Illegal Immigrants: Offshore Detention and Deportation

John Lamont Excerpts

Monday 13th July 2026 Westminster Hall

[John Lamont (Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered e-petition 737105 relating to offshore detention and deportation of illegal immigrants.

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Twigg, and to open this debate on behalf of the Petitions Committee. I will speak today in my role as a member of the Committee; in doing so, I am obliged to give not only my own views on the issue, but those of the petitioners and the campaigners who have sought this debate. I will set out what the petition seeks, its merits and some points worth considering further. Of course, I have my own views, which I will share throughout the debate.

I congratulate the petitioner on setting up the petition. Unusually, he is one of our colleagues: the hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Rupert Lowe). The petition calls on the Government to

“establish offshore detention facilities for individuals who enter the UK illegally, to process them and arrange their deportation.”

It closed in March with over 720,000 signatures from every part of the United Kingdom, including from a great many of my constituents in Galashiels, Hawick, Kelso, Jedburgh and across the Scottish Borders. The number of signatures that the petition attracted reflects the strength of feeling on immigration.

Let me set out the scale of the problem that has prompted the petition. Each year, tens of thousands of people are entering the United Kingdom illegally, mainly travelling by small boat across the English channel. There is a process for those fleeing war and persecution to seek asylum in this country. The people coming here illegally are not following that process. They are not doing the right thing. They are breaking the law. When they get to this country, it becomes incredibly difficult for them to be removed. Nearly everyone who arrives here goes on to claim asylum, even if their claim is dubious. Even in circumstances in which it is clear that they should not be here, perhaps because of a criminal record, it is challenging to remove those who hide behind the process.

Those abusing the process benefit from the fact that our asylum system is broken. Resolution of asylum claims takes far too long—often years for the initial case, and then potentially far longer on appeal. As of March this year, over 10,000 people were waiting more than a year, and nearly 100,000 people were in asylum accommodation, including more than 20,000 in hotels. As these claims go on, people are housed by the state. The policy of housing asylum seekers in hotels is one of the signatories’ main objections to UK asylum policy. They are correct in their assessment of the moral flaws of the policy. A system has been created that seems to encourage and reward those who make an asylum claim even if they have no real chance of success or fair basis for doing so.

This is not about those who fairly claim asylum, but about those who abuse the system. The practice of using hotels for these people has led to justified public anger. At a time when normal British citizens are struggling to make ends meet and working hard only to pay huge sums in taxes to fund services that are declining, it is grossly unfair that people illegally entering this country are being put up in hotels at the public’s expense.

The Government have started to use dedicated sites larger than hotels, on the basis that concentrating provision is more manageable than dispersing tens of thousands of people across hundreds of hotels the length and breadth of the country. In further information that the petitioner submitted ahead of today’s debate, he argues that if consolidation into larger mainline sites is already accepted as an improvement on hotels, the logical next step is to consolidate provision entirely. Offshoring at a single location with one integrated set of services, including accommodation, healthcare, legal support, translation and case management, would replace the costly current patchwork of provision. It would provide clearer entry and exit controls. Crucially, it is argued that it would have a genuine deterrent effect that dispersed mainland accommodation cannot deliver.

[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 ---

[John Lamont]

I am not used to having 90 minutes to speak, but I promise not to detain colleagues long. I thank all Members who took part, particularly the hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Rupert Lowe), who was the petitioner, and the hon. Members for Hartlepool (Mr Brash), for Runcorn and Helsby (Sarah Pochin), for Clapham and Brixton Hill (Bell Ribeiro-Addy) and for South Basildon and East Thurrock (James McMurdock), my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Esther McVey) and the various party spokesmen.

I have been on the Petitions Committee since the last election, and it is quite telling that this petition has had, I think, the second or third highest number of signatures. I am surprised that more MPs are not participating. Is this an example of where Parliament is disconnected from what our constituents are telling us? I know that 2,500 constituents of my constituency neighbour the hon. Member for Carlisle (Ms Minns) signed the petition, the second highest number in the UK. I have been at other petition debates here and there has not been enough space for all the MPs who wanted to participate. That is telling.

Part of the problem, with the greatest respect to the Minister, is that although we hear all the achievements that he thinks the Government have achieved, the reality is that people out there in society do not see or feel those achievements. They feel the pressures in their society because of the broken immigration system. In the 12 months between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026, 43,806 illegal arrivals took place in the UK, and that was up on the previous year. That is why our constituents feel so frustrated and why so many people signed this petition.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered e-petition 737105 relating to offshore detention and deportation of illegal immigrants.