What does the pledge mean? 

Immigration ‘returns’ involve the removal of people who are in the UK without a legal right to be here, usually to their country of origin. Some of these returns are voluntary, meaning that a person leaves the UK of their own accord (either with or without notifying the Home Office), while others are enforced (meaning their departure is carried out by the Home Office).

After leaving the EU, and prior to Labour coming into government in July 2024, the UK negotiated bilateral returns agreements with a number of non-EU countries, including Albania, Vietnam, Pakistan and Bangladesh, in an effort to speed up the return of people with no right to remain in the UK, including failed asylum seekers, foreign national offenders and others.

We’ve not seen Labour set out details of its approach to negotiating further arrangements, though it has signalled that it wants to negotiate a returns agreement with the EU, which would potentially allow the UK to return some asylum seekers who travelled to the UK via an EU member state to that country (as opposed to their country of origin).

What progress has been made?

We’ve updated this pledge to “in progress”, as the government has announced new returns arrangements with at least one country since the election.

On 28 November 2024 the Home Office announced a series of co-operation deals with Iraq, including a joint statement on migration which it said included “further work on the returns of people who have no right to be in the UK, where returns are currently very slow, and the continued provision of reintegration programmes to support returnees”.

In September the Home Office published a contract inviting charities to bid for contracts to help with the “reintegration” of people being returned to 11 countries (Albania,  Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Iraq, Jamaica, Nigeria, Pakistan, Vietnam and Zimbabwe).