Has Labour carried out ‘record deportations’?

Labour MP Mike Tapp has claimed the government has carried out “record deportations”.

We’ve frequently seen MPs and ministers using the word “deportations” when referring to all immigration returns.

But as we’ve explained before, not all immigration returns are “deportations”, and we don’t actually know how many meet the official definition of a deportation.

The Home Office defines deportations as “a specific subset of returns which are enforced either following a criminal conviction or when it is judged that a person’s removal from the UK is conducive to the public good”.

We do know, however, that enforced returns—the category of returns which includes deportations—account for a minority (26%) of all returns carried out under Labour during its first year in office.

We’ve asked Mr Tapp about his claim and will update this article if we receive a response. We’ve previously contacted Mr Tapp about an inaccurate claim he made about the government’s record on deportations earlier this year, but did not receive a response.

MPs should use statistics transparently and with all relevant context and caveats, and quickly rectify oversights when they occur.

‘Record’ removals?

According to ad-hoc figures published by the Home Office, during Labour’s first year in office a total of 35,052 returns were recorded.

We don’t have data to compare this exact period with the same period in previous years, but official immigration statistics show that this figure is not a record for the number of immigration returns over a 12-month period, going back to 2004 when this data series began.

These figures show that immigration returns over a 12-month period were consistently above 40,000 between 2010 and 2016, for example.

It does appear, however, that the 35,052 returns in the first year of this Labour government represents the highest 12-month figure since 2017.

As explained above, we don’t know how many of these returns were official “deportations”, but the figures also show that the 9,115 enforced returns carried out between 5 July 2024 and 4 July 2025 also do not represent a record.

While this figure is the highest number of enforced returns carried out over a 12-month period since 2018, prior to 2018 enforced returns were consistently above 10,000 over a 12-month period.