Nigel Farage is facing questions over his plan for a million migrants to leave Britain voluntarily if each is offered £1,000.
The Reform leader on Monday said that if he became prime minister he would have the cases of 400,000 people granted asylum over the previous five years reviewed and revoke permission to remain for those who arrived illegally or overstayed their visas.
This is on top of the 600,000 people deemed to be living in the UK illegally that he has already vowed to remove.
Although each would be given £1,000 and a plane ticket, Reform estimates the policy would still save taxpayers £14.3billion over five years.
Mr Farage insisted the ‘vast majority’ of those told to return to their home countries would do so ‘peaceably’. He said even those from Afghanistan could return – as he had done a deal with the Taliban.
‘There’s no way that British taxpayers should have to live with a whole load of people who illegally broke into our country, who disguised their identities and who are now living off the taxpayer, potentially for the rest of their lives,’ Mr Farage told a press conference at Reform UK’s London headquarters.
Asked if he thought the public wanted to see deportations like those carried out in the US by Donald Trump’s ICE agents, Mr Farage said: ‘I think the British public want to see fairness, and fairness is that you can’t jump the queue – you can’t illegally break into Britain.’
He claimed that most deportations in the US were voluntary, and went on: ‘The vast majority of people… once we send them back to a safe country with some money in their pocket to restart their lives, will do it, and will do so peaceably.’
But Imran Hussain, director of external affairs at the Refugee Council, which works with asylum seekers, said: ‘This proposal is simply not a serious or workable plan.
‘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.’
And Lib Dem immigration spokesman Will Forster said: ‘Reviewing five years’ worth of asylum grants is an impractical farce that will just slow down the process even more.’
Mr Farage’s home affairs spokesman insisted a Reform government, which would withdraw from international human rights treaties, would not need extra civil servants to go through huge numbers of previously decided asylum cases.
Zia Yusuf added: ‘Everything we’re talking about here can be done by existing workforce, because rather than having to go through and assess every asylum claim on its merits, they simply have to look at the existing Home Office data which shows clearly what the method of entry was.’
He claimed Reform would have enough detention capacity to ‘deport a million people through a single [parliamentary] term’.
Asked by the Daily Mail if he expected people to return to countries such as Afghanistan, Mr Farage replied: ‘I’ve already got provisional agreements in place… so I’m confident we can do that.’
