The UK will look into penalising countries that refuse to take back people who are refused asylum by making visa applications for their nationals harder, Keir Starmer has said at the G7 summit in Canada.
Asked during a media Q&A about ways to reduce the number of people arriving irregularly, the prime minister said it would have a more “transactional” approach to granting visas for countries depending on their cooperation with returns.
This would also be the case, he said, for countries that did not cooperate on efforts to prevent their nationals heading towards Europe and potentially the UK to claim asylum.
Describing a G7 session on migration at the summit in Kananaskis, Alberta, on Monday, Starmer said: “I made clear that we are looking at issues like a smarter use of our visas, looking at whether we should tie our visas to the work that the countries we’re dealing with are doing on preventive measures and on return agreements.”
The UK currently has returns deals with 11 nations including Albania, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Iraq, Nigeria and Bangladesh, meaning people refused asylum can be swiftly sent back. This process is seen as a notable disincentive, with the number of Albanian nationals seeking asylum in the UK having dropped sharply.
“We’ve done a number of bilateral returns agreements,” Starmer said. “So the question is, again, whether it’s possible to go a bit beyond that. We are including looking at whether we can’t be a bit smarter with the use of our visas in return in relation to countries that don’t have a returns agreement with us.”
This would be, he added, more “transactional” in approach.
More widely, Starmer said he had spoken with France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, and Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, about asylum and small boats.
He said: “I think we need to strengthen our existing tools, but then go further and see what else we can do. And that is a piece of work we’re looking at with the French in particular.”
At the joint session on migration, Starmer said, he also put out proposals on “counter-terrorism, powers and sanctions”.
He added: “I obviously raised it specifically, and indeed in detail, with President Macron, and in terms of the specific actions that I want us to take together, as I did with Giorgia Meloni, slightly more upstream with her, which is where she’s shown some success in reducing her own numbers, and with Friedrich Merz as well, because some of the boats are transiting through Germany.”
