December 2023 8,000 individuals had their accounts closed. ¹²³ However, s. 40A still only requires banks to alert the Home Office to a potential positive match if there is a three-point exact match between an individual's account details and the DPL. It is at this point that the Home Office steps in to conduct its own review of the account and determines whether to instruct for its closure. A greater number of referrals for potential matches must be made to the Home Office, even if the likelihood of the account being held by an illegal migrant is lower. To achieve this end, the threshold for referral must be reduced to a two-point match, allowing a greater throughput of data to be assessed by the Home Office.

The Home Office has acknowledged that, owing to the nature of the black economy, banking checks can never be perfect: 'there are alternatives to traditional banking spanning from cash-in-hand to informal networks or complex digital disruptive products. These alternatives to traditional banking are likely to open gaps in the Home Office's enforcement activity in banking.' 124 For this reason, it is important also to ensure that other financial institutions are not accessible to illegal migrants. The Trump administration, for instance, has introduced a tax on remittances through his One Big Beautiful Bill, which looks to remove the ability to send money back to countries of origin - a key pull factor behind illegal migration.

A 25% tax should be applied to all remittances going to nations identified as having large illegal migrant populations in Britain. World Bank data shows that in 2021, the latest available year, the top 5 nations for illegal migrants in Britain received huge sums of money in the form of outward remittances.

Alongside a remittance levy, the government should introduce a targeted dividend tax on profits repatriated to countries identified as uncooperative in taking back their own citizens.

The main aim is not revenue generation, but the achievement of greater compliance through a change in economic incentives. For governments that ignore diplomatic pressure, the taxation of dividends and remittances alike ensures that there is no longer a financial advantage in refusing to take back their own nationals.

[2021]

This means that a total of £12.2bn is estimated to leave the British economy each year to nations from which a large proportion of illegal migrants are known to originate. A 25% taxation rate on these remittances could generate, therefore, up to £3bn per annum for investment into deportation facilities. Not only would such a measure compound pressure on individuals living in Britain without authorisation but, just as importantly, it would influence the governments of the least cooperative nations, giving them strong reasons to make sure that they assist in our mass deportations efforts.

Advertising and facilitating voluntary returns

It is the intended consequences of a hostile environment spanning employment, housing, and healthcare that illegal migrants will decide to leave the country voluntarily, and at a far less prohibitive cost than tends to be the case with enforced returns. Under Trump, the United States has led the way by employing innovative tactics in this area. There is much that we can learn from how the voluntary component of America's mass deportation agenda has been maximised.

The United States' Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) currently operates an online Self-Deportation Portal and the CBP Mobile Home App, which allows illegal migrants to arrange their departure in an organised manner, access flights, and apply for a $1,000 'exit bonus.' The app provides services in a range of languages, which includes chatbots for queries, and the ability to arrange departure flights. Partly due to such initiatives, as many as 1.6 million voluntary deportations have taken place since Trump's second inauguration in January 2025.

Britain must introduce a similar mobile app, with language features for those nationalities known to have large illegal migrant populations, including Pakistan, India, and Albania. Promotion of the app through social media marketing channels should be geofenced to prioritise areas known to have large illegal migrant populations, such as many London boroughs, Birmingham, and Manchester, and airlines encouraged to advertise their services through the software. The app must offer a one-stop-shop for the journey, providing details on transportation to the airport of departure, and facilitating onward travel in the country of destination.

Immigration raids and the use of detention facilities must also be widely publicised. In recent months, the Home Office has produced social media videos showing the detention of migrants crossing the channel on small boats. However, these efforts pale in comparison to the high-profile content being produced by official White House and Homeland Security pages, which often combine humour and pop-culture references to boost organic reach. In April alone it was revealed that the United States spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on YouTube ads directing migrants towards the self-deportation app. 125

Roles in the public sector that have a public interface - such as the aforementioned OVMs who are supposed to operate within NHS Trusts - should be expanded to include a support function for illegal migrants, advising them on how to access self-deportation facilities. Other roles where a degree of minimal training could greatly expand their ability to support those wishing to self-deport include custody detention officers, volunteers at the Citizens' Advice Bureau, and local authority staff working in social services.

In theory, voluntary returns are already facilitated by the Voluntary Returns Services, with a 'reintegration package' of up to £3,000 available to those who volunteer themselves for self-deportation. Information about this service must be made available in a variety of everyday locations, from NHS waiting rooms and common areas in HMOs to public libraries and well-attended leisure centres.

The embassies of nations with large illegal migrant populations in Britain must also be brought into the process. As set out above, the introduction of a tax on remittances/dividends will no doubt give rise to diplomatic negotiations. Every effort must be made to ensure that the governments of countries of origin are encouraged to expand their consular advice and outreach to their diasporas currently living among us illegally. As we shall see in due course, the withholding of foreign aid - along with the introduction of trade and visa sanctions - are additional diplomatic levers that we should not hesitate to pull.

Needless to say, many illegals who choose to leave of their own accord will do so under independent returns, without bothering to contact the authorities to assist with their departure. To monitor and assess the scale of independent returns, it is necessary that appropriate data collection on exit checks is reinstated. The Home Office does not currently produce data on the number of exit checks being conducted - an important statistic to understand compliance with time-limited study, work, and tourism visas. Since February 2022, the Home Office has had these statistics 'under review.' 126

Involuntary Returns (VIII)

Immigration Enforcement

Immigration Enforcement was first established within the Home Office in 2012. Between 2013 and 2021, the amount of resourcing and funding it received fell from £437.6m in financial year 2013/14 to £391m in financial year 2020/21. In inflation adjusted terms, this was a drop of £96m (20%). The annual budget for the financial year 2023/24 was roughly £636m, with just 5,382 staff employed. ¹²⁷ Despite these long-established shortcomings, Restore Britain is of the view that any attempt to dismember Immigration Enforcement and replace it with a new organisation altogether would risk jeopardising useful institutional knowledge and depth.

Although an emaciated institution, there are several natural revenue streams available to improve its financing that must be ringfenced. For instance, almost £100m a year is collected in fines for illegal working and illegal renting across Britain. Rather than allowing these funds to find their way into the broader government budget, Immigration Enforcement must be the sole recipient of such funding. Likewise, Immigration Enforcement must be the only beneficiary of asset seizures from closed bank accounts of illegal migrants, as well as the revenue generated through the taxation on remittances/dividends.

The responsibility of tackling visa overstayers rests with Immigration Enforcement, and it is therefore appropriate that revenue generated through the awarding of these visas is used to mitigate the consequences. A standard British tourist visa currently costs just £127 for 6 months. ¹²⁸ Those nations with large illegal migrant populations must see a significant uplift in this rate to £500. The financial opportunity here is significant given the sheer number of tourist visas that are awarded to countries with large overstay rates. This step alone could raise as much as £447m a year, which amounts to over two-thirds of Immigration Enforcement's existing annual budget.

Visitor visas issued to top five countries of origin for illegal migrants (2024) 129:

1. India - 657,612
1. Pakistan - 152,146
1. Nigeria - 164,965
1. China - 557,093
1. Bangladesh - 38,149

Any government committed to the mass removal of illegals must, from the outset, institute a stipulated five-year budget of £30bn, allowing for initial investment in training and recruitment of IE officers in the first twelve months of the Parliament. This is greater than the £1.6bn annual budget (£8bn over the course of a parliament) posited by the Conservative party for their 'Removals Force' reflecting the need for significant early stage investment in recruitment and training. ¹³⁰ This recruitment drive must follow the model adopted by the United States, aiming to recruit 10,000 new ICE staff, offering bonuses of up to $50,000 in the process alongside the provision of student loans, and waiving age limits which currently hinder recruitment. Further manpower can be generated through the utilisation of police forces across Britain, in a similar vein to the United States, where the ICE287(g) programme allowed law enforcement bodies to enter into memorandum of understandings with ICE, which provides immigration enforcement training and bestows immigration powers, under the enforcement of ICE. 131

These agreements, wherever possible, should also be entered into - with varying levels of power - to regulators and other bodies that are likely to be exposed to the illegal migrant population. For example, inspectors for the Regulator of Social Housing, or food standards inspectors, are likely to enter environments where there are indications of illegal living or working.

Between July 2024 and March 2025, there were 6,784 illegal working visits carried out by Immigration Enforcement, which resulted in 4,779 arrests, equating to 1.42 visits per arrest made. This would pro rata to roughly 9,000 immigration enforcement visits a year, and roughly 6,400 arrests. ¹³² As an intelligence-led organisation, there is clearly a significant need to heighten the information tributaries that feed into the operational decision-making process.

A specific recruitment campaign for veterans should be implemented, to ease and assist military veterans into Immigration Enforcement field roles. Overall, Immigration Enforcement raids must be increased seven-fold and publicised nationwide, complete with a specified communications budget within the organisation to promote and support the ongoing hostile environment.

Central government

To ensure effective delivery and continued public accountability, a Minister for Deportations and Border Integrity should be appointed with sole responsibility for the coordination, execution, and oversight of this national deportation strategy.

This Minister would report directly to Parliament on a quarterly basis, providing transparent data on removals, returns agreements, and enforcement outcomes. The role would centralise responsibility, remove bureaucratic drift within the Home Office, and ensure that Parliament - and by extension, the British people - can hold any government to account for progress.

Sustained public support is essential to the success of any large-scale deportation strategy. The government must maintain a constant, transparent communications effort to explain what is being done, why it is being done, and what progress is being made. Regular briefings, public data releases, and ministerial statements should reinforce that this policy is rooted in fairness, legality, and the restoration of border integrity. Silence breeds mistrust, openness builds consent. A consistent communications strategy will ensure that the British people remain informed, supportive, and confident that the government is acting decisively in their interests. This is absolutely necessary to maintain public trust in the programme.

Local authorities

The present state of cooperation between local authorities and Immigration Enforcement is piecemeal and non-defined. While there are 19 local Immigration and Compliance Enforcement teams across the country 133, their use is sporadic and lacking in systematic focus. They ought to be greatly expanded in scope.

One way to begin this process is to place a statutory obligation on local authorities to produce monthly reports on suspicious activity recorded across their variety of functions. This will mandate more intelligent use of the data that local councils accrue on a day-to-day basis. For example, council trading standards boards and licensing sub-committees receive thousands of reported concerns annually, many of them simply ignored because there is deemed to be no immediate emergency or safety concern. ¹³⁴ A statutory duty placed upon councils would require such information to be viewed through a tandem lens: the chief functions of the relevant body would still be performed, but any data gathered in the process would also feed into a broader nationwide operation to understand illegal migration trends. The promise of such a statutory obligation is that it would induce practices that create an ever-growing dataset on illegal migration, rather than allowing valuable information to fall by the wayside.

Following practices seen under the last Conservative government, immigration officers should similarly be placed in local authority departments with the specific purview of illegal migration. ¹³⁵ Council specialists in children's services and social care are very often at the coal-face of illegal migration, but as this is not their area of focus, valuable information often goes undetected. Embedding immigration officers within these council bodies, which would otherwise continue to function as usual, would require little logistical effort, and would simply insert analysts into the slipstream of existing processes.

For example, local authorities are often responsible either directly or indirectly for complaints and issues relating to social housing. In many areas, especially in big cities, a significant proportion of social housing is occupied by foreign nationals, with 431,000 social housing properties across England having a foreign national as a lead tenant 136. Issues such as noise pollution, flytipping, or suspicious activity, when reported to local authorities or housing associations, should alert the interests of these immigration officers. Indeed, Restore Britain's research into HMOs revealed a significant number of complaints across local authorities. There are potential insights to be made into properties that are overpopulated, or in which there is a regular churn of occupants. Local authorities could be encouraged to expand the scope of the existing Empty Homes Network, and their in-house empty home officers, to identify those properties where the inverse problem is taking place - namely that many properties are overinhabited, or occupation is in a regular state of flux.

The need for legislation mandating that councils cooperate formally with Immigration Enforcement, however, is made all the more urgent given the pushback that these measures have received in the past. Colin Yeo, an immigration law barrister at Garden Court Chambers (the chambers from which the Rwanda scheme was fought) once claimed that 'Councils are not legally obliged to collaborate with the immigration authorities in this way and it is disappointing to see them voluntarily creating a hostile environment for vulnerable migrants.' 137 Significant pushback, legal as well as institutional, should be expected.

Without legislative change, similar challenges are likely to arise through the so-called 'City of Sanctuary' network, which presently sees many councils orient their functions around a set of value-laden non-statutory, self-imposed duties. This was perhaps best described by Oxford City Council, which states on its website that:

'being a Local Authority of Sanctuary means that we have made a formal commitment to support all vulnerable individuals, particularly those fleeing conflict or persecution. This involves creating a welcoming environment, providing access to services, and promoting integration within our local area.' 138

By describing their 'council of sanctuary' status as some kind of formal commitment, when it is nothing of the sort, Oxford's local politicians are effectively seeking to reframe their own ideological prejudices as non-negotiable council duties. Such duties are thought to include the distribution of grants, the use of taxpayer money to provide universal services regardless of immigration status, and a brazen refusal to cooperate with Immigration Enforcement.

Data sharing

In 2018, the Home Office abandoned plans to require NHS Digital to disclose nonmedical information (such as the name and address) of potential immigration offenders. Whereas current legislation only makes provision for the NHS to access Home Office data to confirm the immigration status of patients, these measures would have required a flow of information the other way, allowing the Home Office access to crucial identifying information of those without a regular migration status. As set out above, over 100,000 illegals were treated by 137 NHS Trusts between 2018 and 2024. A committed revival of the 2018 plans would also allow nonmedical information to be shared from GP surgeries. In order to maintain public support, the Home Office should receive nonmedical information in phases, beginning with those areas most likely to host large illegal migrant populations. Vital work by Trafalgar Analytics has identified significant discrepancies between the size of GP patient lists and the population at the time of the 2021 census in many inner-city areas. ¹³⁹ Of course, some of this discrepancy can be explained by geographically mobile students and temporary workers, as well as poor data cleaning by the surgeries themselves, but it nonetheless provides a rough outline of those areas most likely to bear fruit.

A 2023 review by the Home Office into the 'hostile environment' (also known as the 'compliant environment') found that between 2014 and 2018 the Home Office shared data with other government departments pertaining to 448,800 individuals 'who appeared on Home Office systems to not have rights to reside in Britain, or to have certain conditions on their visas restricting their access to work, benefits or services.'

The onus was then passed to these other government departments (DVLA, DVA, HMRC, and DWP) to ensure that those who did not have the right to hold a British driving licence (illegal migrant) or access taxpayer funds (those without indefinite leave to remain) did not access these facilities.

However, of these 448,800 individuals, only 63,786 actually received a sanction 140, such as the revocation of their driving licence or their employer receiving a letter about their legal status. This accounted for just 14% of those that the Home Office deemed not to have an immigration status. Any serious commitment to mass deportations would require that each of these identified individuals are properly assessed. This data should also be shared with a greater number of stakeholders, including local councils, police forces, and NHS Trusts.

For too long, the action taken whenever an individual is detected has been insufficient. If ever an individual is deemed by the Home Office to have no right to a driving licence, for instance, the standard response of the DVLA is simply to revoke it. Instead, all data possessed by the DVLA about that individual should be transferred to the Home Office to identify the whereabouts, detain, and ultimately deport that individual. For example, the 'hostile environment' led to 35,583 illegal migrants having their driving licences revoked between 2014 and 2018, but these individuals were not necessarily then removed. 141

Reporting

Indeed, one major benefit of the 'hostile environment' is not just its push effect on those here illegally, but also the opportunity it presents to collect data that enables detection and detention. As it stands, the Immigration Act (2014) only prohibits employers from hiring someone that they know has no legal right to work in our country. Even if businesses are found to be employing an illegal migrant, they are able to avoid sanction if they can produce a statutory excuse as having done the necessary checks.

However, if we were to boost the number of RtW checks along the lines suggested above, a greater number of employers would find themselves running into foreign nationals who lack the necessary documentation. The law must be amended so that employers are required not only to deny employment, but to report the information of applicants unable to prove any legal right to work. The same obligation must be placed on landlords and letting agents who cannot verify a tenant's right to rent, as well as on financial institutions.

Local immigration and compliance officers should engage with trade body groups and local associations where there are known problems with illegal working. Almost 80% of illegal working visits are conducted at businesses in the restaurant/takeaway, convenience store, nail/barber shop, and car wash industries. ¹⁴² Of the 321 illegal working fines issued in the first quarter of this year, 46% were restaurants or takeaways, and a further 30% were car washes or convenience stores. ¹⁴³ ONS data suggests there are 233,385 businesses, in industries with a disproportionate propensity towards illegal working:

SIC 4520: Maintenance and repair of motor vehicles - 48,645 businesses (of which 3,975 in London).
SIC 4711: Retail sale in non-specialised stores with food; beverages or tobacco predominating - 32,970 businesses (of which 6,765 in London).
SIC 5610: Restaurants and mobile food service activities - 102,450 businesses (of which 19,465 in London).
SIC 9602: Hairdressing and other beauty treatment - 49,320 businesses (of which 8,692 in London).

The public are also an underutilised consideration, and local immigration enforcement and compliance officers should work to raise awareness of reporting provisions. These must be extended beyond the current hotline (0300 123 7000) to include a supplementary online portal where as much information on location, crime, and other relevant details can be provided. The current government is encouraging whistleblowers to report tax avoiders by promising compensation for those who report illegal practice. ¹⁴⁴ A similar process should be put in place with immigration enforcement, whereby individuals who give successful tip-offs will receive proceeds from the fines issued to businesses - therefore significantly enhancing the hostile environment.

Annual Reward System:

£500 for verified intelligence leading to a successful deportation.
£1,000 for verified intelligence resulting in the conviction/deportation of an illegal employer or trafficker.
£2,500 for verified intelligence resulting in the dismantling of an organised illegal operation.

Despite the low-publicity of the immigration abuse hotline, research by Restore Britain reveals that there were 173,919 reports of people with no permission to be here between 2018 and 2024, and a further 90,970 reports of illegal working. There has been a 22% increase in the number of reports of those without legal residency over the timeframe, and an 80% increase in reports of illegal working.

Similarly, exclusive polling by Restore Britain, conducted in September 2025, shows that more Brits would report an illegal migrant, even if it meant the individual would be deported, than would not. The question asked was as follows: 'Would you report an illegal migrant living in your community if it could result in their deportation?' While just 23.4% of respondents said that they would not do so, nearly twice as many (46.4%) said that they would. This signals the strength of feeling among the British public and their preparedness to assist in tackling the crisis.

Detention

In 2024, 20,604 individuals entered immigration detention facilities, a 12% increase from the previous year, but still well below the levels seen in 2015 when over 30,000 were detained. ¹⁴⁵ However, the proportion being removed following detention has fallen from over 60% in 2010 to just under 40% in 2023, reflecting the challenges presented by judicial reviews and human rights law (see Section II, Section III, and Section VI). In 2024, this proportion increased slightly, with 43% of individuals (8,893) being removed and 50% (10,366) being granted bail either by immigration judges or the Home Secretary.

A programme of mass deportations will require a significant uplift in the number of spaces across Britain's seven Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs). Capacity currently sits at around 2,200, much of it taken up by Brook House (450), Colnbrook (330), and Yarl's Wood (410). 146 The last of these was built in 2001 for £100 million (equivalent to £184.95 million in 2025 terms), giving an indication of the high costs involved in setting up new purpose-built centres. ¹⁴⁷ For any serious programme of deportations, capacity must expand nearly seven-fold to 15,000 beds. Based on current average turnover rates of 28 days, this would enable the detention, processing, and forced deportation of up to 195,000 individuals annually.

An additional 12,800 detention spaces are required. If built at a similar cost to Yarl's Wood, the price would be approximately £5.77 billion. However, the Labour Party recently announced plans to convert government land into makeshift facilities - an encouraging move that sets a valuable precedent. 148 In 2022, the Conservative government announced a £399 million contract to reopen the Campsfield House and Haslar sites. Though not yet operational, these would add 1,000 beds. 149 The rapid creation of Nightingale hospitals during the Covid-19 pandemic was also illustrative of the capacity of the state to respond to pressing public policy demands. The London ExCeL hospital alone was converted to accommodate 4,000 patients. 150 In total, the cost of establishing such facilities was £220m. 151 This would translate to £704m for the construction of the requisite number of beds. Although such a gainful capacity-to-cost ratio is unlikely to be obtainable in the construction of detention facilities, it nonetheless gives an indication of what is possible. In Greece, a new facility was built to handle 3,000 for just €38 million. The British government has already indicated a readiness to use government land to construct new facilities. The 38 RAF bases to suffer closure since 1995 offer viable, readily available land that should be repurposed to help with the mass detention aspect of mass deportations. 152

Operational costs are currently £122 a day per detainee, and the annual cost for a 15,000 detention estate would therefore be £662.4 million at full capacity. ¹⁵³ But this is before we even consider the estate benefits from significant economies of scale and the inevitable cost-saving dynamics that would be set in motion as

Michael D. Carroll, Army to build makeshift barracks for asylum,

Daily Express

, 2 October, 2025.

The Guardian

Diane Taylor, Home Office to reopen immigration detention centres with £39m deal,

ExCeL London launches as NHS Nightingale Hospital, Royal Docks, 6 April, 2020.

Question for Department of Health and Social Care, UIN HL11662, tabled on 30 December 2020, UK Parliament,

11 January, 2021.

Jonathan Morris, Haunting images of the UK's redundant RAF bases,

BBC News

, 28 June, 2015.

, 26 September, private sector businesses, such as Mitie and Serco, outcompete one another to secure large associated contracts. Similar recruitment drives as those required by Immigration Enforcement should be instituted, with retired prison officers and military personnel potentially viable recruits.

In the United States, ICE detention facilities are able to hold almost 60,000 individuals, 3000% times more than the size of the British estate. 154 59 new facilities have been opened since Trump retook office. ¹⁵⁵ America now boasts 190 such operational facilities. 156 90% of facilities are operated by for-profit companies, such as GEO Group and CoreCivic. ¹⁵⁷ All of this serves to demonstrate what can be accomplished by an incoming government with a steadfast commitment to combatting illegal immigration.

Public procurement notices in Britain must emphasise the need to reduce the costs of overly-zealous welfare considerations for those in detention. After all, the treasury's asylum accommodation contract is set on current trends to rise to £10bn by the end of this decade. The reformatting of human rights legislation (see Section III) and the acceleration of processing times should reduce the salience of these concerns and alleviate the need to award expensive contracts such as the multi-billion Advice, Issue Reporting and Eligibility (AIRE) Contract. ¹⁵⁸ Any support received by illegals awaiting deportation should be of the bare minimum variety.

Deportation

Despite claims by Labour politicians, the number of enforced returns/ deportations has fallen significantly since 2004. That year, there were 21,435 enforced removals. Yet in 2024, this number had fallen to just 8,164, a 62% decline despite a marked increase in the illegal migrant population. A significant proportion of these deportations are not illegal migrants, but foreign national

Justice Centre, 20 September, 2024.

offenders (FNOs). Between July 2024 and January 2025, 57% of those deported from Britain were FNOs. 159 Any ambition to deport between 100,000 and 150,000 by force per year will require a targeted campaign of diplomatic coercion, aimed at pressuring origin countries to expand readmission frameworks. There is also strong cause to revive third-country schemes akin to Rwanda.

Diplomatic sanctions are a lever in Britain's arsenal. Indeed, we are one of the biggest economies in the world, a popular tourist destination, and an overly generous provider of foreign aid. Yet none of this leverage has been used in our own interests or to appropriate effect. We would do well to learn from the actions taken by the first Trump administration, such as the deployment of visa sanctions against countries like Eritrea for dragging their feet on the acceptance of returns. 160

Targeted negotiations must be used against those countries behind the burgeoning population of visa overstayers. Home Office data, shared with other government departments, exposes the top five nationalities driving this problem. ¹⁶¹ They are as follows:

1. Indians (16.6% of the HO data).
1. Pakistanis (12.9% of the HO data).
1. Nigerians (8.9% of the HO data).
1. Bangladeshis (7.4% of the HO data).
1. Chinese (6.1% of the HO data).

The last year for which data is available shows significant numbers of visa-overstayers:

1. India: 20,706 overstayed.
1. Pakistan: 5,118 overstayed.
1. Philippines: 5,025 overstayed.
1. China: 4,174 overstayed.
1. Nigeria: 3,709 overstayed.

See Home Office Research, Developing an evaluation strategy for the compliant environment: Review of internal

Britain has only a limited number of returns agreements with countries of origin. ¹⁶² This includes 7 formal readmission treaties and 17 informal memorandums of understanding. However, in 2024, of the 43,630 illegal migrants detected entering Britain, 33,039 (75%) came from a country with which we have no returns agreement, formal or informal. The treaty secured with Albania is an example of the success that may be achieved through diplomatic pressure. It has resulted in a doubling of the number of Albanians returned between 2022 and 2024. 163 Overall, as many as 27% of all returns in the year ending March 2025 were to Albania alone. 164

Legislation must be brought forward akin to s. 243(d) of America's U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act. This stipulates that

'when specific countries deny or delay accepting their nationals with final orders of removal from the United States, the U.S. government may issue visa sanctions as a means of encouraging the recalcitrant country to cooperate.' 165

The results have been impressive. Indeed, the U.S. recently lifted visa sanctions on Ghana, restoring their validity to a length of 5 years, after the country agreed to take in not just Ghanaian nationals but nationals from other countries, too. 166 In 2021, although not implemented, the EU introduced visa sanctions on Bangladesh under Article 25a of the EU visa code. This eventually secured a readmission agreement. 167

It has been suggested that Ghana's agreement to accept returns from the United States was also in part the result of tariffs imposed by the Trump administration. Britain should look to make similar use of the significant trade deficits it has in relation to countries with significant visa overstaying populations. For example,

Faye Brown, Sir Keir Starmer in talks with 'a number of countries' over return hubs for failed asylum seekers,

News

, 15 May, 2025.

See Home Office Statistics, How many people are detained under immigration powers in the UK?, 3 October,

See U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Visa Sanctions Against Multiple Countries Pursuant to Section

243(d) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 22 January, 2025.

Thomas Naadi, Ghana agrees to accept West Africans deported from US,

BBC News

, 11 September, 2025.

EU Accelerates Deportation Procedures Amid Migration Reform, ETIAS, 11 September, 2024.

Sky Britain recorded a trade deficit in goods with India of over £4bn in the year ending March 2025. 168 Remittance taxation is also a useful tool, considering that Nigeria constituting nearly 9% of current data on visa overstayers - is particularly reliant on money received from abroad. Almost 6% of its GDP came from remittances in 2023. 169

Foreign aid must also be withheld until incalcitrant nations agree to receive their citizens and display a consistent commitment to this end. Their cooperation must be held in constant review. It is best gauged by critical performance indicators, from the speed with which they issue the requisite travel documents to the diligence they show in ensuring the completion of end-checks. In 2023, Britain awarded £268.4 million (£1.3bn over five years) in foreign aid to five nations with a troublesome track record. ¹⁷⁰ The breakdown runs as follows:

1. Nigeria: £100m.
1. Pakistan: £69m.
1. Bangladesh: £58m.
1. India: £33.4m.
1. China: £8m.

'Deportation NaTO'

Bilateral diplomacy and individual sanctions are valuable tools. However, they are only so powerful when employed by a single country. If governments in the third world are dead set on refusing to take back their own nationals, they will attempt to ride out such penalties and pivot in search of relief elsewhere.

Britain should therefore initiate the first steps across Europe and the wider West to establish a collective border security coalition: a kind of Deportation NATO, as it were. Its chief purpose would be to deploy collective leverage - an organised, explicit, and escalatory chain of measures, from visa sanctions to lifetime re-entry bans, that member states apply in concert to secure readmission agreements and operational cooperation.

Reform UK, for instance, have proposed a life-time re-entry ban for all illegals once deported. ¹⁷¹ Of course, in many ways this is the bare minimum. But consider how much tougher the measure would be if we had an international system in place to ensure that such bans apply not only in the case of Britain, but in as many Western countries as possible. The NATO-like principle at work is clear: a lifetime ban from one member state means a lifetime ban from all. There is no reason why the same collective clout cannot also intensify the power of various other penalties like remittance taxes or trade sanctions. Altogether, they would strengthen the deterrent.

Done once hard enough, it would not need to be deployed twice.

If a country persistently refuses to accept its own nationals, the coalition will move through a pre-agreed escalation ladder: (1) naming-and-shaming, (2) moving quickly to visa restrictions, (3) suspension of non-essential travel, (4) aid cancellation, (5) trade and tariff measures, (6) restrictions on remittances/dividends, (7) diplomatic pressure and (8) for the most intransigent states, coordinated refusal to admit nationals into coalition territories. The objective is simple: make non-cooperation politically and economically unbearable for the recalcitrant state until it agrees to practical readmission arrangements.

Let us develop the practical levers that could best be put to use at a coordinated level:

Joint public designation. A monthly, public list of countries that are non-cooperative on returns, backed by a short dossier of cases, statistics (e.g. numbers of failed returns, average delay in issuing travel documents), and specific examples of obstruction. Publicity concentrates diplomatic pressure and provides the necessary political cover for tough measures.
Harmonised visa sanctions. Coordinated suspension or severe restriction of visa issuance for government officials, business elites, and non-essential travellers from designated countries.
Foreign aid suspension. Freeze or cancel bilateral development assistance until measurable improvements in readmission are achieved, with funds reallocated to border enforcement or returned to domestic priority spending. Aid should be tied to concrete KPIs: travel-document turnaround, acceptance rates for deportation flights, and establishment of a functional route.
Targeted trade measures and tariffs. Apply tariffs or temporary trade barriers on a narrow set of goods or sectors where the coalition has leverage, calibrated to hurt government revenue or key economic actors tied to the state.
Remittance/dividend controls and taxation. Coordinate temporary surcharges or administrative friction on monetary flows from coalition territories to the recalcitrant state - a lever that hits both official revenues and private remitters in countries heavily dependent on diaspora money.
Reciprocal mobility restrictions for elites. Restrict access to elite services business visas, training programmes, government contracts - which applies pressure on ruling circles who can influence return policies.
Rapid-response returns taskforce. When a state finally agrees to cooperate, the coalition provides a pooled operational capacity (planes, escorts, processing teams) to execute removals promptly, demonstrating the tangible and immediate benefits of cooperation.
Sanctions on document fraud facilitators. Coordinate criminal sanctions and asset freezes against individuals and networks that produce or trade in forged passports and travel documents.

The coalition should adopt such a ladder, together with its in-built escalation tactics, and make it public to world leaders. This leaves the ball in their court as the relevant phases commence: initial designation → 30-day window for remedial action → phased visa and aid measures → targeted trade/remittance/dividend steps → as a last resort, coordinated mobility restrictions.

Exit criteria should be explicit: evidence of timely issuance of travel documents, concrete acceptance rates for deportations, or a signed readmission agreement with operational timelines.

This is very much in the spirit of the call for creative new forms of cooperation with our European neighbours that we made at the end of Section V.

Strength in Numbers:

Multilateral weight magnifies cost. Sanctions from a single country are easier to absorb, but a unified bloc of economies and travel markets creates systematic and severe pressure. Coordinated restrictions would also close loopholes whereby nationals bypass one state's measures by moving to another jurisdiction.

All delivered alongside the credible and proven threat of action.

A ladder published in clear terms reduces negotiation uncertainty and removes the advantage of hoping political fatigue will make sanctions temporary.

The use of these levers must be governed by legal authority and parliamentary oversight. The coalition's designation process must be transparent and evidence-based to withstand diplomatic and legal challenges.

Potential Members:

Britain is uniquely placed to lead such a coalition. Initial membership would likely consist of nations already aligned on border enforcement, intelligence cooperation, and migration control: the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Greece. Several Central and Eastern European states (notably Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic) have already voiced support for tougher deportation frameworks and would likely join.

The coalition could also coordinate with non-EU European partners such as Norway and Switzerland.

Collectively, this bloc would represent the overwhelming majority of the Western world's desirable destinations for economic migration, giving it immense leverage over recalcitrant states.

Rwanda

Although much maligned as the result of Conservative failures to implement necessary changes to human rights law, the Rwanda scheme did provide the blueprint for an essential component of any serious deportation agenda. Origin countries may continue to resist repatriation and rebuff diplomatic pressure. In the event of continued recalcitrance, an alternative will be required.

By 2024, the cost of the Rwanda scheme had reached £715m 172, and estimates suggested that, when fully operational, these would have risen to nearly £4bn. 173 As such, provision should be made of roughly £1.5bn a year for the scheme to be comprehensively robust.

This, however, would still represent a significant saving when compared to other expenditure lines, such as the billions presently being spent on a chaotic asylum system. Its logical soundness was exemplified when it was announced that Denmark was looking to conclude a similar deal with the East African nation. ¹⁷⁴ Again, the Trump administration has provided ample case studies on how this can be conducted, with 12 countries agreeing to take individuals who have no ties to their country. ¹⁷⁵ Similarly, Australia's successful efforts to end its own small boats crisis were contingent on its offshoring agreements with Papua New Guinea and Nauru, as is Italy's offshoring agreement with Albania (though currently hamstrung by EU law). 176 Britain should enter negotiations simultaneously with several nations with a view to securing multiple agreements within the early days of a new government.

Retrospective Action

Britain's asylum framework has been systematically abused for over a decade. Since 2018, a total of 145,834 asylum applications have been made by people entering illegally across the English Channel. Of these, 86,646 have received a decision, with 56,605 receiving a decision granting asylum or some other form of protection status. Of those processed, only 30,041 were refused. ¹⁷⁷ The 56,605 asylum grants must be rescinded and the remaining 59,188 still yet to be processed must receive automatic detention, rejection and deportation. Every illegal migrant currently in hotel accommodation and HMOs must be securely detained in emergency temporary accommodation on MoD/Government land, as is currently being considered by the Labour Government according to news reports. 178

All individuals must then be either returned to their nation of origin or removed to a safe third country.

The current chaos has been caused by a combination of bureaucratic paralysis, applicant dishonesty, politically motivated leniency, and judicial activism. It has eroded the authority of Parliament and the integrity of our borders.

All asylum and humanitarian protections granted to individuals who entered Britain illegally within the last decade should be rescinded in full, and those individuals deported within a reasonable time period.

This measure is necessary to restore credibility to the rule of law and to re-establish deterrence against illegal entry. The asylum system must operate on the principle that those who arrive illegally have no entitlement to remain.

Incoming Arrivals

The continuing small-boat crossings across the Channel are a direct result of perceived opportunity and delayed enforcement. Our plan would remove that incentive comprehensively and entirely, to the point that we anticipate the number of annual crossings would move close to zero.

Any individual arriving illegally would be subject to immediate processing and deportation within 24 hours, either to their country of origin or a designated safe third country. Clear statutory authority and pre-arranged logistics would make such removals automatic and immediate.

To maximise deterrence, the government must accompany this with a comprehensive public information campaign, in a number of foreign languages both domestically and in northern France - stating unambiguously that illegal entry will lead to swift removal, not settlement in any form.

Logistics (IX)

The final step in the removal of individuals from Britain is the physical process of deportation. This must utilise a combination of scheduled flights, chartered flights, and RAF assets.

Trafalgar Analytics have produced valuable insight into the opportunities presented by the use of scheduled flights. ¹⁷⁹ Using Civil Aviation Authority data, they show hundreds of thousands of passenger seats departing to those nations and regions with large illegal migrant populations resident in Britain. In July 2025, this included 340,000 scheduled seats to the Indian subcontinent and 533,000 to North Africa (though just 7,491 to Pakistan and 57,178 to Nigeria). 180 Frontex, the EU's external border agency, observes that 'scheduled flights remained the main means of transportation for returns (80%)' in 2024, although note a growing number of chartered flights are being used. 181

This reflects the fact that scheduled flights do not always provide the required capacity for deportations to certain countries of origin. It also reminds us that certain deportees present safety concerns that render the use of commercial flights unwise. Nonetheless, a statutory requirement must be introduced demanding the government to secure a fixed percentage of seats (between 5-7%) on departing flights to countries of origin with large illegal populations resident in Britain. Whenever we secure a new third country agreement, provision must be made for up to 10% of passenger seats to that destination. Using July 2025 data, this would equate to roughly 1,200 passenger seats being secured on flights to Rwanda. The costs of scheduled flight tickets are minimal when compared to the costs involved in chartered flights, which equated to roughly £13,000 in 2021. 182 This provides significant fiscal leeway to ensure that the British government can provide airlines with a commercially desirable offering.

However, there is no doubt that chartered flights will also play an essential role in deportations. They must be significantly upscaled. In 2023, just 2,620 people were deported on 60 chartered flights (an average of 44 deportees per flight). We believe that the number of chartered flights leaving Britain should be increased to 600 a year and the number removed per flight more than doubled. It is clear that current chartered flights are not being used to full capacity. The United States already manages roughly 100 deportees per flight. 183 It also does so at a fraction of the price ($8,577) that Britain pays at the moment. ¹⁸⁴ A major benefit of chartered flights is their suitability for more resistant deportees, allowing for the use of straitjackets and restraining measures.

The United States is also looking to build its own fleet of aircrafts. It is claimed by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that this would cause the number of deportations to double. ¹⁸⁵ While Britain could look to procure commercial aircraft, the use of RAF planes would be more immediately accessible for an incoming government. During the 2021 evacuation of Afghanistan, over 400 individuals were

Josh Marcus, Trump administration sending 100 people back to Iran after deal with Tehran despite fears over

Independen

their safety, t, 30 September, 2025.

carried by a Boeing C-17 Globemaster, and the fleet of 22 Airbus Atlas A400M are similarly viable. 186

Costs (X)

The direct costs set out in this research paper total between £49bn and £57.6bn if set over a pessimistic five-year period, with a ratio of three voluntary exits for every forced exit (3:1).

Immigration Enforcement: £30bn.
Detention facilities: lower estimate of £704m and an upper estimate of £5.7bn.
Estate management: £3.3bn
Enforced returns: £5.4 bn
Voluntary returns: £5.7bn, split between £1.4bn in logistical expenditure and reintegration payments costing up to £4.3bn.
Third country: A lower estimate of £4bn and an upper estimate of £7.5bn.

However, these costs are contingent upon fluid behavioural factors that cannot be foreseen in full. There is therefore every likelihood that costs may be lower if the uptake on voluntary returns is high, if economies of scale are achieved in the construction of estate management and the chartering of flights, and if other agencies move at a desirable pace to support the activities of Immigration Enforcement.

Savings (XI)

A large illegal migrant population has huge secondary economic effects. These include suppressed wages for low skilled workers, the cost of crime, a slump in productivity as businesses stave off investment, a loss of income taxes and employer national insurance contributions, a reduction in the supply of housing, and a deflationary impact on capital stock for the British people. These are not accounted for in standard impact assessments.

Nevertheless, the Home Office's 2023 Impact Assessment accompanying the Illegal Migration Bill allows us to calculate a rough attributable cost to each illegal migrant present in Britain 187:

Congestible Public Services (e.g. public transport, waste management, fire protection services): £3,859.
Wider Public Services (e.g. police services): £665.
A 2013 Department for Health report found that the annual cost of an illegal migrant on the NHS was £570 (£787 in today's money). 188
Total expenditure: £5,311.

For a child migrant, given the costs of education, this figure increases by at least a further £4,000. 189 If we assume that, via each migrant's expenditure, the Treasury recoups roughly £2,000 via indirect taxes, this would mean that an average illegal migrant in the UK will cost between £3,311 and £7,311.

Assuming 1.5 million illegal adults, and 300,000 illegal children, the total annual cost is £7.16 billion. It should be added that this figure is incredibly conservative, since it does not include the considerable secondary economic effects recounted above. A further £5.38bn, using 2023/24 figures, is saved with the abolition of the asylum system. ¹⁹⁰ The overall savings of enacting this deportation plan would be at least £12.5bn a year.

The roadmap (XII)

In our view, the roadmap of mass deportations should proceed roughly as follows.

To recap, we have called for a hostile environment aimed at fostering a culture of self-deportation, combined with somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 forced removals per year.

First, we give our conservative estimate. Assuming a cautious ratio of three voluntary exits for every forced exit (3:1), together with a similarly cautious annual average of 150,000 forced deportations, 3 million would be removed within a single Parliament. It would therefore take exactly three years to deport 1.8 million, which we regard as close to the true number of illegals in Britain.

Again, these estimates are more than plausible. If anything, they fail to do justice to what a patriotic government could do with political will and united effort. For one thing, the second Trump administration has managed to achieve a voluntary to involuntary removal ratio as high as 4:1. For another, detention capacity under our recommendations would climb to 195,000 per year. Consequently, the closer the detain-to-deport conversion rate approaches 100%, the closer we move from 150,000 to 195,000 forced deportations per year.

In view of all that, our second realistic estimate is more impressive. It assumes the same 150,000 forced deportations per year, but this time with a Trump-like 4:1 ratio of voluntary to involuntary removals. In short, this would see 3.75 million deported within a single Parliament. Given that our illegal population is more like 2 million, this is obvious overkill. Suffice it to say, then, that assuming such a ratio with such a scale, it would take around 2 years and 5 months to deport 1.8 million illegals.

Last of all, we provide our daring estimate, which in fact assumes quite a plausible scenario: a Trump-like 4:1 ratio of voluntary to involuntary deportations, together with a near-perfect detain-to-deport conversion rate (95%) that sees 185,000 illegals removed per year. In such favourable circumstances, it would take fewer than 2 years (1 year and 11 months) to deport 1.8 million illegals.

We estimate that the total number of illegal migrants in Britain falls somewhere between 1.8-2 million. Given our ultimate preference for the realistic estimate given above, we have full confidence that, courtesy of our proposals, mass deportations would be achieved in well under 3 years, if not sooner.

This paper deals with the existing illegal migrant population. Needless to say, if ever dramatic changes are made to the status of legal migrants in Britain, as we believe to be necessary, many of them would be rendered effectively illegal overnight. A reasonable grace period for individuals to organise their own arrangements is only fair, but in good time we would demand that they leave. It is doubtful that they would all do so.

Our detailed plans for removing people who were always illegals could then be deployed to deport those who initially came to Britain in good faith, but have overstayed their welcome. Such difficulties shall be addressed in further Restore Britain policy research. In this paper, we have focussed our attention on existing illegals, given the overwhelming urgency to remove them.

'Nothing can be done,' we are always told. But talk of inevitabilities is intended to paralyse serious alternatives to an intolerable status quo. It is a brazen political power-play posing as an anti-political assessment.

Viewed with proper clarity, the numerical roadmap of mass deportations is in fact quite simple. Whether we allow ourselves to be knocked off course by bad faith rhetoric is up to us.

Conclusion

The history of the British Isles is one of continuous invasion, and the 21st century is no exception. If anything, advances in communication and transport technology have made it easier than ever for eye-watering numbers of people to migrate across continents at unprecedented speed.

Moving into and then remaining in our country, whether legally or illegally, has never been more straightforward.

The present system - a wild tangle of statutory protections, international obligations, and disruptive appeals - has long choked our capacity to enforce the immigration laws that Parliament has enacted.

All we have suggested in this paper is that the law should be upheld: those living here illegally must be removed. Our effective open border has devastating consequences: overstretched services, communities under strain, and cratering public confidence in the state's ability to control who may lawfully live and work here. Part I of this paper has set out in forensic detail the legal impediments responsible for such dreadful outcomes. Part II has shown that, with political will and proper planning, a lawful and deliverable operational framework can be built to restore border integrity.

If we are serious about addressing the problem, two hard facts must be accepted:

The legal architecture matters. Many of the current obstacles are the product of domestic statutory design and judicial interpretation. If Parliament believes mass removal programmes to be necessary and in the national interest, it has every right and full authority to clear the path. However, it must do so explicitly, transparently, and with full parliamentary sanction.

Practical delivery is achievable but challenging. The logistics of identification, detention, and removal are complex. They will require significant investment in staff, facilities, and systems. The scale is not trivial. It will require coordination across departments, firm action with third countries, and robust forensic and biometric capabilities. None of this is impossible, but it requires sustained focus and political will.

The policy choices set out in this paper are stark. They involve trade-offs that are bound to be contested vigorously in Parliament and around the country. That is appropriate. The purpose of this paper is not to short-circuit that debate, but to embrace it - to replace improvisation with a coherent analysis of what the law permits, what it prevents, and what must be changed if Parliament so decides.

The debate so far has been governed by emotion, not facts. This paper has set out, in the most comprehensive fashion, a route forward. That has never been done before.

If the public mandate exists and Parliament chooses to act, the path is clear. The steps required are neither mystical nor magical; they are legislative, administrative, and political. It can be done. They demand courage, detailed planning, and an insistence on the rule of law. They also demand that those who advocate for change do so responsibly: proposing measures that are targeted, proportionate, and defensible, not reckless or arbitrary. Retaining public confidence amid any programme of mass deportations is vital.

We close with a simple proposition. If Britain is to restore public confidence in its immigration system, it must do so through hard work - reforming the law where it obstructs reasoned policy, building the institutions necessary for delivery, and ensuring that enforcement operates with maximal efficiency.

That is the only route to a durable settlement that the British people can trust and support.

The mass deportation of every single illegal migrant can and must be the first victory in our wider struggle to restore Britain.

Appendices

Appendix A: Find Out Now polling on mass deportations

processed)beingopenedinyourowncommunity?

Totalsamplesize:2,665

Filteredsamplesize:2,035

GBSAMPLESPEC	COMPLETES	SUPPORT	SUPPORT	OPPOSE	OPPOSE	DON'TKNOW	DON'TKNOW
		COUNT	PERCENTAGE	COUNT	PERCENTAGE		PERCENTAGE
TOTALS				1,225	60.2%		21.4%
AgeRange				Results
18-29	374	127.0	34.0%	154.0	41.2%	93.0	24.9%
30-39	350	88.0	25.1%	162.0	46.3%	100.0	28.6%
40-54	495	72.0	14.5%	303.0	61.2%	120.0	24.2%
55-64	331	40.0	12.1%	238.0	71.9%	53.0	16.0%
65-74	252	28.0	11.1%	183.0	72.6%	41.0	16.3%
75+	233	19.0	8.2%	185.0	79.4%	29.0	12.4%
Region				Results
NorthEast	84	7.0	8.3%	61.0	72.6%	16.0	19.0%
NorthWest	231	34.0	14.7%	146.0	63.2%	51.0	22.1%
YorkshireandTheHumber	171	37.0	21.6%	95.0	55.6%	39.0	22.8%
EastMidlands	153	24.0	15.7%	96.0	62.7%	33.0	21.6%
WestMidlands	184	28.0	15.2%	112.0	60.9%	44.0	23.9%
Eastof England		31.0	15.7%	123.0	62.4%	43.0	21.8%
London	272	74.0	27.2%	143.0	52.6%	55.0	20.2%
SouthEast	290	55.0	19.0%	176.0	60.7%	59.0	20.3%
SouthWest	182	25.0	13.7%	120.0	65.9%	37.0	20.3%
Wales	98	19.0	19.4%	54.0	55.1%	25.0	25.5%
Scotland	173	40.0	23.1%	99.0	57.2%	34.0	19.7%
Gender				Results
Male	985	171.0	17.4%	640.0	65.0%	174.0	17.7%
Female	1,050	203.0	19.3%	585.0	55.7%	262.0	25.0%
Ge2024				Results
Labour-party	422	170.0	40.3%	151.0	35.8%	101.0	23.9%
Conservative-party	296	16.0	5.4%	241.0	81.4%	39.0	13.2%
Reform-uk	178	0.0	0%	162.0	91.0%	16.0	9.0%
Liberal-democrats	153	44.0	28.8%	66.0	43.1%	43.0	28.1%
Green-party	84	48.0	57.1%	20.0	23.8%	16.0	19.0%
Other	83	25.0	30.1%	34.0	41.0%	24.0	28.9%
I-did-not-vote	819	71.0	8.7%	551.0	67.3%		24.1%

Total sample size:2,665

Filteredsamplesize:2,035

GBSAMPLESPEC	COMPLETES	SUPPORT	SUPPORT	OPPOSE	OPPOSE	DON'TKNOW	DON'TKNOW
		COUNT	PERCENTAGE	COUNT	PERCENTAGE	COUNT	PERCENTAGE
TOTALS				391	19.2%		17.8%
AgeRange				Results
18-29	374	159.0	42.5%	114.0	30.5%	101.0	27.0%
30-39	350	170.0	48.6%	92.0	26.3%	88.0	25.1%
40-54	495	315.0	63.6%	84.0	17.0%	96.0	19.4%
55-64	331	250.0	75.5%	45.0	13.6%	36.0	10.9%
65-74	252	191.0	75.8%	32.0	12.7%	29.0	11.5%
75+	233	196.0	84.1%	24.0	10.3%	13.0	5.6%
Region				Results
NorthEast	84	61.0	72.6%	11.0	13.1%	12.0	14.3%
NorthWest	231	150.0	64.9%	42.0	18.2%	39.0	16.9%
YorkshireandTheHumber	171	102.0	59.6%	40.0	23.4%	29.0	17.0%
EastMidlands	153	109.0	71.2%	17.0	11.1%	27.0	17.6%
WestMidlands	184	114.0	62.0%	30.0	16.3%	40.0	21.7%
Eastof England		129.0	65.5%	35.0	17.8%	33.0	16.8%
London	272	152.0	55.9%	70.0	25.7%	50.0	18.4%
SouthEast	290	168.0	57.9%	62.0	21.4%	60.0	20.7%
SouthWest	182	128.0	70.3%	24.0	13.2%	30.0	16.5%
Wales	86	64.0	65.3%	18.0	18.4%	16.0	16.3%
Scotland	173	104.0	60.1%	42.0	24.3%	27.0	15.6%
Gender				Results
Male	985	0'169	70.2%	180.0	18.3%	114.0	11.6%
Female	1,050	590.0	56.2%	211.0	20.1%	249.0	23.7%
Ge2024				Results
Labour-party	422	192.0	45.5%	130.0	30.8%	100.0	23.7%
Conservative-party	296	248.0	83.8%	31.0	10.5%	17.0	5.7%
Reform-uk	178	143.0	80.3%	24.0	13.5%	11.0	6.2%
Liberal-democrats	153	84.0	54.9%	36.0	23.5%	33.0	21.6%
Green-party	84	24.0	28.6%	37.0	44.0%	23.0	27.4%
Other	83	36.0	43.4%	23.0	27.7%	24.0	28.9%
I-did-not-vote	618	554.0	67.6%	110.0	13.4%	155.0	18.9%

If yourMPsupported deporting all those living in theUK illegally,would that makeyou moreor less likelytovote for them?

Totalsamplesize:2,665

Filteredsamplesize:2,035

GBSAMPLESPEC	COMPLETES	MORELIKELY	MORELIKELY	LESS LIKELY	LESS LIKELY	DON'TKNOW	DON'TKNOW
		COUNT	PERCENTAGE	COUNT	PERCENTAGE	COUNT	PERCENTAGE
TOTALS				363	17.8%		29.5%
AgeRange				Results
18-29	374	134.0	35.8%	112.0	29.9%	128.0	34.2%
30-39	350	139.0	39.7%	86.0	24.6%	125.0	35.7%
40-54	495	265.0	53.5%	72.0	14.5%	158.0	31.9%
55-64	331	215.0	65.0%	46.0	13.9%	70.0	21.1%
65-74	252	156.0	61.9%	27.0	10.7%	69.0	27.4%
75+	233	163.0	70.0%	20.0	8.6%	50.0	21.5%
Region				Results
NorthEast	84	54.0	64.3%	8.0	9.5%	22.0	26.2%
NorthWest	231	127.0	55.0%	41.0	17.7%	63.0	27.3%
YorkshireandTheHumber	171	86.0	50.3%	29.0	17.0%	56.0	32.7%
EastMidlands	153	87.0	56.9%	18.0	11.8%	48.0	31.4%
WestMidlands	184	96.0	52.2%	27.0	14.7%	61.0	33.2%
EastofEngland	197	108.0	54.8%	32.0	16.2%	57.0	28.9%
London	272	126.0	46.3%	71.0	26.1%	75.0	27.6%
SouthEast	290	151.0	52.1%	52.0	17.9%	87.0	30.0%
SouthWest	182	106.0	58.2%	27.0	14.8%	49.0	26.9%
Wales	86	50.0	51.0%	16.0	16.3%	32.0	32.7%
Scotland	173	81.0	46.8%	42.0	24.3%	50.0	28.9%
Gender				Results
Male	98	579.0	58.8%	167.0	17.0%	239.0	24.3%
Female	1,050	493.0	47.0%	196.0	18.7%	361.0	34.4%
Ge2024				Results
Labour-party	422	136.0	32.2%	147.0	34.8%	139.0	32.9%
Conservative-party	296	229.0	77.4%	17.0	5.7%	50.0	16.9%
Reform-uk	178	152.0	85.4%	6.0	3.4%	20.0	11.2%
Liberal-democrats	153	64.0	41.8%	33.0	21.6%	56.0	36.6%
Green-party	84	12.0	14.3%	49.0	58.3%	23.0	27.4%
Other	83	30.0	36.1%	24.0	28.9%	29.0	34.9%
I-did-not-vote	618	449.0	54.8%	87.0	10.6%	283.0	34.6%

Totalsamplesize:2,665

Filteredsamplesize:2,035

GBSAMPLESPEC	COMPLETES	SUPPORT	SUPPORT	OPPOSE	OPPOSE	DON'TKNOW	DON'TKNOW
		COUNT	PERCENTAGE	COUNT	PERCENTAGE	COUNT	PERCENTAGE
TOTALS				455	22.4%		27.2%
AgeRange				Results
18-29	374	115.0	30.7%	140.0	37.4%	119.0	31.8%
30-39	350	135.0	38.6%	100.0	28.6%	115.0	32.9%
40-54	495	252.0	50.9%	99.0	20.0%	144.0	29.1%
55-64	331	205.0	61.9%	53.0	16.0%	73.0	22.1%
65-74	252	151.0	59.9%	38.0	15.1%	63.0	25.0%
75+	233	169.0	72.5%	25.0	10.7%	39.0	16.7%
Region				Results
NorthEast	84	50.0	%969	11.0	13.1%	23.0	27.4%
NorthWest	231	123.0	53.2%	56.0	24.2%	52.0	22.5%
Yorkshireand TheHumber	171	83.0	48.5%	41.0	24.0%	47.0	27.5%
EastMidlands	153	76.0	49.7%	27.0	17.6%	50.0	32.7%
WestMidlands	184	88.0	47.8%	35.0	19.0%	61.0	33.2%
EastofEngland		104.0	52.8%	41.0	20.8%	52.0	26.4%
London	272	112.0	41.2%	88.0	32.4%	72.0	26.5%
SouthEast	290	154.0	53.1%	63.0	21.7%	73.0	25.2%
SouthWest	182	101.0	55.5%	32.0	17.6%	49.0	26.9%
Wales	86	49.0	50.0%	18.0	18.4%	31.0	31.6%
Scotland	173	87.0	50.3%	43.0	24.9%	43.0	24.9%
Gender				Results
Male	985	596.0	60.5%	198.0	20.1%	191.0	19.4%
Female	1,050	431.0	41.0%	257.0	24.5%	362.0	34.5%
Ge2024				Results
Labour-party	422	138.0	32.7%	175.0	41.5%	109.0	25.8%
Conservative-party	296	209.0	70.6%	29.0	9.8%	58.0	19.6%
Reform-uk	178	134.0	75.3%	17.0	9.6%	27.0	15.2%
Liberal-democrats	153	55.0	35.9%	46.0	30.1%	52.0	34.0%
Green-party	84	18.0	21.4%	47.0	56.0%	19.0	22.6%
Other	83	33.0	39.8%	26.0	31.3%	24.0	28.9%
I-did-not-vote	618	440.0	53.7%	115.0	14.0%	264.0	32.2%

Totalsamplesize:2,665

Filteredsamplesize:2,035

GBSAMPLESPEC	COMPLETES	YES	YES	NO	NO	DON'TKNOW	DON'TKNOW
		COUNT	PERCENTAGE	COUNT	PERCENTAGE	COUNT	PERCENTAGE
TOTALS				476	23.4%		30.2%
AgeRange				Results
18-29	374	106.0	28.3%	151.0	40.4%	117.0	31.3%
30-39	350	125.0	35.7%	113.0	32.3%	112.0	32.0%
40-54	495	222.0	44.8%	101.0	20.4%	172.0	34.7%
55-64	331	185.0	55.9%	51.0	15.4%	95.0	28.7%
65-74	252	146.0	57.9%	35.0	13.9%	71.0	28.2%
75+	233	161.0	69.1%	25.0	10.7%	47.0	20.2%
Region				Results
NorthEast	84	47.0	56.0%	8.0	%96	29.0	34.5%
NorthWest	231	122.0	52.8%	54.0	23.4%	55.0	23.8%
Yorkshireand TheHumber	171	74.0	43.3%	42.0	24.6%	55.0	32.2%
EastMidlands	153	74.0	48.4%	28.0	18.3%	51.0	33.3%
WestMidlands	184	89.0	48.4%	29.0	15.8%	66.0	35.9%
EastofEngland		111.0	56.3%	42.0	21.3%	44.0	22.3%
London	272	016	33.5%	96.0	35.3%	85.0	31.3%
SouthEast	290	135.0	46.6%	65.0	22.4%	90.0	31.0%
SouthWest	182	016	50.0%	38.0	20.9%	53.0	29.1%
Wales	86	39.0	39.8%	25.0	25.5%	34.0	34.7%
Scotland	173	72.0	41.6%	49.0	28.3%	52.0	30.1%
Gender				Results
Male	985	559.0	56.8%	200.0	20.3%	226.0	22.9%
Female	1,050	386.0	36.8%	276.0	26.3%	388.0	37.0%
Ge2024				Results
Labour-party	422	118.0	28.0%	194.0	46.0%	110.0	26.1%
Conservative-party	296	192.0	64.9%	27.0	9.1%	77.0	26.0%
Reform-uk	178	144.0	80.9%	6.0	3.4%	28.0	15.7%
Liberal-democrats	153	47.0	30.7%	54.0	35.3%	52.0	34.0%
Green-party	84	9.0	10.7%	50.0	59.5%	25.0	29.8%
Other	83	27.0	32.5%	28.0	33.7%	28.0	33.7%
I-did-not-vote	618	408.0	49.8%	117.0	14.3%	294.0	35.9%

Totalsamplesize:2,665

Filteredsamplesize:2,035

GBSAMPLESPEC	COMPLETES	SUPPORT	SUPPORT	OPPOSE	OPPOSE	DON'TKNOW	DON'TKNOW
		COUNT	PERCENTAGE	COUNT	PERCENTAGE	COUNT	PERCENTAGE
TOTALS				451	22.2%		27.0%
AgeRange				Results
18-29	374	103.0	27.5%	146.0	39.0%	125.0	33.4%
30-39	350	116.0	33.1%	108.0	30.9%	126.0	36.0%
40-54	495	250.0	50.5%	92.0	18.6%	153.0	30.9%
55-64	331	207.0	62.5%	48.0	14.5%	76.0	23.0%
65-74	252	172.0	68.3%	35.0	13.9%	45.0	%61
75+	233	187.0	80.3%	22.0	9.4%	24.0	10.3%
Region				Results
NorthEast	84	53.0	63.1%	8.0	%96	23.0	27.4%
NorthWest	231	112.0	48.5%	54.0	23.4%	65.0	28.1%
Yorkshireand TheHumber	171	82.0	48.0%	45.0	26.3%	44.0	25.7%
EastMidlands	153	82.0	53.6%	31.0	20.3%	40.0	26.1%
WestMidlands	184	95.0	51.6%	31.0	16.8%	58.0	31.5%
EastofEngland		99.0	50.3%	44.0	22.3%	54.0	27.4%
London	272	124.0	45.6%	78.0	28.7%	70.0	25.7%
SouthEast	290	160.0	55.2%	53.0	18.3%	77.0	26.6%
SouthWest	182	100.0	54.9%	35.0	19.2%	47.0	25.8%
Wales	86	46.0	46.9%	23.0	23.5%	29.0	29.6%
Scotland	173	82.0	47.4%	49.0	28.3%	42.0	24.3%
Gender				Results
Male	985	599.0	60.8%	198.0	20.1%	188.0	19.1%
Female	1,050	436.0	41.5%	253.0	24.1%	361.0	34.4%
Ge2024				Results
Labour-party	422	131.0	31.0%	181.0	42.9%	110.0	26.1%
Conservative-party	296	241.0	81.4%	15.0	5.1%	40.0	13.5%
Reform-uk	178	139.0	78.1%	9.0	5.1%	30.0	16.9%
Liberal-democrats	153	57.0	37.3%	55.0	35.9%	41.0	26.8%
Green-party	84	17.0	20.2%	47.0	56.0%	20.0	23.8%
Other	83	31.0	37.3%	28.0	33.7%	24.0	28.9%
I-did-not-vote	618	419.0	51.2%	116.0	14.2%	284.0	34.7%

Total sample size: 2,665

Filteredsamplesize:2,035

GBSAMPLESPEC	COMPLETES	YES	YES	NO	NO	DON'TKNOW	DON'TKNOW
		COUNT	PERCENTAGE	COUNT	PERCENTAGE	COUNT	PERCENTAGE
TOTALS				736	36.2%		18.8%
AgeRange				Results
18-29	374	115.0	30.7%	173.0	46.3%	86.0	23.0%
30-39	350	125.0	35.7%	134.0	38.3%	016	26.0%
40-54	495	239.0	48.3%	162.0	32.7%	94.0	19.0%
55-64	331	173.0	52.3%	111.0	33.5%	47.0	14.2%
65-74	252	131.0	52.0%	83.0	32.9%	38.0	15.1%
75+	233	133.0	57.1%	73.0	31.3%	27.0	11.6%
Region				Results
NorthEast	84	51.0	60.7%	19.0	22.6%	14.0	16.7%
NorthWest	231	115.0	49.8%	66.0	28.6%	50.0	21.6%
YorkshireandTheHumber	171	69.0	40.4%	69.0	40.4%	33.0	19.3%
EastMidlands	153	75.0	49.0%	47.0	30.7%	31.0	20.3%
WestMidlands	184	90.0	48.9%	49.0	26.6%	45.0	24.5%
Eastof England		92.0	46.7%	74.0	37.6%	31.0	15.7%
London	272	106.0	39.0%	126.0	46.3%	40.0	14.7%
SouthEast	290	128.0	44.1%	105.0	36.2%	57.0	19.7%
SouthWest	182	78.0	42.9%	72.0	39.6%	32.0	17.6%
Wales	86	42.0	42.9%	37.0	37.8%	19.0	19.4%
Scotland	173	70.0	40.5%	72.0	41.6%	31.0	17.9%
Gender				Results
Male	985	478.0	48.5%	359.0	36.4%	148.0	15.0%
Female	1,050	438.0	41.7%	377.0	35.9%	235.0	22.4%
Ge2024				Results
Labour-party	422	105.0	24.9%	255.0	60.4%	62.0	14.7%
Conservative-party	296	171.0	57.8%	88.0	29.7%	37.0	12.5%
Reform-uk	178	137.0	77.0%	19.0	10.7%	22.0	12.4%
Liberal-democrats	153	39.0	25.5%	85.0	55.6%	29.0	19.0%
Green-party	84	15.0	17.9%	58.0	69.0%	11.0	13.1%
Other	83	27.0	32.5%	39.0	47.0%	17.0	20.5%
I-did-not-vote	618	422.0	51.5%	192.0	23.4%	205.0	25.0%

Footnotes

1. Legal immigration is by far the greater problem in Britain today, but that subject is beyond the remit of this paper. Rest assured, it will be addressed in future ones. ↩

2. Peter William Walsh & Madeleine Sumption, Recent estimates of the UK's unauthorised resident population, The Migration Observatory, 11 September, 2020. ↩

3. Sam Ashworth-Hayes & Charles Hymas, Up to one in 13 in London is an illegal immigrant, The Telegraph, 22 January, 2025. ↩

4. Sam Bidwell, Why don't we know how many people are in Britain?, The Spectator, 1 February, 2025. ↩

5. Kieran Everson, Illegal Channel migrants now exceed entire British armed forces, GB News, 11 September, 2025. ↩

6. See Home Office Statistics, Immigration system statistics data tables, Returns, 21 August, 2025. ↩

7. See Home Office Statistics, Immigration system statistics data tables, Asylum, 21 August, 2025. ↩

8. See Home Office Statistics, Immigration system statistics data tables, Asylum, 21 August, 2025.

9. See Office for Budget Responsibility, Fiscal Risks and Sustainability Report, Chapter 4: Long-term fiscal projections, 12 September, 2024.

10. This is to say nothing of the present asylum system, which in 2019/20 cost us £230 million per year but now runs into the billions.

12. See Immigration and Asylum Act (1999).

13. See Asylum Seekers (Reception Conditions) Regulations (2005).

14. See Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act (2002).

15. See UK Borders Act (2007).

16. See Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act (2009).

17. See Equality Act (2010).

18. See Peter Whittle & Stephen Balogh, State of Emergency: A Voice for the Silenced Majority (London: New Culture Forum Ltd., 2023).

19. See Illegal Migration Act (2023).

20. Doughty Street Chambers, Hardial Singh: Principles and Practice, 26 April, 2022, p. 5.

21. Reform UK, Operation Restoring Justice, August 2025, p. 2. ↩

22. Amar Johal, Will the Tory 'Deportation' Bill Work?, Pimlico Journal, 19 May, 2025.

23. See Keynote Address by UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman: UK-US Security Priorities for the 21st Century, American Enterprise Institute, 26 September, 2023.

24. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951), ARTICLE 31. REFUGEES UNLAWFULLY IN THE COUNTRY OF REFUGE.

25. Stephen Webb, Why is it so hard getting immigration numbers down?, Policy Exchange, 18 January, 2025, pp. 58-59.

26. Even when asylum claims are rejected, such rejections are almost never followed up by enforced removals. On a non-trivial number of occasions, initial rejections are also overturned by domestic courts later down the line. ↩

27. Illegals who enter from France would not count, because they never claim to be seeking asylum from France.

28. See Nationality and Borders Act (2022).

29. See Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act (2004). ↩

30. Dominic Cummings, People, ideas, machines XII: Theories of regime change and civil war, Dominic Cummings Substack, 28 May, 2025.

31. Tony Blair, A Journey (London, Hutchinson, 2010), p. 205.

32. European Court of Human Rights, Case of TYRER v. THE UNITED KINGDOM, JUDGMENT, 25 April, 1978 [31].

33. John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 212.

34. Jonathan Sumption, Judgment call: the case for leaving the ECHR, The Spectator, 30 September, 2023.

35. John Finnis, Judicial Law-Making and the 'Living' Instrumentalisation of the ECHR, in Lord Sumption and the Limits of Law, edited by NW Barber, Richard Ekins, Paul Yowell (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2018), p. 118.

36. European Court of Human Rights, Case of CHAHAL v. THE UNITED KINGDOM, JUDGMENT, 15 November, 1996 [80].

37. European Convention on Human Rights, Article 46, Binding force and execution of judgments.

38. European Convention on Human Rights, Article 32, Jurisdiction of the Court.

39. Jonathan Sumption, Trials of the State: Law and the Decline of Politics (London: Profile Books, 2020), pp. 51-52.

40. European Convention on Human Rights, Article 58, Denunciation. ↩

41. Rights Brought Home: The Human Rights Bill, presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for the Home Department by command of Her Majesty, October 1997, [1.14].

42. See Human Rights Act (1998). ↩

43. Dominic Cummings, People, ideas, machines XII: Theories of regime change and civil war, Dominic Cummings Substack, 28 May, 2025.

44. Matt Dathan, Jack Straw: Leaving ECHR won't affect Good Friday Agreement, The Sunday Times, 31 August, 2025.

45. See Jonathan Sumption: Britain should quit the intrusive ECHR | SpectatorTV ↩

46. Tánaiste's Remarks at the British Irish Association Conference Oxford, 5 September, 2025.

47. Amar Johal, How to enact a Great Repeal, The Critic, 6 May, 2025.

48. The Belfast Agreement: An Agreement Reached at the Multi-Party Talks on Northern Ireland (April 1998), p. 25.

49. The Belfast Agreement: An Agreement Reached at the Multi-Party Talks on Northern Ireland (April 1998), p. 16.

50. Conor Casey, Richard Ekins KC (Hon) & Sir Stephen Laws KCB, KC (Hon), The ECHR and the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement, Policy Exchange, 31 August, 2025, p. 32.

51. Conor Casey, Richard Ekins KC (Hon) & Sir Stephen Laws KCB, KC (Hon), The ECHR and the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement, Policy Exchange, 31 August, 2025, p. 9.

52. Suella Braverman & Guy Dampier, Why and How To Leave the European Convention on Human Rights: Roadmap to Freedom, Prosperity Institute, 21 July, 2025, p. 8.

53. Suella Braverman & Guy Dampier, Why and How To Leave the European Convention on Human Rights: Roadmap to Freedom, Prosperity Institute, 21 July, 2025, p. 8.

54. Conor Casey, Richard Ekins KC (Hon) & Sir Stephen Laws KCB, KC (Hon), The ECHR and the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement, Policy Exchange, 31 August, 2025, pp. 10-11.

55. Under Article 58 of the ECHR, the period between giving notice of denunciation and officially withdrawing lasts six months. To prevent a rush of claims and an unmanageable pile of cases from mounting in the interim, we should repeal the HRA (albeit with a retained slither of ECHR case law, available only to our domestic courts and subordinate to parliamentary defeat if necessary [see Section VI ], for the benefit of Northern Ireland) before triggering Article 58. ↩

56. Suella Braverman & Guy Dampier, Why and How To Leave the European Convention on Human Rights: Roadmap to Freedom, Prosperity Institute, 21 July, 2025, p. 31.

57. Suella Braverman & Guy Dampier, Why and How To Leave the European Convention on Human Rights: Roadmap to Freedom, Prosperity Institute, 21 July, 2025, p. 31.

58. As Braverman and Dampier write, 'During this transition period, the main political parties in Northern Ireland would be consulted, to secure agreement to amend the Multi-Party Agreement. There would also be a supplemental agreement negotiated with the Irish Government, akin to the 2006 or 2010 frameworks.' See Why and How To Leave the ECHR, p. 8.

59. See Douglas Carswell, My plan to get Britain back on track, The Telegraph, 22 March, 2025. ↩

60. We should perhaps make an exception for Ireland v. United Kingdom (1978), given its obvious relevance to Northern Ireland. The problem is that this ECtHR judgment cites Article 3. Much like Article 8, Article 3 is often used to block deportations. If the specifics of Ireland v. United Kingdom (1978), though not the Articles it cites, are retained in our law and later come to be used by British judges to stop mass deportations, the powers conferred by the Great Clarification Act (see Section VI) should be enough to shoot down the deleterious consequences in an afternoon. Any retained ECHR case law would be intended as a gesture of good will towards Northern Ireland, not a gift to activist judges. ↩

61. See Agreement on the withdrawal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from the European Union and the European Atomic Energy Community, Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland, Article 2(1).

62. See Summary of judgment - In re Dillon and others - NI Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023, Judiciary NI, 20 September, 2024. ↩

63. Christopher McCrudden, The origins of 'civil rights and religious liberties' in the Belfast-Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 3 (2024), pp. 443-487 (p. 447).

64. Trade and Cooperation Agreement between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, of the

67. Trade and Cooperation Agreement between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, of the

69. In English, 'to explicate the one is to exclude the other [if the other is not otherwise or elsewhere explicated].'

70. See Nigel Biggar, What's Wrong With Rights? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

71. This Act is not mentioned in Section I because it was passed to address a situation in which we remained members of the ECHR and bound by the HRA. Since we have recommended either leaving or ignoring the ECHR and repealing the HRA (while retaining a small sliver of ECHR case law to avoid difficulty in Northern Ireland), the Act would no longer be relevant.

72. Douglas Carswell, My plan to get Britain back on track, The Telegraph, 22 March, 2025.

73. See Senior Courts Act (1981). ↩

74. Douglas Carswell, Restore the State (Part 3): Judicial Reform - the six steps to restoration, Conservative Home, 4 September, 2025.

75. See Constitutional Reform Act (2005).

76. Douglas Carswell, My plan to get Britain back on track, The Telegraph, 22 March, 2025. ↩

77. Oliver Moody, Germany could leave the ECHR over migration crisis, says party leading polls, The Times, 9 December, 2024.

78. See answer to Written Question 9996 Undocumented Migrants, 28 October, 2024.

79. Rajeev Syal, Home Office 'has no idea how many people are in the UK illegally', The Guardian, 17 June, 2020. ↩

80. Phillip Connor & Jeffrey Passel, Updated unauthorized immigrant population estimates for Europe and the United Kingdom, 2014-2017, Pew Research, 19 March, 2025.

81. See Homeland Security, New Milestone: Over 2 Million Illegal Aliens Out of the United States in Less Than 250 Days, 23 September, 2025. ↩

82. See Home Office Statistics, Immigration system statistics data tables, Returns, 21 August, 2025.

83. Peter William Walsh & Mihnae Cuibas, Briefing: Returns of unauthorised migrants from the UK, The Migration Observatory, 11 August, 2025.

84. See Home Office, eVisa transition: vulnerability support confirmed, 18 September, 2024. ↩

85. See Home Office, Estimated number of people who still need to create a UKVI account: methodology note, 21 August, 2025.

86. See Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act (2006).

87. See Home Office Guidance, Employer's guide to right to work checks: 26 June 2025, 31 July, 2025.

88. Home Office Impact Assessment, Extension of prohibition on employment to other working arrangements, 7 May, 2025. ↩

89. See Office for National Statistics, EMP14: Employees and Self Employed by Industry, 13 May, 2025.

90. Home Office Impact Assessment, Extension of prohibition on employment to other working arrangements, 7

91. HM Revenue & Customs, HMRC internal manual: Labour Provider Guidance, 16 July, 2025.

92. See Office for National Statistics, EMP14: Employees and Self Employed by Industry, 13 May, 2025.

93. James Cockett, The true story of the UK gig economy, Chartered Institute of Professional Development, 12 October, 2025.

94. Tom Calver, How many delivery drivers are there on our roads?, The Times, 22 December, 2025. ↩

95. See Home Office, Hundreds arrested in illegal delivery rider shut down, 9 August, 2025.

96. See Home Office, New operational partnership with delivery giants to combat illegal working, 22 July, 2025.

97. See Home Office Statistics, How many cases are in the UK asylum system?, 21 August, 2025. ↩

99. Tsige Berhanu, What do the fine increases for employing illegal workers mean for businesses?, Keystone Law, 19 March, 2024. ↩

100. Gavin McEwan, Two firms fined thousands over illegal workers, BBC News, 7 September, 2025.

101. James Hudson, Crackdown on illegal Employment: director disqualifications surge as insolvency service tightens controls, Capital Law, 10 December, 2024.

102. April, 2025.

103. Home Office Research, Evaluation of the compliant environment: interim report, 1 April, 2025.

104. Zachary Strain-Fajth & Madeleine Sumption, EU Citizens in the UK Labour Market, The Migration Observatory, 19 June, 2025.

105. See One-to-many letters: Tracker, Ross Martin Tax and Accounting, 29 September, 2025. ↩

106. Ben Pollard, How to find government tenders & contracts, Tussell, 28 February, 2024. ↩

107. See Government Contracts Still Out of Reach for Many SMEs, British Chambers of Commerce, 7 August, 2024.

108. See Immigration Enforcement, Illegal working civil penalties for UK employers: 1 January 2025 to 31 March 2025, ↩

109. See Written evidence submitted by Sodexo to Parliament, SSU0005 - Evidence on Strategic Suppliers, 6 June, 2018.

110. See Home Office Research, Developing an evaluation strategy for the compliant environment: Review of internal data and processes, 9 February, 2023. ↩

111. See Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities Statistics, English Housing Survey 2021 to 2022: private rented sector, 21 July, 2025.

112. See Home Office & Immigration Enforcement, Tripling of fines for those supporting illegal migrants, 7 August, 2023. ↩

113. See Home Office Research, Evaluation of the compliant environment: interim report, 1 April, 2025. ↩

114. See Home Office Research, Evaluation of the compliant environment: interim report, 1 April, 2025. ↩

115. See Office for Health Improvement and Disparities Guidance, NHS entitlements: migrant health guide, 2

116. See 1,000+ Safe Surgeries: GPs Stand Up For All In Their Community, Doctors of the World, 17 October, 2022. ↩

117. Lambeth Council, Safe Surgeries offer health equality, Love Lambeth, 5 May, 2023.

118. See Safe Surgeries Network, GP Website City and Hackney. ↩

119. See Entitlement to Secondary Care Services, Doctors of the World.

120. Jonathan Walker & David Williamson, Fury as £1.5bn of taxpayer cash goes to groups fighting Rwanda asylum scheme, Daily Express, 1 July, 2023.

121. See The National Health Service (Charges to Overseas Visitors) Regulations (2015).

122. See Immigration Act (2014). ↩

123. See Home Office Research, Evaluation of the compliant environment: interim report, 1 April, 2025. ↩

124. See Home Office Research, Evaluation of the Compliant Environment: interim report, 1 April, 2025.

125. Anna Lagos, The US Has Spent Over $500,000 on Youtube Ads to Discourage Irregular Migration, Wired, 24 April, 2025.

126. See Home Office Statistics, Developments in Exit Checks, 24 February, 2022.

127. See Home Office, Home Office annual report and accounts: 2023 to 2024, 30 July, 2024. ↩

128. See Visa and Immigration, Visit the UK as a Standard Visitor. ↩

129. See Government Statistics, Immigration system statistics data tables, Entry clearance visas granted outside the UK, 21 August, 2025.

130. Ben Bloch, Conservative Party pledges £1.6bn ICE-style 'removals force' to deport 150,000 illegal migrants a year, Sky News, 5 October 2025. ↩

131. See U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Delegation of Immigration Authority Section 287(g) Immigration and Nationality Act, 13 May, 2025.

132. See Home Office Data, Illegal working activity from 5 July 2024 to 22 March 2025, 9 August, 2025. ↩

133. UK Visas and Immigration, Guidance: Contact Details for Immigration Compliance and Enforcement Teams, 11 March, 2025.

134. Surrey County Council, Trading standards investigations criteria, 11 July, 2024. ↩

135. Jack Barton & Jamie Grierson, Immigration officers placed in 25 local authorities by Home Office, FoI reveals, The Guardian, 1 May, 2022. ↩

136. See Department of Housing, Communities and Local Government, 2023-24 English Housing Survey: Rented Sectors Report, 17 July, 2025.

137. Jack Barton & Jamie Grierson, Immigration officers placed in 25 local authorities by Home Office, FoI reveals, The Guardian, 1 May, 2022.

138. Oxford City Council, Local Authority of Sanctuary.

139. See GP Lists & Illegal Migration, Trafalgar Analytics, 7 July, 2025. ↩

140. See Home Office Research, Developing an evaluation strategy for the compliant environment: Review of internal data and processes, 4. How the compliant environment works, 9 February, 2023.

141. See Home Office Research, Developing an evaluation strategy for the compliant environment: Review of internal data and processes, 9 February, 2023.

142. See David Neal, An inspection of illegal working enforcement: August - October 2023, Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration. ↩

143. See Immigration Enforcement, Illegal working civil penalties for UK employers: 1 January 2025 to 31 March 2025, 29 August, 2025. ↩

144. Rob Davies, Tax avoidance whistleblowers will earn share of HMRC proceeds, says Reeves, The Guardian, 26 March, 2025. ↩

145. See Home Office Statistics, How many people are detained under immigration powers in the UK?, 3 October, 2025. ↩

146. Question for Home Office, UIN 101782, tabled on 2 December 2022, UK Parliament, 7 December, 2022.

147. Yarl's Wood removal centre of 'national concern', BBC News, 12 August, 2015. ↩

153. Melanie Griffiths & Peter William Walsh, Immigration Detention in the UK, The Migration Observatory, 12 December, 2024. ↩

154. See TRAC Immigration, Immigration Detention Quick Facts, 2025.

155. More People Are in Immigration Detention Than Ever Before, Vera, 2 October, 2025. ↩

156. Policy Brief | Snapshot of ICE Detention: Inhumane Conditions and Alarming Expansion, National Immigrant

157. Meg Anderson, Private prisons and local jails are ramping up as ICE detention exceeds capacity, NPR, 4 June, ↩

158. See Asylum Matters, The Advice, Issue Reporting and Eligibility Contract (AIRE): A Guide. ↩

159. See Home Office Data, Returns from the UK from 5 July 2024 to 31 January 2025, Returns, 9 August, 2025.

160. David Shortell, US to sanction 4 countries for refusing deportations, CNN, 24 August, 2017.

161. data and processes, 4. How the compliant environment works, 9 February, 2023. ↩

162. See C.J. McKinney & Melanie Gower, Unauthorised migration: UK returns agreements with other countries, House of Commons Library, 5 December, 2024. ↩

168. Department for Business & Trade, UK-India Trade and Investment Factsheet, 19 September, 2025.

169. The Global Economy, Nigeria: Remittances, percent of GDP.

170. Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, Statistics on International Development: Final UK ODA Spend 2023, September 2024. ↩

171. Reform UK, Operation Restoring Justice, August 2025, p. 2. ↩

172. See Home Office statistics, Transparency Data: Breakdown of Home Office costs associated with the MEDP with Rwanda and the Illegal Migration Act 2023, 2 December, 2024.

173. Institute for Public Policy Research, Hidden costs of rwanda scheme revealed to be in the billions, finds IPPR, 18 March, 2025.

174. See Ida Marie Savio Vammen & Ahlam Chemlali, Offshoring refugees to Rwanda: A new era for Europe's anti-refugee policies?, Danish Institute for International Studies, 31 May, 2022. ↩

175. Jacqueline Metzler, What Are Third-Country Deportations, and Why Is Trump Using Them?, Council on Foreign Relations, 3 September, 2025. ↩

176. Sarah Rainsford, Italy plan to process migrants in Albania dealt blow by EU court, BBC News, 1 August, 2025.

177. See Home Office Statistics, How many people come to the UK irregularly?, 3. Asylum claims from small boat arrivals, 25 June, 2025. ↩

178. Michael D Carroll, Army to build migrant camps in huge immigration crackdown, Daily Express, 2 October, 2025.

179. See GP Lists & Illegal Migration, Trafalgar Analytics, 7 July, 2025. ↩

180. See UK Civil Aviation Authority, UK airport data July 2025.

181. See Evaluation Report on return operations conducted in the 2nd semester of 2024, Frontex.

182. Diane Taylor, Home Office spends £13,354 per person on deportation flights, The Guardian, 23 March, 2021.

184. ET Online, Up to $852,000: How much Trump ends up paying for each deportation flight, The Economic Times, 27 January, 2025. ↩

185. Kelly Rissman, Taking ICE to the skies: Noem wants a whole fleet of DHS owned planes to fly deportees back to their home countries, Independent, 21 August, 2025. ↩

186. C-17: The US military plane carrying Afghans to safety, BBC News, 22 August, 2021.

187. Home Office, Impact Assessment: The Illegal Migration Bill, 26 June 2023.

188. See Melanie Gower, Maria Lalic, Georgina Sturge & Daniel Harari, General Debate: Costs associated with illegal immigration, House of Commons Library, 2 May, 2024.

189. See Department for Education, Press release: Record funding for schools in England, 17 July, 2023.

190. Alix Culbertson, Home Office spent record £5.38bn on asylum over past year, Sky News, 28 November, 2024. ↩

About the Authors

Acknowledgements

Foreword - rupert lowe MP

Foreword

Executive Summary

Part I: The Legal Obstacles to Mass Deportations

Part II: The Practical Logistics of Mass Deportations

Introduction

Part One: The Legal Obstacles to Mass Deportations

Legal Obstacles to be Cleared by Repeal (I)

Immigration and Asylum Act (1999)

Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act (2002)

UK Borders Act (2007)

Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act (2009)

Equality Act (2010)

Illegal Migration Act (2023)

UN Refugee Convention (II)

ECHR-Related Obstacles (III)

The Northern Ireland Problem? (IV)

Windsor Framework & UK-EU Trade Deal Problems? (V)

Restoring the Judicial System (VI)

Conclusion

Part Two: The Practical Logistics of Mass Deportations

Understanding the problem

Voluntary Returns (VII)

E-visas

Employment

Facial recognition and real-time RtW checks

Increased sanctions

Targeted Nudge Letters

Government Supply Chains

Housing

Sanctions

Right to Rent checks

Healthcare

GP surgeries

Secondary treatment

Banking and Finance

[2021]

Advertising and facilitating voluntary returns

Involuntary Returns (VIII)

Immigration Enforcement

Central government

Local authorities

Data sharing

Reporting

Annual Reward System:

Detention

Deportation

'Deportation NaTO'

Strength in Numbers:

Potential Members:

Rwanda

Retrospective Action

Incoming Arrivals

Logistics (IX)

Costs (X)

Savings (XI)

The roadmap (XII)

Conclusion

Appendices

Appendix A: Find Out Now polling on mass deportations

Footnotes