New Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said she had discussed suspending visas from countries who refuse returns deals with allies as she sounded a warning over small boats
UK could suspend visas in drive to secure migrant returns deals
Labour’s new Home Secretary has warned the UK could suspend visas from countries that do not “play ball” and agree to returns deals for migrants.
Shabana Mahmood said she had discussed the measure with the allies from the Five Eyes group, who are in London for crunch talks on border security. Ms Mahmood said the nations would work together “particularly on how we deal with countries who do not take their citizens back”.
The Home Secretary, who was appointed during a reshuffle on Friday, said other nations must “play by the rules” and take back citizens with no right to be in the UK.
Visa warning
Ms Mahmood said:: “For countries that do not play ball, we’ve been talking about how we can take much more co-ordinated action between the Five Eyes countries.
“For us, that means including possibly the cutting of visas in the future, just to say, you know, we do expect countries to play play ball, play by the rules, and if one of your citizens has no right to be in our country, you do need to take them back.”
She is meeting counterparts from the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, with tackling people smuggling at the heart of their discussions. Vowing to do “whatever it takes” to stop small boat crossings, she added: “This is a Labour Government with Labour policy and Labour proposals. We’ve been looking at this for some time.
“It’s been discussed already across the Government and I’m very clear that there has to be a strong approach to maintaining our border, and that does mean saying to countries who do not take their citizens back that we’re not simply going to allow our laws to remain unenforced.”
Pressure over asylum hotels
Pressure is mounting on the Government to deal with the asylum mess it inherited from the Tories. At the end of June 32,000 people were being housed in hotels while their applications were processed.
Keir Starmer has called on ministers to come up with ways to speed up asylum hotel closures. Last week senior ministers including the Defence Secretary joined a meeting chaired by the PM on closing hotels.
Use of military bases
The Government is now considering using defence sites as temporary asylum accommodation as ministers seek to speed up plans to end the use of hotels after they became a focal point for demonstrations in recent weeks.
Defence minister Luke Pollard said bases with existing housing blocks or large areas of hard standing which could be used for temporary accommodation would be considered, along with non-military sites.
He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “We’ve deployed a military planning team into Border Security Command and the Home Office to look at military and non-military sites, about where we can help build temporary but adequate accommodation that enables us to transfer those folks from asylum hotels into that temporary accommodation so we can close even more hotels.
“We’ve closed 25 in the last year, but the Prime Minister is clear he wants every single one of them closed.”