I have a confession to make. This won’t be news to some, but up until I retired last year I worked for the Home Office for over twenty years in immigration enforcement. That meant I wasn’t entirely free to comment when prominent people, or even the person on the Clacton Omnibus, got things so spectactularly wrong. Times have changed and I’m no longer so in need of having one eye over my shoulder. I pride myself that I have probably forgotten far more about immigration enforcement than most people will ever know. I’d just like to take the opportunity to address some of the more outrageous bollocks spouted by a few of our well known, or should that be notorious, MPs. (BTW – If you’re looking for state secrets you’ve come to the wrong place. All of this is out there if you go look for yourself.)
So let’s take a look at what Deform UK announced this week. First off, Farago says he’s going to build 24,000 new detention spaces. Despite his claim that he can do this on the cheap with modular construction, exprience has shown that they have to be the same standard as a Category B prison. If they’re not then the detainees either break out or walk out. The current construction estimate for this standard is at least £257,000 per bed, so that’s a minimum of £6.17 billion straight out of the box. Then you’ve got to staff them. The removal centre at Gatwick, Brook House, holds just over 500 immigration offenders and costs about £18,000 per bed per year. Farago would need at least another 48 of these detention centres, each costing about £9 million per year to run – that’s £432 million per year or £2.13 billion over a full Parliament.
Next question would be – where are they going to be built? It’s tempting to suggest dotting them all around Clacton, Skegness and Ashfield, but, and trust me on this, they won’t be welcome additions to the community. The Tories had 14 years to carry out their promise to build 20,000 new prison places, and actually managed less than a third of that. That’s in big part because as soon as you mention that you want to build something like a prison the people in Land Rovers and wax jackets appear out of nowhere to gum up the process with those pesky planning and legal challenges. I mean, how DARE they protect their local community like that, eh!
Farago says that he’ll build them in out of the way places or use redndant RAF bases, but can’t say where or which ones. Most of the existing detention centres are clustered around London – there’s only a few north of the Wash and there’s a very good operational reason why. London’s where the big effing airports are. Regional airports tend to fly business and leisure to places like Amsterdam and Shagaluf. Immigration removal needs world-wide coverage. It’s simple logistics – the further from London the more escorted transport you need. Removing someone from the most northerly detention centre, for instance, involves at least a six-hour plus road trip with an overnight for the driver and escorts.
Now, Farago claims that he’s going to remove 600,000 people over a full Parliament. Enforced charter flight removals are expensive. Migration Watch UK, which is not the Home Office’s greatest cheerleader, estimated the average cost three years ago to £8,940 per person. It’ll have gone up since then, but we’ll use it anyway to be fair to Farago. That comes in at at least another £5.64 billion.
So far we’ve clocked up £13.64 billion. A lot more than the £10 billion that Zia “good at maths” Yusuf claims it will cost, but a lot less than Rupert Lowe’s, admittedly slightly more realistic, £47.5 billion. Worth noting that the Home Office spend for 2024-25 is £27.7 billion, so unless Farago can tell us where the money is going to come from he’s going to have to eat into the police budget! And we haven’t even started on all the extra immigration officers, caseworkers, administrators, escorts, drivers, etc. that you’re going to need to manage that caseload. And not forgetting that the legal costs. The lawyers are going to have a field day with all this – they always do!
So far, so bad! Quite clear that Farago and “Good at Maths” have no flaming idea of the costs and logistics involved and have just scribbled this out on an old Rothmans packet.
To be continued …