Cooper Still Won’t Reveal How Many Migrants Will Leave Under Labour’s Returns Deal – Guido Fawkes

WATCH: Cooper Still Won’t Reveal How Many Migrants Will Leave Under Labour’s Returns Deal

Yvette Cooper is making the dubious claim this morning that revealing how many people the government is aiming to return to France under the new one-in-one out deal would empower the gangs. A fudge intended to save face if things go wrong…

Overnight the government announced that the deal was signed and detentions with an aim to deport would begin “within days.” On Sky News Yvette Cooper was asked about wide speculation that the weekly returns will only number 50:

“So, we’re not setting out the numbers… the numbers will vary and we want them to increase and we have not set an overall figure for the programme but also secondly we don’t want to provide operational information for criminal gangs who will then use it if they think there are particular numbers of people who are going to be detained on particular days. They will then use that and operate their boats and their gang operations around that and that’s not what we’re prepared to tolerate.”

That is a poor excuse for not revealing an overall figure and if Labour is happy with a figure expect it to be trumpeted widely. It’s unsustainable not to know the results of the long-running pilot anyway…

Asked what a successful scheme would look like in terms of numbers according to government modelling, Cooper refused to specify. The deal was meant to be agreed weeks before it actually was – the French were negotiating the number down. The Home Office will have extensive modelling on what number it thinks will make an impact…

Cooper said the deal is a “joint agreement” and the UK and France will be “reviewing it continually” until June next year. At which point she admitted the French could say – au revoir…