New government minister makes incorrect claim about number of deportations

This morning in an interview on LBC, recently appointed migration and citizenship minister Mike Tapp MP claimed that “deportations are up to 35,000 now”.

But this isn’t correct. As we’ve explained several times before, there were 35,052 immigration returns during Labour’s first year in government—but not all immigration returns meet the official definition of a ‘deportation’.

The majority of the 35,052 returns were voluntary returns. 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, according to ad hoc data that was published by the government last month.

We don’t know how many of the enforced returns were classified as deportations—we’ve asked the government about this several times but have not received a response.

In other interviews this morning on Sky News and BBC Radio 4’s Today programme [2:27:48], Mr Tapp said there had been 35,000 “deportations and removals”.

When asked by Nick Ferrari in this morning’s LBC interview how many of the 35,000 returns were people who had crossed the Channel by small boat, Mr Tapp said it was “hard to put an exact figure on that”, and when asked again, said it was “really difficult to give that exact figure”.

While the ad hoc stats released by the government last month don’t contain a breakdown of how many of the 35,052 returns were people who had arrived by small boat, the latest release of regular data from the Home Office shows that 2,330, or about 7%, of the 35,833 voluntary and enforced returns that took place in the year ending June 2025 were of people who had arrived by small boat.

We’ve previously seen Mr Tapp claim that returns and deportations under Labour are at record levels. We’ve asked him about his latest claims and will update our blog if we receive a response.