This morning’s Sun reports on a new Labour pledge to “deploy a 1,000-strong squad to track down failed asylum seekers and foreign criminals” in the event that it wins power at the election.
According to the report, the new outfit will operate both within the United Kingdom and overseas, with “agents” in other countries responsible for negotiating more returns agreements.
That last details seems a little odd – such agreements are, presumably, normally negotiated via the ordinary diplomatic channels, and it would seem unusual to delegate that responsibility to “agents” of a border-enforcement task force. It sounds rather like an attempt to pad the numbers by counting diplomatic personnel.
However, the bigger question mark is over the way Labour says they would pay for it. Per the Sun, this new “squad” will be “financed by savings from clearing the asylum backlog and ending the use of hotels”.
Now, in the long term both of those things would, or at least could, generate significant savings for the Exchequer. The problem is that getting to that point ought to require a lot of up-front spending.
Clearing the backlog would require more Home Office officials assigned to assessing cases – and more returns agreements, which Labour apparently intend to delegate to a task force funded via the savings of clearing the backlog in the first place.
Ending the use of hotels, meanwhile, would require ministers to bite the bullet and authorise the construction of a purpose-built asylum residential and detention estate. This would allow those in the system to be housed cost-effectively, and those awaiting deportation to be safely detained.
But Labour will encounter exactly the same problem as the Conservatives on this, namely that it involves a big up-front capital investment (of the sort to which the Treasury appears allergic) and that no MP wants such facilities in their constituency.
Of course, all of this assumes that you are trying to clear the backlog within the existing system. There are other ways that ministers can try to reduce friction and speed up deportations. For example, the Government has attempted to reduce grounds for appeal and restrict the abuse of things such as modern slavery protections.
We haven’t heard anything from Labour about policies in that vein, however, which raises the spectre of a possible alternative: clearing the backlog by such means as rubber-stamping applications and granting amnesties to overstays and absconders.
Such a policy would have the effect of reducing the headcount of people in the asylum system. It would thus reduce the number of people HM Government was directly responsible for housing, in hotels or anywhere else. It could be done quickly and would generate immediate savings.
But it would do this at the price of once again abandoning the attempt of actually controlling who comes to this country. Funding a tough-sounding new “squad” on the savings of such a policy would be like buying a big new padlock for a stable door, financed from the savings of no longer needing to feed or care for the horse that just bolted.
It may be that Labour has another plan in mind. Certainly the limited reporting on this plan to date has some good proposals: a “crack down on illegal employment practices” would, if effective, definitely help to reduce one of the big pull factors that makes the United Kingdom such an attractive destination, i.e. the fact that it is relatively easy to enter the black economy here.
But that problem isn’t going to be solved by a 1,000-strong task force (minus whatever share of its headcount is deployed on diplomatic service overseas). Even if real, painful sanctions were introduced for businesses caught employing illegal labour, the problem is so widespread that the state would just end up playing whack-a-mole.
Such a push would need to be backed up by new policies. The big one would be introducing ID cards, leaving no employer any excuse for hiring someone who didn’t have the right to work here. Smaller interventions could include things like banning Deliveroo and similar businesses from allowing their employees to share their accounts.
To date, the biggest problem with immigration control has been that neither Labour nor the Conservatives has been really serious about it. Policing illegal immigration effectively is expensive, whilst trying to sustainably reduce levels of legal immigration would involve a fundamental rethink of this country’s political economy and picking fights with lots of vested interests, such as universities and business.
Whoever forms the next government, they are going to face the same pressures, caught between a tax burden that is already at historic highs and core budgets that are already stretched to creaking point. Escaping this Overton Precipice is going to require bold and imaginative action, in pursuit of a coherent plan for fundamental reform. Neither party yet shows any sign of having such a plan.
In its absence, the fear must be that ministers will continue to look for the cheap and easy way out. On illegal immigration, that looks a lot like funding a new task force with the savings of waving people through.
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Author: Henry Hill
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