Despite law-enforcement cooperation with France and work with authorities in other countries along the migrant route, more than 6,600 people crossed the Channel in the first three months of this year, the highest number on record.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said a lack of coordination between the police and intelligence agencies is partly responsible for a surge in the number of migrants reaching the UK in small boats across the English Channel.
At an international meeting on boosting border security and tackling people-smuggling, Starmer expressed frustration at the difficulty of stopping thousands of people a year risking the dangerous sea crossing from France.
“We inherited this total fragmentation between our policing, our Border Force and our intelligence agencies,” Starmer said, as officials from more than 40 countries met in London.
“A fragmentation that made it crystal clear, when I looked at it, that there were gaps in our defence, an open invitation at our borders for the people smugglers to crack on.”
Starmer’s centre-left Labour government, elected nine months ago, is grappling with an issue that vexed its Conservative predecessors.
Despite law-enforcement cooperation with France and work with authorities in countries further along the route taken by migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, more than 6,600 migrants crossed the channel in the first three months of this year, the highest number on record.
The opposition Conservatives say the figure shows Labour should not have scrapped the previous government’s contentious plan to send asylum-seekers who arrive by boat on one-way trips to Rwanda.
Starmer called the Rwanda plan, which was never implemented, a “gimmick” and cancelled it soon after he was elected in July.
Britain paid Rwanda hundreds of millions of euros for the plan under a deal signed by the two countries in 2022, without any deportations taking place.
Monday’s meeting was addressed virtually by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose far-right government has opened centres in Albania to hold some asylum-seekers while their claims are processed.
That project is being closely watched by Starmer’s government.
Meloni said the plan was “criticised at first,” but had “gained increasing consensus, so much so that today, European Union is proposing to set up return hubs in third countries.”
The governments of Albania, Vietnam and Iraq, whose nationals account for a significant number of asylum-seekers in the UK, were also represented.
Starmer, who has said organised people-smugglers should be treated in the same way as terror groups, has been criticised by refugee agencies and some Labour supporters for his hardline approach to irregular migration.
But he said “there’s nothing progressive or compassionate about turning a blind eye to this. Nothing progressive or compassionate about continuing that false hope which attracts people to make those journeys.”
