Former Home Office Minister Tom Pursglove has branded the Liberal Democrats’ call for the UK to join the EU’s migration and asylum pact “completely naive”, telling GB News that a previous European returns system failed to deliver significant numbers of migrant returns.

The Liberal Democrats have called for the UK to join the EU’s migration and asylum pact as a way of allowing Britain to return migrants who have travelled to the UK from other European countries.

But Mr Pursglove dismissed the proposal as a return to an approach that he said had produced only small numbers of returns while allowing more migrants to travel in the opposite direction.

“Boring, EU-loving Lib Dems, completely naive,” he told GB News.

He argued that the proposal was rooted in the same thinking behind the previous Dublin Regulation, which provided a mechanism for countries to return asylum seekers to other participating European states.

Mr Pursglove said the system had failed to deliver meaningful numbers of returns to the UK.

Under the Dublin Regulation the UK sent back 209 migrants in 2018, 263 in 2019 and 105 in 2020, while thousands came the other way, in what was previously the EU’s framework for determining which country is responsible for processing asylum claims. He said the system “just didn’t work”.

He argued that the numbers returned under the Dublin system were insignificant compared with the scale of the current Channel migration challenge.

“These are tiny numbers. We were worse off on the back of that arrangement,” Mr Pursglove said.

“When you look at the scale of the challenge that we have in the Channel, those numbers just pale into insignificance.”

He also questioned what a new agreement with the EU would mean for Britain in practice, including the potential costs and the number of migrants the UK could be expected to accept in return.

Mr Pursglove argued that the consequences could extend beyond migrants who might have a legitimate basis for claiming asylum.

“It wouldn’t necessarily just be legal migrants who they would say, you know, people perhaps who should have a right to claim asylum somewhere in the EU will be able to be in safety, but also illegal migrants,” he said.

He said there was strong public opposition to allowing migrants who had entered the UK illegally to remain in the country.

“People feel really strongly, quite rightly, that none of these people should be able to stay in the UK,” Mr Pursglove said.

He concluded that any such agreement would therefore risk being heavily weighted in favour of the EU.

“So this would be a very one-sided agreement if they’re coming here,” he said.