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Natalie Elphicke, one of the Tories’ strongest advocates for a crackdown on small-boat immigration into Britain, pointed to the government’s failure to “keep our borders secure” as she defected to Labor on Wednesday.
The Prime Minister’s press secretary asked whether the MP for Dover believed Labor leader Sir Keir Starmer really had a better plan.
Labour’s rapidly evolving policy to tackle irregular migration depends on restoring the system to the way it worked before the Tories’ attempts to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Resolving this issue will be crucial for Labor to win over voters in the UK general election expected later this year.
How would Labor deal with small boat crossings?
Labor has announced plans to tackle the people smuggling gangs that run the networks that transport asylum seekers across the English Channel, including by creating a new cross-border police force working in the UK and across Europe to tackle “upstream gangs”.
Tory critics point out that the government has already worked closely with France and the EU to try to dismantle the smuggling networks. This work has proven to be challenging. Last week alone, almost 1,500 people arrived in the UK on small boats, bringing the total so far in 2024 to over 8,500 – 36 per cent more than the same period last year.
A former government insider criticized the idea that Labor could crack down more effectively on human trafficking networks, saying: “What does Labor think we’ve been trying to do? You can’t just stop the gangs.”
What would happen to the Rwanda program?
Starmer has stated categorically that he will end the Rwanda program as soon as a Labor government comes to power, regardless of whether flights have already started bringing migrants to Kigali.
Labor argues there is no need to repeal the Rwanda Act, which received royal assent last month, because the legislation does not force officials to send people abroad.
The party also says it would scrap a new government scheme that allows asylum seekers to move to Rwanda voluntarily for £3,000 in cash because it is too costly.
How would Labor deal with the backlog of asylum seekers?
The Illegal Migration Act – passed last year – bans anyone who entered the UK “illegally” after March 2023 from claiming asylum, meaning tens of thousands of people are now stuck in limbo in the system.
According to Home Office officials, more than 40,000 people have arrived in the UK with applications currently deemed “inadmissible” since the IMA was passed, and this number could double by the end of the year.
Labor says it will begin working on these cases soon after it comes to power. To achieve this, legal experts say parts of the Illegal Migration Act that prevent the Home Office from processing claims would have to be repealed or disapplied.
To address the backlog, Labor says it will hire more than 1,000 Home Office clerks, adding to the 2,400 the government had already hired by the end of last year.
Would Labour’s plans reduce the number of small boats arriving?
Critics of Labor’s plans say repealing the Illegal Migration Act and ending the Rwanda program would remove the only plausible deterrents to irregular migration.
But Labor says it will invest energy and resources in creating new repatriation agreements, both with the EU and bilaterally with states from which large numbers of asylum seekers come.
Migrant returns have declined sharply over the last decade. Migration experts say this is partly because it has become unaffordable to transport people abroad against their will as the government relies on costly charter arrangements following a backlash against the use of commercial flights.
A person who advised Labor on its migration strategy said the party would make some “crunchy and immediate” decisions once it comes to power. They acknowledged that negotiating new return deals with EU countries may not reduce the overall number of people coming to the UK to seek asylum.
But they said this would still be an improvement. “People arriving on ferries as scheduled are very different to people settling on the beach.”
Colin Yeo, an immigration lawyer, argued that it may not be necessary for a Labor government to reduce the net number of asylum seekers entering the UK if it can reduce reliance on expensive asylum hotels and demonstrate that it is reducing the number of migrant deportations have increased significantly overseas.
This is “more realistic and humane” than the current government’s strategy, he argued. “It is part of a plausible public policy response in a way that is simply not the case in Rwanda,” he said.