Has Labour ‘deported’ 35,000 people?

A Labour minister and a Labour party social media account have both claimed in recent days that at least 35,000 people have been “deported” since the election. But that’s not correct, according to the government’s own data.

The 35,000 figure is the total number of immigration returns that took place in Labour’s first year in government, as set out in an ad-hoc data release last month, but most of these weren’t officially classed as “deportations”. The majority of the 35,000 were people who left the UK voluntarily, in some cases without the government being directly involved or even being informed at the time.

As we’ve explained before, not all immigration returns meet the official definition of a “deportation”, which the Home Office says refers specifically to a “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”.

Enforced returns, which is the category of returns which the Home Office says includes deportations, accounted for 26% of all returns during Labour’s first year. We don’t know how many of these enforced returns were deportations.

Deportation claims

During a discussion on migration on Sky News Breakfast on Monday morning, education minister Stephen Morgan MP said: “35,000 people have been deported that have no right to remain in the UK.”

We saw a similar claim from the Labour party on social media last week, when its Instagram account claimed “we’ve already deported over 35,000 people with no right to be here”.

We wrote to the Labour party about this last week, and also to Labour MP Josh MacAlister, who made a similar claim on Facebook in late July. Mr MacAlister has since corrected the caption of his Facebook reel to refer to “deportations and returns”.

In recent months, we’ve frequently seen ministers and MPs using the word “deportations” when referring to all immigration returns, though most official announcements have been careful to refer instead to the “return” or “removal” of “individuals with no right to be in the UK”, in line with the Home Office’s terminology.

We’ve previously written twice each to defence secretary John Healey MP and to Labour MP Mike Tapp to ask them to correct the record after they too made claims which conflated the number of deportations with the total number of returns.

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

In 2024 former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak corrected the parliamentary record after he referred to combined enforced and voluntary returns as “deportations”, which we wrote about at the time.

What the returns figures show

Returns of people who are in the UK without a right to stay here fall into two broad categories: enforced returns (those carried out by the Home Office, such as deportations and people subject to administrative removal), and voluntary returns (those where someone liable to be returned leaves of their own accord, either with or without support from the Home Office). The Home Office describes voluntary returns with no involvement from the government, or when the government has not been informed of someone’s departure, as “other verified returns”.

We don’t know exactly how many of the 35,052 returns that took place in Labour’s first year in government were classed as official “deportations”—the Home Office doesn’t routinely publish this data.

But we do know that enforced returns—the category which includes deportations—accounted for a minority (9,115 or 26%) of the total returns that took place between 5 July 2024 and 4 July 2025.