Nigel Farage has set out a plan that he claims would lead to the mass deportation of up to 600,000 asylum seekers if Reform were to be elected to power. The plan involves ripping up human rights law, building costly detention infrastructure and potentially paying corrupt and totalitarian regimes billions to accept people put on deportation flights.

Here are the key planks of the policies – and what the moral and economic costs would be.

Leaving the ECHR, repealing the Human Rights Act and disapplying international conventions

The UK would be an outlier among European democracies, in the company of only Russia and Belarus, if it were to leave the European court of human rights (ECHR).

Opting out of treaties such as the 1951 UN refugee convention, the UN convention against torture and the Council of Europe anti-trafficking convention would also be likely to do serious harm to the UK’s international reputation.

It could undermine current returns deals, including with France, and other cooperation agreements on people-smuggling with European nations such as Germany.

The Society of Labour Lawyers said the plan would “in all likelihood preclude further cooperation and law enforcement in dealing with small boats coming from the continent and so increase, rather than reduce, the numbers reaching our shores”. 

Farage said he would legislate to remove the “Hardial Singh” safeguards – a reference a legal precedent that sets limits on the Home Office’s immigration detention powers – in order to allow indefinite detention for immigration purposes. This would be highly vulnerable to legal challenge.

As Adam Wagner, a barrister, points out, many of the rights protected by the ECHR and the Human Rights Act are rooted in British case law, so judges would be able to prevent deportations even without international conventions.

‘Payouts’ to countries like Iran & Afghanistan for returns agreements

Reform’s deportation plans rely on striking “returns agreements” with countries including Afghanistan, Iran, Eritrea and Sudan, offering financial incentives to secure these deals, alongside visa restrictions and potential sanctions on countries that refuse.

These are countries where the Home Office’s risk reports warn of widespread torture and persecution. It would risk the scenario of making payments to countries such as Iran, whose regime the UK government has accused of plotting terror attacks on British soil.

The Liberal Democrats called the payments “a Taliban tax”, saying the plan would entail sending billions “to an oppressive regime that British soldiers fought and died to defeat”. They said: “Not a penny of taxpayers’ money should go to a group so closely linked to terrorist organisations proscribed by the UK.”

Reform’s Zia Yusuf told the BBC that £2bn had been earmarked for these deals, partly funded by the UK’s foreign aid budget. The party also proposes considering using Ascension Island or other remote UK territories to detain people who cannot be returned.

Risking the Good Friday agreement

Farage suggested the plan would require renegotiation of the Good Friday agreement, which No 10 denounced as “not serious”.

The SDLP’s Colum Eastwood said it was “undermining our peace deal for a cheap headline” and would make the case stronger for a united Ireland. “These are fundamentally unserious proposals from unserious people who haven’t given a second’s thought to Northern Ireland, the layered complexities of our fragile society, the support for peace from the United States, Europe and others,” he said.

It could also reignite support for Scottish independence.

Cost of detention centres and deportation flights

Reform UK’s briefing document says the scheme would cost £10bn over five years, far less than a near identical plan proposed by the former Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe, who estimated his would cost £47.5bn in its first five years.

Asked why the costs were so different, Farage simply said: “Because Zia’s good at maths,” without further explanation.

Yet the plan suggests building significant infrastructure, and with chartered flights is likely to cost tens of billions. It involves building new capacity to detain 24,000 people, as well more staffing.

Farage has previously said Reform would use RAF sites in remote locations to house and deport people, but refused to say where they would be, making costs impossible to assess. Yusuf claimed that if they revealed the sites then Labour would “sell that land rapidly to developers or to green companies”.

Reforn also proposes a new enforcement unit that will “fuse data from the Home Office, NHS, HMRC, DVLA, banks and police”, and says mandatory biometric capture will be introduced at police encounters.

There is no associated cost in the document for this, and past attempts at cross-government databases have cost billions. Costs for police to run biometric capture at every encounter could run into the tens of millions.

New legal obligations and rights removed

A proposed new law would impose a duty on the home secretary to remove people who are in the country illegally, though it is unclear what the consequences of any failure to do so would be, or how it would be assessed.

It would make it illegal for anyone who has arrived in the UK via an irregular route to claim asylum. The party claims this would mean courts would not consider any claims from those who arrive, for example, by small boats.

But when a similar move was implemented under the Conservative government as they attempted to get the Rwanda scheme off the ground, it led to an enormous backlog and the consequence was thousands more people needing to be housed in asylum hotels.