Illegal Immigrants: Offshore Detention and Deportation

Robbie Moore 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.