How achievable is Reform’s plan on migration?

3 hours agoDominic CascianiHome and Legal Correspondent•@BBCDomCGetty ImagesReform UK leader Nigel Farage (R) and chair Zia Yusuf following the party’s new policyNigel Farage has set out how a Reform government would tackle what he called “uncontrolled illegal migration” – with moves including human rights law changes, and mass deportations. But how deliverable are the plans?Let’s start with the headline figure of how many people the party badges as illegal migrants (the precise definition of this is up for debate) that it says it will deport.There’s no figure in the party’s document – but during the event Nigel Farage asked Reform UK chair Zia Yusuf whether it was realistic to deport 500,000-600,000 people within the lifetime of the first Parliament under a Reform UK government, to which he replied “totally, yeah”.The party is proposing to create secure facilities to hold 24,000 to be deported every month – that gives us another figure of 288,000 a year, ramping up after 18 months of building work.Removing 6,000 people per week would, using today’s operations as a guide, require an average of 1.7 escorting officers per individual removed. When you break that down into departing planes per day, that’s within the maths for the party’s projection of five flights per day.But these targets are far in excess of what any government has ever achieved. An average of 158 people per flight, plus security, would require the equivalent of five jumbos to be available all year around. That per flight number of 158 is three times higher that the numbers currently removed on the most-packed departures.No government has ever tried to build prison-like detention facilities for 24,000 people in 18 months – the time scales envisaged by Reform – or at the cost claimed.For detention facilities to be escape-proof, they have to be the equivalent of what’s known as a “Category B” prison – which means there are walls and locked doors, wings and gates everywhere with a suitable level of staff…