Green-led council plans to ban cooperation with Home Office on immigration raids

Exclusive: Lewisham council’s move marks first step in Greens’ plan to create a corridor of sanctuary boroughs across London

A Green-led London council is planning to ban its officials from working with the Home Office on immigration raids, after uncovering evidence suggesting government officials wanted to use environmental health data to target restaurant workers.

Councillors on the Lewisham borough council are due to vote next week on a motion that would review its systems with a view to ending any cooperation with the government’s attempts to deport people without the right to remain in the UK.

The vote comes after council officials uncovered an email from the Home Office’s immigration enforcement team asking for help with conducting “joint operational visits”.

Ministers have boasted about conducting more immigration raids than the previous Conservative government, but Green-led councils are now promising to defy the Home Office with a “green crescent” of sanctuary boroughs across the capital.

Zack Polanski, the Green party leader, said: “I’m proud of brave, compassionate Green councils in London working to create a corridor of sanctuary where nobody, no matter where they’re from or what papers they have, has to live in fear of being snatched away from the place they call home.”

A Home Office spokesperson said the department had a “collaborative relationship” with Lewisham council, adding: “While all immigration enforcement visits are intelligence-led, we make no apology for joining forces with local authorities to enable information sharing and ultimately fighting criminals who fuel immigration crime.”

Labour has increased immigration raids to historic numbers since entering government two years ago as the party comes under pressure from voters and Reform UK to take a harder line on the issue.

The Home Office said in January there had been a 77% increase in the number of raids on businesses such as nail bars, car washes, barbers and takeaways since the 2024 election, with an 83% rise in arrests.

This is despite mixed evidence for their success.

Peter Walsh, a senior researcher at the Migration Observatory, said: “There is evidence that workplace enforcement makes employers think twice about hiring people without the right to work.

“But with an unauthorised population likely in the high hundreds of thousands, raids can only ever touch a small share of the businesses involved, and reporting has tended to suggest that they remain expensive, resource-intensive and reliant on tipoffs of variable quality.”

The Greens won sweeping victories in the local elections in May, in part by winning over progressive voters in urban areas who had been angered by Labour’s migration policies. The party now runs councils in Southwark, Haringey, Hackney, Lewisham, Lambeth and Waltham Forest.

Lewisham became a “sanctuary borough” in May 2021 under a Labour administration, announcing it welcomed all migrants, asylum seekers and refugees.

However, an email from 2023 seen by the Guardian shows the Home Office asking the council to cooperate on raids, with an official at the department’s immigration enforcement team writing to the council’s food standards team to ask for assistance.

“I am trying to establish some contacts within the council of whom we as a team can share findings with that may be of interest to the Local Authorities,” the person wrote. “Also with the possibility of carrying out joint operational visits.”

That year the Observer also uncovered evidence that child protection services in Sussex were working with immigration enforcement to gather data on unaccompanied child asylum seekers.

The Green party in Lewisham now wants to review all of its spending and data-collection systems to stop any cooperation with the Home Office on raids, as a first step to creating a corridor of sanctuary boroughs across London.

Party sources say the review will also include any contracts the council has with organisations that have themselves helped facilitate raids. That could include the homelessness charity St Mungo’s, which in 2019 apologised for sharing information about migrant rough sleepers with the Home Office.

Councillors will vote on the move at a meeting next Wednesday, with the motion expected to pass given the Greens have 40 of the council’s 54 seats.