On 25 May 2012 Theresa May, the then home secretary, gave an interview to the Daily Telegraph in which she said: “The aim is to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration.” The phrase became shorthand for a series of strict policies aimed at cracking down on migrants who had overstayed, making it harder for them to work in the UK legally and access housing and bank accounts.
A decade on and the hostile environment is still around, but politicians and others from across the political spectrum question whether it has achieved its stated objectives.
25 May 2012: Theresa May announces the aims of the hostile environment in a Telegraph article. For the first time private landlords, employers and NHS staff are to be co-opted into plans to carry out checks on migrants to ensure they are in the UK legally and to report them to immigration enforcement if not. May, who became home secretary two years before she announced her crackdown, warned: “We’re going to give illegal migrants a really hostile reception.” The policy heralded a culture change across a range of UK institutions unused to policing immigration.
22 July to 22 August 2013: a pilot scheme takes place in six London boroughs featuring vans carrying billboards with the message: “In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.” Government hoped that the populist move would take some of the wind out of the sails of the Ukip party, whose anti-immigration, anti-EU narrative was gaining traction at the time. The operation was considered a failure with only a few dozen people leaving the UK as a result. The scheme was ridiculed, with some calling the helpline number saying things like: “Hello – I’d like to go home – to Willesden. Can you give me a lift?”
February 2014: BBC Panorama exposed cheating among overseas students taking English tests. This led to a draconian response from the Home Office with many innocent students later found to have been wrongly accused. About 2,500 students were forcibly removed from the UK after being accused of cheating and a further 7,200 left the country after being warned that they faced detention and removal if they stayed.
October 2017: the Guardian reporter Amelia Gentleman begins the painstaking work of exposing the Windrush scandal. Her exposé led to international condemnation of Home Office hostile environment policies. Gentleman has said it was not initially apparent how wide-ranging the scandal was. She said: “Some MPs, such as Kate Osamor, were beginning to see lots of cases; others hadn’t heard of the problem. Mostly people assumed these were weird anomalies where something very specific had gone wrong. I realised how rapidly the problem was growing when the charity Praxis said it was seeing more and more cases every year.”
October 2021: the Home Office announces a controversial policy to push back small boats in the Channel. It later emerges that officials never planned to use the policy against asylum seekers, the overwhelming majority of those crossing the Channel in small boats. The widely criticised policy now appears to have been dropped.
14 April 2022: the Home Office launches its most controversial plan to date: offshoring asylum seekers to Rwanda. Rumours and leaks about the policy had been circulating for months before the government announced it formally. At least 100 asylum seekers who recently arrived in the UK in small boats are understood to have been issued with notices of intent that they will be flown 4,500 miles to Rwanda. The government has indicated nobody will be flown out to the central African country before 6 June. The PCS union, which represents many Home Office staff, and several refugee NGOs have launched legal challenges against the policy.
