The Tories’ 14-year run is over, but migrant solidarity campaigners are doubtful whether things look much brighter under Labour. How much has Keir Starmer’s government departed from the Conservatives’ migration policies, and what does the Home Office have in store for the next few years?

We break down key developments in the Home Office and shine a light on the companies that have a stake in them.

Note on terminology: Corporate Watch recognises there is a distinction in law between deportations and removals. However, we choose not to use the dehumanising term ‘removal’, opting to refer to all forced returns as deportations.

Jump to the section:

1. Get braced for more deportations

2. The UK’s detention capacity will grow, aided by Galliford Try Construction

3. Stay vigilant for ‘Rwanda-Lite’

4. Decision-making will become more automated

5. Refugees will continue to risk their lives to reach safe haven

…and ways to organise against the border regime

1. Get braced for more deportations

For all the controversy surrounding the Conservatives’ policies on migration, it is worth remembering that ‘enforced returns’ have never been as high as they were under Tony Blair’s New Labour, and Starmer is seeking to reverse the decline.

Less than a month in office – and just a few weeks after the worst racial violence in years – the Starmer government announced its plan to kick off a “large surge” in deportations, with the aim of “reversing the damaging drop in enforcement over recent years”.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the government intended to forcibly return 14,500 people by the end of 2024. And it has been delivering on that cruel promise, “re-purposing” Rwanda logistics to ramp up charter deportations within a few weeks of gaining power. It organised the UK’s first known mass charter to Timor-Leste in July, operated by Aero Dili, on the back of one to Vietnam, courtesy of airline HiFly. A month later, 200 people were returned to Brazil, in what was reportedly the UK’s the largest deportation on record. In just a few months in office, Starmer’s government is said to have carried out the three largest mass deportations in British history.

To enable this, Immigration Enforcement (now headed by Sajid Javid’s brother, Bas Javid) carried out raids and checks on nearly 300 sites over just a few weeks in August, with one widely-publicised incident in Bristol targeting Brazilian delivery drivers working for Deliveroo and Just Eats, employed to ferry sandwiches to the homes of the city’s wealthier residents.

Bas Javid, new head of Immigration Enforcement and brother of former Home Secretary, Sajid Javid

The government is seeking to regain access to Eurodac, the EU-wide biometrics database that records the European countries refugees transit through and claim asylum in, which it lost access to with Brexit. This usually functions alongside the Dublin Regulation, which broadly speaking, enables EU member states to send asylum seekers back to those countries to lodge their claims there. Therefore, information from the database would only be of limited use, as the UK no longer has the ability to deport people within the EU through the Regulation.

So Starmer is looking to formulate a separate returns agreement with EU countries now that Rwanda is off the table. A recent proposal involves ‘swapping’ select asylum seekers – in this case, most likely unaccompanied children who have family in the UK – for those who have made it to the UK illegally. It’s unlikely the EU, or specific European countries, would be willing to accept the UK’s deportees without a significant sweetener in return – financial or otherwise.

Meanwhile, in the absence of any legal agreement enabling asylum seekers to be pushed back to mainland Europe, it looks like the government will try to hit its targets by opening new charter routes and packing flights with as many people as it can.

2. The UK’s detention capacity will grow, aided by Galliford Try Construction

More deportations means the Home Office will need to expand its holding capacity. One way it plans to do this is by reopening its old detention centres; to this end it is renovating Haslar detention centre in Hampshire and carrying out work on Campsfield in Oxfordshire. Uxbridge-based firm Galliford Try Construction Limited is doing the job at both, and is being paid £102m and £70m for each project, respectively.

The firm is owned by Galliford Try Holdings plc., whose largest investors (according to financial databases) are Aberforth Partners LLP. Engineers AktinsRealis and property consultants Gleeds Advisory have also been contracted to work on the two sites, albeit for much smaller sums.

There have been no further updates on Home Office plans to use the former RAF base and ex-Northeye prison site in Bexhill, Sussex, to build a detention centre with a capacity of up to 1,200 people. The presence of asbestos contamination on site and a legal challenge mounted by local residents are likely to have put any development on hold.

The Home Office is soon due to start tendering for the Facilities Management 2026 (FM26) contracts for “the majority” of the government’s “UK, Northern Ireland, and European estate”. While exactly what this will cover remains unclear, the lucrative deals for the operation of Haslar and Campsfield may form part of this.

Meanwhile, former Campsfield operator, Mitie, which provides the guards used to carry out deportations, recently had its contract to run the Heathrow detention centres extended. As anticipated in our profile on Mitie from last year, the company’s fortunes have only grown owing to its foray into prison management, thirteen years after it first started operating detention centres. It will assume responsibility for HMP Millsike, a new 1,500-person category C site in Yorkshire, once it opens in early 2025.

The company also runs security services at Manston holding camp in Kent, the once grossly overcrowded site which serves as a “processing centre” for newly arrived Channel-crossing asylum seekers. The Home Office has recently carried out a consultation on turning the site into a permanent structure, along with a new Border Force Training Centre. A tender has just been launched for a £521m, six-year contract to run the camp, plus a second contract to manage Dover’s Western Jet Foil – the point of arrival for Channel-crossing refugees – security for which is currently supplied by Interforce.

In the meantime, the Home Office is relying on so-called alternatives to detention. This includes the expansion of electronic tagging started by the previous government, a job now being delivered by Serco (which also runs Gatwick, Derwentside and Yarl’s Wood detention centres) for £330m, along with G4S (for £175m). The Home Office is also increasingly using ‘non-fitted devices’ – GPS systems which require users to frequently submit fingerprint scans to confirm their location. Privacy International recently reported that Chinese manufacturer Unihertz has replaced Buddi as the Home Office’s supplier of these devices. For more on the roll-out of electronic monitoring in the UK, see our report on Capita here.

Protest against the reopening of Campsfield detention centre. Image from Keep Campsfield Closed.

3. Stay vigilant for ‘Rwanda-Lite’

There are indications that once the furore over the Tories’ Rwanda plan dies down, the government may seek to implement less trumpeted versions of the programme. For one, Starmer met with Italy’s far-right Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, in September and showed an interest in copying Italy’s new scheme to offshore asylum seekers to Albania. Other EU governments are interested in following the precedent set by Meloni, and the head of the EU Commission is seeking to establish EU ‘returns hubs’ outside the bloc.

Not only that, but in October, Starmer agreed a plan to temporarily offshore people who claim asylum on the British-occupied Chagos Islands. In recent years, Tamil asylum seekers had begun seeking refuge at the US-UK military base on the the islands, but were trapped in a human rights no man’s land. Some of the refugees left in limbo in the makeshift camp there attempted suicide. Then last month, the government struck a deal with another British-claimed island – the Atlantic outpost of St. Helena – to process any future asylum seekers arriving on the Chagos archipelago. The deal lasts until Mauritius assumes control of the Chagos Islands in 18 months’ time – although following a legal challenge, the government suddenly opted to ‘temporarily relocate’ the majority of the group to mainland Britain. Another member of the same British Overseas Territory – Ascension Island – had been a contender for a Rwanda Plan B by the Sunak government. So despite the partial u-turn on the new deal, the St. Helena scheme may be a testing ground for the UK’s ‘offshoring’ strategies over the coming years.

Lastly, we shouldn’t forget that the Rwanda plan was taken straight from the playbook of Starmer’s predecessor, Tony Blair, back in 2004. With that country still emerging from genocide, Blair had its neighbour, Tanzania, in mind. He said that the scheme would be a pilot, which if successful, could be followed by a similar plan with another African country “in the same area”. Thankfully, Tanzania rejected the deal.

4. Decision-making will become more automated

Over the past five years, the Home Office has been throwing hundreds of millions of pounds at a multitude of databases, analytics software and automation programmes as part of its ‘digital transformation strategy’, in a trend that is not likely to change.

Back in 2016, in order to implement its technological ambitions, the Home Office created Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) – a unit now comprising several thousand specialists who work in collaboration with corporate partners. DDaT oversees the development of a range of new systems focused on border analytics, passport control, watchlist databases, and immigration case management. The hefty contracts to develop and run these tools have been awarded to companies such as BAE Systems, Capgemini, 6Point6, Caci, Fujitsu, Leidos, Deloitte, Accenture, Mastek, PA Consulting, Atos, Cognizant, IBM and BJSS.

One of these projects is Home Office Biometrics (HOB), a central biometrics database made from the merger of a police and immigration database, to be used across the department to ascertain a person’s ID. The new tool would allow officers to search for matches based on fingerprints, DNA and facial recognition. However, it is designed to be adaptable to other technological advances, notably it can incorporate voice and iris recognition in its scope. Last year, IBM was given a £66m, five-year, extendable contract to manage HOB’s Matcher Service Platform, developed earlier by Fujitsu. This is on top of a £96m deal granted to arms company Leidos to transition the databases to the new system.

Atlas, a new case management system designed to automate “large parts of immigration casework”, and TRaM, a database of people made to sign at reporting centres, are used in conjunction with a third tool called IPIC, which “recommends cases for interventions” to immigration officers based on what are called ‘business rules’. The Home Office claims that IPIC and TRaM do not automate decisions since an officer makes the ultimate call about whether to accept the ‘recommendation’. But we suspect the degree of reflection and further investigation is likely to be minimal in most cases – especially in view of the Home Office’s time pressures and targets. Factors that are taken into account in the recommendations include nationality, which would then be used to round up groups for mass deportations – such as the large-scale charter flights described above. Staff can set particular search filters if, for example, Immigration Enforcement is planning a specific campaign designed to create a media splash.

It could be argued that allowing an algorithm to dictate who stays and who goes might improve consistency of decision-making. It could also be said that Home Office culture is so heartless, media-orientated and target-driven that few would notice if staff were replaced by machines. But algorithms such as TRaM seriously risk discrimination by enabling certain groups to be easily targeted. They entrench a racist attitude that sees migrants as classes rather than individuals. And they create a culture in which decision makers become reliant on technology to such a degree that serious serious mistakes can be made which may not be easily undone. One only has to look at the injustices and lengthy legal battles at the heart of the Post Office Horizon scandal to see how dangerous reliance on automated systems can be.

5. Refugees will continue to risk their lives to reach safe haven

“They build walls, we count the dead”, Calais. From Calais Migrant Solidarity.

Is ‘Smash the Gangs’ really any different to ‘Stop the Boats’? A year before the racist riots – which exploded after the Southport attacker was wrongfully characterised as an asylum seeker – Starmer played his part in fueling the fire by likening the “threat” he saw posed by refugees crossing the Channel as “on a par with” climate change, hostile foreign powers and terrorism.

By doing so, the former Director of Public Prosecutions was paving the way for expanding the scope of certain anti-terrorism laws to those accused of people smuggling, which is precisely what his government’s new Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill sets out to do. The Bill would also give legal basis to the new, £75m ‘Border Security Command’, which will bring together officers from the National Crime Agency, MI5, the CPS and Border Force to dismantle smugglers’ networks. It aims to achieve this by investing millions into surveillance tech, making greater use of undercover policing tactics, and carrying out interventions at key points along migration routes globally. The BSC will be headed by former Met commander and ex-chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, Martin Hewitt.

Martin Hewitt, ex-Met police commander and head of the New Border Security Command

The extended anti-terrorism powers proposed by the Bill come despite numerous cases of refugees being prosecuted for people smuggling after having been forced by smugglers to steer dinghies. A recent Oxford University study shows that people are being arrested for “having their hand on the tiller”, even though the reasons they did were found to be “having boating experience, steering in return for discounted passage, taking it in turns, or being under duress”.

2024 currently stands as the second busiest year for small boat crossings, after 2022, proving that attempts to counter the flow of people through aggressive tactics are just not working. Ironically, Brexit seems to have made the UK a more attractive destination for asylum seekers. This is because the UK is now outside the area covered by the Dublin Regulation, which makes it difficult to seek asylum in another European country once a claim has been rejected. This means that many who have been unsuccessful in seeking refuge in Europe may try the UK as an alternative.

The only noticeable effect of increased controls is, as ever, people making even more dangerous journeys. ‘Stop the Boats’ and ‘Smash the Gangs’ tactics, such as increasing the police patrols on Normandy beaches and attacking smugglers’ supply chains, have both driven deadly overcrowding, as these are pushing people into fewer and fewer boats. Home Office data at the time of writing shows the number of boats reaching UK waters since 2021 has dropped by 40% (from 1034 to 619), while the number of people who made those crossings has risen (from 28,526 in 2021; to 32,900 in 2024 to date).1

With more people getting into far fewer boats, it is perhaps no surprise then that greater numbers of people have died in 2024 than in any other year, with conservative official figures putting the estimate at at least 73 people at the time of writing. Some of these people have been crushed inside overcrowded boats, rather than drowning (while these cases are well documented, they are not reflected in the International Organization for Migration’s official figures).2 The police violence in Calais, the increased fortification of the border, and the appalling treatment of asylum seekers on arrival have done little to deter desperate people. More evidence – if ever it were needed – of why racist and classist controls are a dead-end solution to the growing numbers of people displaced globally.

Let’s not stay angry – let’s organise!

Action in spring against the Bibby Stockholm round–up, Peckham. Over 50 people are on trial in relation to the resistance. Image: South London Anti Raids.

The government may have shifted from blue to red, but the main difference is the packaging. Both Labour and the Tories share an interest in maintaining a steady flow of cheap workers, while scapegoating society’s most vulnerable for the ills of rampant capitalism and poor governance.

The Rwanda plan may be dead, but when the government is eyeing up alternatives, and machines are ‘recommending’ people for bigger deportation flights to new destinations, it certainly doesn’t feel like a victory. Yet there’s plenty we can do. We can organise strategically against raids in our neighbourhoods, intervening before people get anywhere near an immigration prison – and buying time for legal challenges. We can build resistance to new detention centres in places like Oxfordshire, Kent and Sussex. We can counter racist media and mobilise against migrant pogroms with street-based outreach like anti-raids stalls. And we can break the isolation at the border, in detention and in migrant hotels through direct solidarity work with those trapped there.

For more on how to get active in this resistance, check out the following projects:

Migrants Organise – self-organised migrants’ network campaigning for justice

Keep Campsfield Closed – to fight against the reopening of Oxfordshire’s detention centre

Anti Raids Network – local groups mobilising against immigration snatch squads. Over 50 people are now on trial for resistance to the Bibby Stockholm round-ups; a call has been made for people to show solidarity with the defendants at court.

Action Against Detention and Deportation (AADD) – network of groups organising against the hostile environment

No to Hassockfield – organising against Hassockfield detention centre in Durham

These Walls Must Fall – network of refugee and migrant campaigners against immigration detention

Migrants Rights Network – charity working for migrant justice and building organising capacity in migrant communities

Human Rights Observers – project documenting human rights abuses by the authorities in Calais and disseminating testimonies of migrants there.

Captain Support – activists providing practical support for refugees criminalised for crossing the border

Resources to support people in Calais

– – – – – – – – – –

Notes