Reform UK wants to put migrant detention centres in Green-voting areas. Is it legal?

Reform’s plan to “prioritise” the siting of migrant detention centres in Green-voting areas would be illegal, experts have told Big Issue.

In a video released just days before the local elections,  a sunglasses-clad Zia Yusuf – the party’s shadow home affairs spokesperson – announced the policy while striding along a Brighton beach.

“Put simply, if you vote in a Reform council or Reform MP, we guarantee you won’t have a detention centre near you,” he said. “If you vote Green, there’s a good chance you will.”

The post was accompanied by the launch of a new website: votegreengetillegals.com. Plug in a postcode likely to elect Green politicians – say, Brighton – and a message pops up stating that the area will be “prioritised to receive a detention centre”.

Reform’s opponents across the political spectrum condemned the policy.  A Green Party spokesperson described it as “disgusting” idea, while Labour deemed it “grotesque.” The Conservatives said that it was “clearly made up on the spot for a social media video.”

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YouGov polling found that 45% of adults said it was not acceptable for a government to base decisions affecting individual constituencies on how voters voted – and among Reform’s own supporters, 37% agreed.

Be that as it may, Reform’s gains in the local elections mean that its policy ideas may one day make it to the statute book.

So, is this idea viable?

 The reality

The policy is “almost certainly unlawful” under current law, said Joelle Grogan, presenter of The Law Show on BBC Radio 4 and academic co-director at the Rule of Law Clinic.

Public bodies must act within their legal powers. If they don’t, anyone can challenge them in court through judicial review – on the grounds that a decision was illegal, procedurally unfair, or so irrational that no reasonable authority would have made it. Reform’s policy, Grogan says, fails on all three counts.

“It is irrational – no sensible authority would make a decision to build an immigration centre purely based on an unrelated and arbitrary reason of voters in the area,” Grogan told Big Issue.

“It is unlawful – planning law, and immigration laws which allow government to build immigration centres do not give any authority to decide where to detain people based on the voting patterns of citizens nearby. And it is procedurally improper: in that the planning policy is biased and considering irrelevant factors – voting – rather than relevant ones, [like] suitability of area for an immigration centre.”

The courts have already grappled with this kind of improper use of public power. In the 1980s, the Conservative-run Westminster Council adopted a policy of selling council homes in areas where residents were believed likely to vote Conservative – the “homes for votes” scandal.

In Porter v Magill [2001], the House of Lords ruled that council leader Dame Shirley Porter had engaged in “wilful misconduct,” establishing that elected officials cannot use their powers for the electoral advantage of a political party. Reform’s proposed policy, said Jeff King from University College London (UCL), “would go much further.”

“A court would be well-positioned to find the policy to be in bad faith,” he said.

Then there are the practical problems. Even setting aside the legal challenges, the policy would struggle.

“What is a ‘green-voting area’?” Grogan asked. “Is it a ward, a council, or a constituency? An area that has any Green majority anywhere, or has voted in a Green MP? For all the rhetoric, there are very obvious legal, political, and practical inconsistencies.”

Reform could try to legislate its way around the courts – a Commons majority could in theory pass a new act giving politicians the power to site detention centres by voting pattern.

But in reality, this would face a “hell of a ride through parliament”, said King, “especially the House of Lords, where there would be few (or no) Reform peers to defend it.”

In other words, this policy is doomed for the dust heap. But as a piece of cynical politicking – designed to set up Reform as the alternative to the Greens, and to draw attention away from Nigel Farage’s £5 billion undeclared cryptocurrency donation – perhaps it has succeeded.

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