Lord John Redwood has questioned how Reform UK would build enough detention centres to house more than 20,000 people earmarked for deportation.
Speaking on GB News, he said: “The [immigration] priorities are to turn down and off the flow, first of all, and you may need quite a lot of deportations of recently arrived illegals, as the Conservatives are recommending, so that you break the flow. You’ve got to do that for a bit, and then people won’t come.
“And I think the other priority is the indefinite leave to remain grants should not be given at the five year stage, and they should be delayed for at least another five years and made much more difficult to achieve. And then you’ve got a group of people that you can talk to about repatriating them.
“The Conservatives are stating this, now several years in advance of any final date election. So I think that’s perfectly fair. I think it’s much more difficult to take something away from somebody that has been granted.
“I thought what [Farage] was saying was it’s easy to identify these people, because they’re all people who came in illegally, whereas quite a lot of people who got indefinite leave to remain came in legally.
“It’s going to be very difficult to [handle mass asylum applications] and indeed, on past evidence, there will be a lot of institutional resistance to that.
“And of course, he won’t be able to do it on day one, were he to be in that position, because there will need to be repeals and processes to renounce treaties and so forth, which will create delay to start with.
“But he would also need to build these detention centres. I think he’s saying that he needs to be able to detain more than 20,000 people, and that they would aim to remove 20,000 a month, so that they would constantly achieve that. Is that really going to happen?
“I guess he may have more than one, I mean, we haven’t got any details. I mean, he doesn’t do the detail whereas Chris Philp and the Conservatives have actually worked out a pretty bold set of proposals which concentrate on indefinite leave to remain delays and concentrate on realistic deportations.”