Illegal Immigrants: Offshore Detention and Deportation

Derek Twigg Excerpts

Monday 13th July 2026 Westminster Hall

[Robbie Moore (Keighley and Ilkley) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that this issue is ultimately about fairness for our constituents, who are paying their taxes and are seeing someone who has come here illegally benefiting from services more than they may be able to, as residents who pay tax? Does he agree that we must absolutely consider offshore detention and consider offshore processing? We must say, “If you come here illegally, you will be deported.”

[Derek Twigg (in the Chair)]

Order. I remind hon. Members that interventions must be short.

[John Lamont]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right: it is about a sense of fairness. The system is not working in the best interests of our constituents, and I am sure that his 1,138 constituents who signed the petition feel that unfairness.

With the incentive of guaranteed mainland accommodation removed, the numbers requiring processing at any one time would fall to the low thousands, rather than the tens of thousands currently housed. The petitioner has based his argument on evidence such as that gathered by the Public Accounts Committee, which reported last month that the asylum system in the UK is

“under severe pressure, with high costs and persistent backlogs.”

The same inquiry found that repeated attempts at reform had failed to fix long-standing problems, and that short-term fixes had tended to push pressure from one part of the system to another rather than resolve it. More strikingly, the Committee recorded that the Home Office could only say that it knew where “the vast majority” of failed asylum seekers were. The Committee called that “shocking and unacceptable”. The vast majority of British people agree. The Committee’s conclusion was that the current accommodation model is “poor value for money”.

The Government response to the petition says that offshore detention would be “costly and impractical”. On that point, the Government seem to be grasping at straws and to be woefully underprepared. Two words that undoubtedly apply to the current system are “costly” and “impractical”. Offshore detention may well be costly and impractical, but the Government have not proven that point. What is worse, they have not come close to proving that it would be more costly or impractical than the current system, which was found by a cross-party Committee of this place not to provide value for money.

The signatories to the petition would be well within their rights to ask the Government to publish all the relevant figures for the current system, break that system down on a cost basis and let people see how broken it is at every stage. Have the Government assessed the cost to every individual community of providing services to those claiming asylum? The answer is no. They certainly have not come close to doing so—nor do they want to, because the cost to local services is not a simple number. It includes the ongoing cost for already strained local services and the breakdown in community cohesion. Some of it cannot be captured on a simple ledger, but is nevertheless very expensive for our country.

Many in the SNP, Labour and the Greens wish to portray an effective immigration system and a strong deterrent as somehow morally wrong. They regard any policy designed to protect our borders as outrageous. Yet internationally, offshore detention and similar measures have been effective and are increasingly being considered by Governments of all political persuasions. Australia’s move to offshore processing coincided with a sharp fall in boat arrivals from 2001, and the Australian Government maintain that offshore processing is very effective. Other countries, including Italy and Denmark, have brought in similar measures to those that the petitioner seeks. Many others, including Germany, Austria, Denmark and Greece, have considered return hub facilities outside the European Union.

No matter what some politicians think, those policies are not far right. It is right that they be properly considered. This Government have not done so appropriately. They have not seriously considered an approach that other countries have implemented successfully and that others are now looking at. They dismiss the views of the signatories to the petition and the huge number of people across the country who support it. Their analysis is short on detail and long on assumptions about costs that do not seem credible.

The truth of the matter is that our immigration system is broken beyond belief, and the British people know all about it. I represent a rural constituency in Scotland, but this issue fills my postbag and comes up time and again on doorsteps and in my advice surgeries. It comes up because my constituents, far from the English channel, can see that they are paying and that our country is suffering for this broken system. They see that we struggle to deport even serial criminals. That is why more than 700,000 people have signed the petition. They deserve to be heard, and they deserve to hear from this Government that all the substantive and reasonable options must be put on the table to fix this broken immigration system.

This is not the time to dismiss, for political or ideological reasons, proposals that are grounded in evidence and that seek to provide a real solution to one of our country’s biggest ongoing issues. The Government should take the petition seriously. They should consider a new approach to immigration. They must consider establishing offshore detention facilities for people who enter the United Kingdom illegally.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Tapp]

The Home Secretary made it clear at Home Office oral questions that the announcement on the five to 10 years absolutely stands. We opened a large consultation and had 200,000 responses that are still being worked through. Announcements on transition arrangements and so on will be made in due course—around the autumn, we expect.

Let me move on to small boat arrivals more broadly. They are unacceptable, and we have made a commitment to restore order and control by making it less attractive to come here and easier to remove people. We have also been working with international partners, and we have seen small boat crossings go down 41% in the last year.

In March, we extended the duty to deport foreign national offenders who have been given suspended sentences of 12 months or more. FNOs who have a prison sentence, a suspended sentence or a community order are referred for deportation. Foreign national offender removals are now up by 36%, and we will continue to remove those who should not be here. Progress is being made to end the use of hotels, which is something that we will achieve by the end of this Parliament. Hotel use is down from 213 in July 2024 to fewer than 170 today. Asylum support costs are down 15%. I have already covered illegal working a number of times in response to interventions.

Small boat crossings are down, decisions are up, hotel use is down, deportations and removals are up, and net migration is down by 82%. This is not an overnight fix and there is no silver bullet, but two years in, this Government are heading in the right direction with a solutions-based approach, which includes safe and legal routes and increased deportations and removals. This does not have to sit anywhere on the political spectrum; it is about finding solutions, and that is what we are doing.

I will conclude there, with thanks again to all who participated in today’s debate. I know that the strength of feeling around these issues is significant on all sides. This debate and the original petition are further evidence of that. Although we may disagree on how best to respond to the very significant challenges that this country faces from illegal migration, I think we are mostly united in believing that those challenges must be addressed if we are to be the strong, secure nation that the people we serve rightly demand. As I have set out, this Government are taking more and stronger action than any in recent memory to restore order and control to our borders. That is the task, and in that task we will be unrelenting.

[Derek Twigg (in the Chair)]

I call John Lamont to wind up.