The Home Office has kicked off the final week of June with a hard-line immigration announcement: capacity at Haslar and Campsfield immigration removal centres will be tripled, lifting the national detention estate by 40 %. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said the expansion will allow the UK to remove more than 45,000 foreign national offenders and failed asylum-seekers over the next decade. The two projects form part of a wider enforcement plan that has already seen deportations rise 41 % compared with the previous 21-month period. Ministers will double the Immigration Enforcement budget by 2028-29 and increase its workforce by 60 % within the current Parliament. That money will fund more workplace raids, digital data-matching and charter flights to priority return countries. Business immigration advisers note that tougher enforcement inevitably bleeds into compliant employers’ day-to-day operations. Sponsor licence holders should expect more unannounced visits and requests for evidence that sponsored workers are being paid and deployed correctly. Companies that rely on contingent labour face the prospect of workers being detained mid-assignment if right-to-work checks were not watertight. The announcement also trails an Immigration and Asylum Bill due in the next King’s Speech. Leaked drafts suggest the Bill will narrow the scope of modern-slavery protections and make it harder for migrants to resist removal on Article 8 (family-life) grounds. Businesses moving staff to the UK will therefore have to monitor litigation risk closely when supporting dependants or vulnerable employees. Practically, mobility managers should review crisis-management protocols, ensure that sponsored workers understand detention risks when travelling internally within the UK and refresh document-retention policies ahead of the stepped-up inspection regime.
Source: Home Office (GOV.UK)
