Reform UK’s Operation Restoring Justice is more detailed than a simple “deport them all” slogan.
The party proposes a new Deportation Command, up to 24,000 secure removal-centre places, return agreements with other countries, up to five deportation flights a day and major changes to immigration and human-rights law.
Those are real policy mechanisms.
The problem is the jump from having mechanisms to delivering the headline number.
600,000 means an industrial-scale system
Removing 600,000 people in five years averages 120,000 completed removals per year.
For comparison, provisional Home Office figures record 39,690 total returns in the twelve months to July 2026. That figure includes voluntary as well as enforced returns and covers categories much wider than Reform’s proposed mass-deportation programme.
Reform is therefore not proposing a modest increase in existing enforcement. It is proposing a system operating at a fundamentally different scale.
The bottleneck is not one thing
A removal programme needs people who are legally removable and ready to travel.
That requires, depending on the case:
- identifying the person and nationality;
- completing immigration/asylum casework;
- resolving applicable legal challenges;
- obtaining travel documents;
- having detention space where required;
- recruiting and training enforcement, casework, escort and detention staff;
- arranging transport;
- obtaining cooperation from destination countries.
Building more detention centres does not automatically create travel documents. Passing a law does not make another government accept a return. Chartering aircraft does not help if there are not enough removal-ready cases to fill them.
Foreign governments matter
Britain cannot simply order another sovereign state to accept anyone the UK chooses to send.
Return agreements, nationality verification and documentation are therefore part of the delivery chain.
This is one of the most important differences between political sovereignty and operational sovereignty: Parliament can change large parts of UK law, but it cannot legislate another country into cooperating.
What does the evidence support?
It supports saying that a Reform government with a Commons majority could pursue a much tougher system: change domestic law, expand detention, recruit staff, increase enforcement and seek more return agreements.
It does not yet support treating 600,000 completed removals within five years as an independently demonstrated delivery plan.
Mark Sawyer’s conclusion is appropriately narrower than “impossible”: the components include feasible mechanisms, but the system and throughput at the promised scale have not been substantiated.
That is the important distinction.