Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, built around an anti-immigration agenda, has pledged that, if it wins the next general election, it will review every asylum decision made over the past five years. Those whom the new government judges to have entered the country “illegally” or overstayed their visas would be deported.
The party—now leading in the polls—said the policy would save British taxpayers £14.3 billion ($19.3 billion) over the next five-year parliamentary term, and £137 billion over the full lifetime of the measure.
Think tanks had long treated Reform’s fiscal claims with skepticism: the Institute for Fiscal Studies, in particular, questioned whether the measures the party had outlined could deliver the savings it promised. Reform’s rhetoric, meanwhile, echoes the way U.S. President Donald Trump has justified his own deportation campaign, carried out through the controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE. In practice, those operations proved more expensive than forecast and required an additional $75 billion injection last year.
Although Reform holds just eight seats in Parliament, the political weight of its programme is growing: the party has led voting-intention polls for a year. That increases the likelihood that, in the election due no later than mid-2029, it could emerge as the force that forms the government.
In a statement on Monday, Reform put the number of people who could fall under review at roughly 400,000. According to the party, that figure is based on the number of people granted asylum over the past two years, those currently in the system awaiting decisions, and those expected to enter it over the next three years. Citing Home Office data, the party said that about 55% of asylum applicants over the past five years arrived in the country by small boat, without documents, or illegally—meaning that, under Reform’s plan, more than half of those whose cases are reopened would face deportation.
At a press conference on Monday, Farage rejected comparisons with ICE and insisted that his party was looking instead to the example of former Democratic President Barack Obama. “All this focus on ICE and Trump turns up the temperature around any issue. In fact, Obama acted in many ways that offer lessons worth learning,” he said.
Under Reform’s proposal, those deemed liable for deportation would be given a deadline to leave voluntarily. If they refused, removals would be handled by a new agency—Deportation Command. Asked whether that would require expanding staff numbers, the party’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf said the policy could be carried out by the Home Office’s existing personnel: officials would need to go back through the archives and reconstruct exactly how any given person had come to be in the country.