The UK prime minister has not ruled out processing asylum claims offshore.
The UK’s new prime minister is rethinking the country’s immigration policies – starting with a potential change into how asylum seekers are processed.
Keir Starmer is likely to face an uphill battle, though, as a returns agreement with the EU seems more distant than ever before.
Speaking at the European Political Community summit, Starmer explained that he was open to the idea of Britain processing claims offshore.
He also met with Edi Rama, the Albanian prime minister. That nation currently processes asylum claims on behalf of Italy.
“In relation to the agreement between Albania and Italy, obviously there’s interest in how that might work, but that wasn’t actually the central discussion in the taskforce in the roundtable,” Starmer said, “That was about the practical measures that we want to discuss, which is about how we deal with taking the gangs down in the first place.”
“I’m a practical person. I’m a pragmatist and I’ve always said we’ll look at what works and where cases can be processed closer to origin, then that is something which of course ought to be looked at,” he added.
He did maintain that any agreement is not on his list of top priorities right now.
“The returns agreement only comes into being at the end of the process; my focus is at the beginning of the process, to make sure we actually secure our borders,” he said, “because the problem we’ve got at the moment is we’ve got tens of thousands of people who are here who shouldn’t be here who aren’t being processed.”
In terms of the future, though, Starmer can’t rely on full support from Emmanuel Macron.
“If [the Brits] want to fix the situation in the Channel it is not just a bilateral [solution]. We will not take the full burden of those who are just going through France to join you,” the French president said in a speech at the same event.
There, newly-elected Starmer explained that he hopes to reset Britain’s relations with the EU, on topics ranging from migration to security and agricultural trade.
The UK and leaders of the bloc have not seen eye-to-eye since the island nation voted to leave the EU, with relations strained ever since.
On migration, Starmer explained that his fellow heads of government had agreed with his particular approach of tackling illegal migration by clamping down on the people-smuggling gangs behind the process.
He also announced that, in future, the UK will cooperate more closely with Europol in The Hague to that end.
Starmer faces a difficult journey ahead. He’s under pressure to bring down the number of people crossing the Channel – currently estimated to be more than 10,000 this year alone.
“We’ve inherited a really bad problem from the [previous] government,” he said, “We’ve got record numbers this year, and we can’t switch that in 24 hours, in one week.”
