Lewisham Greens to block Home Office immigration raids
A Green-led London council will vote next week to ban officials from cooperating with immigration enforcement, creating a local sanctuary policy that directly contradicts the national government's workplace crackdown.
Lewisham council will vote next Wednesday to end all cooperation with Home Office immigration raids. The motion is expected to pass easily given the Green party holds 40 of the local authority's 54 seats.
The move follows the discovery of a 2023 email in which a Home Office official asked the council’s food standards team to share information and conduct "joint operational visits." Green councillors fear this means environmental health data is being weaponised to target restaurant workers.
The national government has dramatically increased its focus on illicit labour. The Home Office reported a 77% increase in raids on businesses such as nail bars, car washes and takeaways since the 2024 election, alongside an 83% rise in arrests. Labour has adopted this tougher stance as it faces heavy political pressure from voters and the right-wing Reform UK party.
For businesses, this creates a fragmented regulatory landscape: stricter enforcement from the state, but potential local resistance if sanctuary policies take hold. Experts also question the efficiency of the raids. 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.”
Lewisham's stance reflects a broader urban political shift. The Green party won control of several London councils in May by appealing to progressive voters alienated by Labour’s migration policies. The party now runs Southwark, Haringey, Hackney, Waltham Forest and Lewisham, and intends to form a "green crescent" of sanctuary boroughs across the capital.
If passed, the motion will trigger a review of all council spending, data-collection systems and contracts to ensure no resources support deportation efforts. This scrutiny could extend to third-party organisations; the homelessness charity St Mungo’s, for example, apologised in 2019 for sharing data on migrant rough sleepers with the Home Office.
A Home Office spokesperson defended the department's operations, stating it had a “collaborative relationship” with Lewisham. “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,” the spokesperson said.
Zack Polansni, the Green party leader, framed the council's move as a moral imperative. “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,” he said.
