Yvette Cooper’s migrant ‘crackdown’ will barely make a dent – here’s why

The Home Secretary’s benchmark for removals is the lowest annual total in almost two decades

Yvette Cooper has announced a raft of “strong and clear steps” to boost the UK’s border security and curb illegal immigration.
These included deporting more people over the next six months than since Theresa May was prime minister, expanding detention capacity by reopening closed centres, and hiring new caseworkers to track down illegal immigrants.
The Government has touted the measures as a “major surge in immigration enforcement and returns activity”. But the data show they are but a drop in the ocean.
The number of asylum applications refused or withdrawn hit 68,564 over the 12 months to March 2024, a threefold increase on the previous year and the highest number since 2003.
Unless the people affected appeal on humanitarian grounds, they are liable to be removed from the country by the Home Office.
The Home Secretary’s goal of getting enforced returns back to 2018 levels will tackle little more than a tenth of the problem.
Ms Cooper claimed that over the next six months, she hoped to achieve the highest rate of removals since 2018, in order to reverse the “damaging drop in enforcement” under the Tories.
This would entail beating the previous six-month highs, of 13,410 in 2018 and the most recent record of 14,703 set between October 2023 and March 2024. These figures refer to the sum total of enforced and voluntary returns over two successive quarters.
But even that is a low bar – both early 2024 and 2018’s records are well below the 24,503 high of the past two decades set in early 2012.
In reaction to the announcement, Dr Peter Walsh, a senior researcher at the Migration Observatory, told Radio 4: “If we look at enforced removals, last year there were 6,000 and in 2018 there were 9,000 – so this would require 3,000 more, a 50 per cent increase, which sounds achievable.” But, as Dr Walsh went on to explain, this was not exactly a particularly commendable goal either.
Looking at enforced removals alone, in 2018 there were 9,236 – the lowest annual total since comparable records began in 2004.
The 2004 beginning of the series is also its height: there were a record 21,425 removals under Tony Blair’s Labour government – more than double the Home Secretary’s plan.
Labour sources have claimed the Government’s approach to stemming Channel crossings is already working, with fewer migrants reaching UK shores in the six weeks since the election than during the same period last year and in 2022.
But transparency data on small boats activity released by the Home Office discloses this to be a highly selective analysis.
A total of 5,000 migrants crossed the Channel during the first 42 days Sir Keir Starmer was in No 10 – from July 5 to Aug 15.
This is indeed 6.7 per cent lower than the 5,357 arrivals over the same period in 2023, and dramatically lower than the 7,407 in 2022.
However, across his first six full weeks in office – Monday to Sunday, starting July 8 – migrant arrivals were higher than last year in three, or half, of them.
The sum total across the period is also higher than last year, by 5,514 to 5,371.
An extra 290 detention spaces are to be created at the former immigration removal centres at Campsfield in Oxfordshire and Haslar in Gosport to “support the higher pace of removals”.
Campsfield House closed in 2019, but at its peak in 2016 it housed 256 detainees. Haslar shut in 2015 and did not hold more than 164 people at any point.
The Government is also said to be studying options for further expansions of detention capacity, currently at 2,300.
The latest figures show that as of March 31 2024, 1,913 people were in immigration detention centres across the country. While this was 20 per cent higher than on the same date in 2023, the tally is yet again dwarfed by the less recent past. On Dec 31 2014, the Home Office was housing 3,462 people.
Some 200 people came to the UK via small boats on Monday alone, and almost 750 arrived just last week. The total number of migrants crossing the Channel for the year is now beyond 20,000.