Reform pledges to review all asylum claims for past five years if it wins power

Reform UK has pledged an immediate review of all asylum claims from the last five years should the party win the next general election.

Around 400,000 people would be liable for deportation under the plans, which would target anybody granted asylum, overstaying a visa, or from a country deemed safe by a Reform-led government.

The current Labour government has announced major crackdowns on immigration, including disrupting human trafficking gangs, emptying asylum hotels and increasing the time before indefinite leave to remain is granted.

Conservatives claimed Reform was copying their policies "but without the detail", and Liberal Democrats called it an "impractical farce" of a policy.

Reform, led by Nigel Farage, has previously announced it would bar anyone arriving on a small boat, and suggested this could mean 600,000 deportations over five years.

The party also wants the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to make removals easier and abolish the right to permanent settlement in the UK after five years.

Reform's home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf said the scale of deportations under a Reform government would be "unprecedented in this country".

"I want to emphasise this," Yusuf told BBC Breakfast on Monday. "We are not going to allow the British people's goodwill to be taken advantage of."

Yusuf set out how he believed building "modular" detention capacity for 22,500 people would allow that many to be deported each month, as had been done in the US, saying this would lead to detentions totalling "a quarter of a million a year".

He also said the party wanted to "turn off welfare" for anybody arriving illegally, putting an end to free accommodation and an "endless merry-go-round" of appeals.

He added: "At no point are we saying any of this is going to be easy. If it were easy then it would already have been done. What has been lacking is the political willpower."

Asked about the staffing levels required for the proposal to review asylum claims, Yusuf told a press conference that "everything we're talking about here can be done by the existing workforce" in the Home Office.

He said: "Rather than having to go through and assess every asylum claim on its merits, they simply have to look at existing Home Office data which shows quite clearly what the method of entry was.

"So actually we could clear the entire backlog and get through all of this very quickly."

Farage said the financial incentives to encourage people to leave the UK would be "an air ticket and up to £1,000 in money".

A Labour Party spokesperson blamed the previous Conservative governments and added Labour was "finally bringing down" immigration numbers.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood had taken "decisive action" to cut small boat crossings and "restore control of our borders after the Tories' failed open borders experiment", they said.

"We have already stopped over 42,000 illegal migrants attempting to cross the Channel since the general election," they added.

"We have removed or deported nearly 60,000 people with no right to be here."

Conservative Chris Philp, shadow home secretary, accused Reform of badly copying his own proposals.

"The Conservatives have already proposed a detailed borders plan to pull out of the ECHR and completely ban asylum claims by illegal immigrants," he said.

"Instead, we would deport them within a week of arrival."

He said the Tories would deport 150,000 immigrants each year with no right to be in the UK and added: "Reform is slowly catching up with our ideas - but without the detail that will ensure it works in practice."

Liberal Democrat immigration and asylum spokesman Will Forster attacked Reform's "hostile, headline-grabbing" plans that he said would "do absolutely nothing to tackle our broken asylum system".

"The backlog of cases is already sky high thanks to the mess the Conservatives left us in," he said.

"Reviewing five years worth of asylum grants is an impractical farce that will just slow down the process even more."

His party has called for temporary processing centres to be set up to clear the asylum backlog within six months so that "those with a right to be here to get on with their lives and support themselves, and those without can be swiftly returned".

The Green Party said it did not want "people risking their lives crossing the Channel in small boats" and urged a wider look at issues driving immigration to the UK.

Deputy leader Rachel Millward said: "Another superficial, ill-thought-out and cruel announcement by Reform UK, which will fail to tackle the roots of the asylum crisis whilst making sure more suffering is heaped on the most vulnerable."

She added: "We have a duty to offer compassion and sanctuary, not insecurity, fear and intimidation."

Refugee Council's director of external affairs Imran Hussain said the pledge was "not a serious or workable plan".

He said: "Reopening and reassessing hundreds of thousands of asylum decisions would overwhelm the system which is already struggling, tie up the courts for years, and cost taxpayers tens of billions.

"Most Britons want an asylum system that works – one that is fair, efficient and controlled - not an expensive and chaotic attempt at mass deportations that would unfairly uproot families who have rebuilt their lives here over years."

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