The Home Secretary has pledged to “go further” in removing people with no legal right to remain in the UK after the government said it had carried out the largest number of removals and deportations in a decade.
The Home Office said more than 58,500 “illegal migrants and foreign criminals” had been removed or deported from the UK since the July 2024 general election, with enforced removals and deportations of foreign national offenders both rising sharply compared with the previous 19 months.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said the government would expand removals and introduce further legislation this year aimed at limiting the use of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in deportation cases, alongside a reworked appeals system designed to speed up returns.
“I vowed to scale up removals of illegal migrants — and we have,” Mahmood said, in comments released by the Home Office. “However, we must go further to remove those that have no right to be in our country. I will do whatever it takes to restore order and control.”
Under the government’s figures, more than 15,200 people were deported or forcibly removed between July 2024 and January 2026 — a 45% increase on the preceding 19-month period — while more than 8,700 foreign national offenders were deported over the same period, up 32%.
The Home Office said foreign national offenders removed included people convicted of serious offences, including murder and rape.
Alongside enforced removals, the Home Office said voluntary returns had also risen. It put voluntary removals at 43,300 over the 19 months after the 2024 election, a 27% increase on the earlier period.
It also reported increases in “early removal returns” — returns of individuals removed earlier than would otherwise have been the case — and “asylum related returns”.
The Home Office described the numbers as evidence of a shift in operational grip and signalled that additional diplomatic pressure would be applied to countries that do not accept returns.
It said the government would issue “further visa sanctions” where it judged “safe countries” were refusing to take back nationals who had no right to remain in the UK or who were being deported after criminal convictions.
The announcement also set out a package of measures aimed at speeding up the legal process around removals.
Ministers said legislation planned for later this year would stop people the government describes as “illegal migrants” from using Article 8 — the right to family and private life — to “frustrate” removal.
The government said it intended to “reset the balance between individual’s rights and the public interest” to make it easier to remove people who entered the UK illegally and deport foreign criminals.
It also promised a “one stop shop” to replace what it called a “broken appeals system”, with the intention that a person would have a single appeal route and, if unsuccessful, would be required to leave.
The Home Office said cases it considers to have little prospect of success would be fast-tracked, and that if a person does not leave voluntarily after losing an appeal, “they will be forced to leave”.
Legal specialists and human rights organisations have long disputed ministerial claims that Article 8 is routinely used to block removals, arguing that the provision is a safeguard that requires courts to weigh family life — including the interests of children — against the public interest in deportation and border control.
Critics of accelerated appeals processes have also warned that compressing timetables and narrowing routes of challenge can increase the risk of wrongful decisions, pushing more cases into judicial review or creating fresh backlogs elsewhere in the system.
With recent problems involving US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) drawing attention to how removal drives can go wrong, campaigners say it is important for the Home Office to remain compassionate as well as strict, so that only the correct people are removed and innocent people are not caught up in the pursuit of targets.
The Home Office announcement sought to link the removals drive to pressure on prisons, with ministers arguing that quicker deportations would reduce the number of foreign nationals held in custody.
Lord Timpson, the minister of state for prisons, probation and reducing reoffending, said: “We are serious about fixing the broken prison system we inherited, including stopping foreign criminals from clogging up our jails. Removals from prisons are up more than 40 per cent and our new laws will get people out even faster.”
The government said the Sentencing Act would change the law to allow for the immediate removal from prison of convicted eligible foreign prisoners for the purpose of immediate deportation, without requiring them to serve a minimum portion of their sentence in custody in England or Wales.
It said the provisions would also apply to those already in custody once in force.
The Home Office framed the wider package as part of “sweeping reforms” intended to remove incentives for people to come to the UK illegally and to strengthen border security.
It pointed to increased enforcement activity against illegal working, saying 2025 was the highest year on record for enforcement activity, with more than 9,000 arrests and 12,800 raids across the UK.
The department said those totals represented rises of 60% and 58% respectively compared with 2024.
Ministers also highlighted measures that came into effect this week under the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act, including new offences targeting online content promoting organised immigration crime.
The Home Office said it would now be a criminal offence to post content selling small-boat Channel crossings, and that the new offences were intended to target criminal gangs and fraudsters who use social media — including AI-generated content — to advertise crossings or fake immigration documents.
It also said new provisions would bar foreign sex offenders from refugee protections.
At the same time, the government said it was seeking to reduce asylum accommodation costs, including by scaling back the use of hotels and recouping funds from existing contracts.
The Home Office said more than £74 million had already been recovered from what it called “wasteful asylum accommodation contracts”.
It said that at the peak under the previous government, around 400 hotels were being used to accommodate asylum seekers at a cost of £9 million a day, and that the number in use had since fallen to just under 200.
Ministers repeated a commitment to end the use of asylum hotels by the end of the current Parliament, moving people into “more basic accommodation such as military sites”.
In a more immediate cost-cutting move, the Home Office said that from this week migrants living in hotels had been banned from using taxis for medical appointments, describing the service as “expensive”.
Campaigners have previously argued that transport decisions can affect access to healthcare, particularly for people with mobility issues, chronic conditions or limited access to public transport.
The department said its latest data showed progress in reducing parts of the asylum backlog.
At the end of September 2025, it said, the number of people waiting for an initial decision on an asylum claim was down 39%.
It added that the number of asylum decisions had doubled over the same period, and that asylum support costs were down 15%, which it said had saved “over half a billion” pounds in hotel spending.
However, the government’s emphasis on higher removals and faster processes is likely to face scrutiny over how the figures are calculated and what sits behind them.
The Home Office totals combine different categories, including enforced removals, voluntary returns and foreign national offender deportations, and do not in themselves show how many people were removed after arriving by small boat, overstaying visas, losing asylum claims, or following criminal convictions.
The department has not, in its announcement, set out the proportion of cases involving families, long-term residents, or people with complex protection claims, factors that can be central to the legal assessment in individual cases.
In notes accompanying the announcement, the Home Office said that, between July 2024 and January 2026, enforced removals totalled 15,200 (up 45%) and voluntary removals 43,300 (up 27%), while foreign national offender deportations totalled 8,700 (up 32%).
It also reported early removal returns of 4,600 (up 43%) and asylum-related returns of 17,400 (up 57%).
For the calendar year 2025, the department said there were 9,900 enforced removals and 5,600 foreign offenders deported, describing that as a 22% and 11% increase respectively.
The Home Office said more detail on the planned legislation would be introduced later this year.
Any attempt to limit the way Article 8 arguments can be raised, or to narrow appeal rights, is expected to draw close attention in Parliament and could prompt legal challenges over compatibility with the UK’s human rights obligations and the fairness of decision-making in high-stakes immigration and asylum cases.