SIR Keir Starmer’s small boats plan was branded an “absurd gimmick” today, as immigration bosses warned the pilot scheme will have no deterrent effect.
Head of the Immigration Services Union, Lucy Morton, slammed the deal for failing to guarantee returned arrivals won’t just try again.
Small boat migrants are brought in to Dover onboard an RNLI lifeboat following an incident in the Channel today[/caption]
The illegal migrants disembark in Dover[/caption]
On Thursday Sir Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron signed a new “one in one out deal” on illegal migrants[/caption]
Last month, French boarder guards were pictured standing on a beach taking pictures as yet another boat-load of migrants set sale[/caption]
And Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp insisted that record numbers of illegal migrants will continue to the cross the Channel at pace.
It came as Home Secretary Yvette Cooper refused to say how many illegal migrants would be sent packing to France under the new arrangement.
Pressed to give a figure this morning, Ms Cooper responded: “The numbers are not fixed, even for this pilot phase that we are starting now.
“So this will be a programme that we roll out step-by-step, and we will provide updates as we go.
“But we are going to do this in a steady way.”
Revealed in the Plan:
- Migrants arriving via small boat will be detained and returned to France in short order
- A one-in, one-out system will operate with migrants sent back to France in exchange for asylum seekers
- The plan is merely a pilot scheme – which could be canned if it doesn’t work
- Only 50 a week will be sent packing – a fraction of the thousands crossing into the UK
The PM’s one-in, one-out deal with President Emmanuel Macron — who blamed Brexit for the surge in illegal crossings — would mean migrants arriving here are detained and then sent back.
Under the arrangement, agreed yesterday, for every one returned, Britain will take an asylum seeker from France with a legitimate claim and an all-clear on security.
But officials are bracing for legal battles similar to those over the axed Tory scheme to sent migrants to Rwanda in Africa.
They admitted those selected for deportation under yesterday’s deal with France would be able to wage lengthy court appeals.
And the initial pilot, hoped to be launched in the coming weeks, will see just 50 migrants sent back per week with the French exercising a veto over who they accept.
Mr Philp blasted the PM’s claim that his new plan is “groundbreaking” and “aggressive”.
The Shadow Home Secretary told Times Radio: “This new announcement is a gimmick just like the smash the gangs gimmick was a year ago because under their proposal 50 migrants a week will get sent back.
“We’ve got record ever numbers of illegal arrivals this year so far under Starmer, Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper.
“They have failed and I’m afraid they’re going to continue to fail.”
Mr Philp added: “The fact you can’t even give a number shows that this hasn’t been properly agreed.
“But it clearly is going to be a very low number.
“If it was going to be a higher number they would obviously have said that and corrected the record.”
Ms Morton warned that the plan is lacking crucial details and currently border force staff have no idea who they are supposed to be preparing to return to France.
The Head of the Immigration Services Union told Radio 4: “Who’s going to be returned?
“We’re only talking about 50 people a week. On average, we get about 800 a week.
“Are we going to detain them?
“That’s really not much of a deterrent.
“What will the French do with them when they get them back?
“Will they just let them go back into the pool of migrants to try it again?”
PM’s bad bet
WHAT are the odds on Keir Starmer’s returns deal with France actually working?
Vanishingly small.
At current rates, just six per cent of the 44,000 illegal migrants who have crossed since Labour took power — about 50 a week — would be sent back.
In gambling terms, anyone lumping £3,000 on being smuggled to Britain would have a near 20-1 ON chance of success.
That’s overwhelmingly worth the punt.
Yesterday as many as 600 migrants arrived — three months’ worth of returns — as the Prime Minister and Emmanuel Macron unveiled their agreement.
In a huge error, Labour had promised no more “gimmicks” as it scrapped the Rwanda scheme — our only viable deterrent.
Yet this pilot with France will prove to be nothing more than a stunt if it is torpedoed before it starts by other EU leaders, who fear migrants ending up in their countries instead.
Europhile Sir Keir thinks he has a helpful pal in Macron, who couldn’t resist having yet another foot-stamping sulk about so-called Brexit “lies”.
As this agreement will prove, nothing could be further from the truth.
Despite the PM’s triumphalism on the “groundbreaking” deal, Mr Macron said it had been struck “in principle” but was subject to “legal verifications” and EU sign-off.
Ms Cooper today insisted euro commissioners would back the plan.
She said: “We have been talking to the EU commissioners. We’ve also been talking to other European interior ministers and governments throughout this process.
“The French interior minister and I have been speaking about this to develop this since October of last year, and the EU commissioners have been very supportive.
“So that is why we have designed this in a way to work, not just for the UK and France, but in order to fit with all their concerns as well.”
Asked whether she was confident it would be signed off by the EU, she said: “Because we’ve done that work all the way through, we do expect the EU Commission to continue to be supportive.”
The French would also be able to choose whether to accept an individual, with the UK also given the same right over who comes here.
The Home Office refused to reveal how the 50 migrants per week would be selected, but said they would mainly be from countries deemed safe, with low rates of successful UK asylum claims.
The numbers are expected to be limited by how many cells are available in immigration detention centres, which currently have around 2,500 spaces. Another 1,000 are being added.
The selected migrants, all of them adults, will be handed notices informing them that they are due to be sent back to France.
It is not yet known how they will be returned but it could be by chartered flights or on coaches.
After being transferred to France, they will have access to the French asylum system or could be removed back to their country of origin.
Anyone who comes back across the Channel in a small boat will be removed again and not allowed to claim asylum.
The 50-per-week trial agreement is equivalent to just 2,600 returns annually, compared with the 44,000 who have arrived since Labour took power a year ago.
And this year alone more than 20,600 migrants had crossed the Channel — a 56 per cent rise on the same period in 2024.
Starmer’s barmy one in one out migrants plan has a fundamental flaw
By Julia Hartley-Brewer
IMAGINE you live in a basket case country like Afghanistan, Eritrea or Iraq.
Now imagine your entire family have saved up to fund the dangerous journey for you to get to Libya, where you then pay armed smuggling gangs to get you over the Mediterranean.
Then imagine arriving in Greece or Italy and making your way across Europe to get to the beaches of Calais, where you pay £1,500 to another gang so you can wade into the water to get on a rickety small boat overcrowded with 50 strangers to risk your life crossing one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world to get to the land of milk and honey in Britain.
But wait! The British Prime Minister has just announced that if you make it here, you face a one-in-17 chance of eventually being sent back to France.
Do you say: “Oh well, in that case I’ll give up and head back to Eritrea?”
Of course you don’t! You get on that dinghy and head out to sea.
This, I suspect, may be the fundamental flaw in Keir Starmer’s latest cunning plan to cut migrant crossings: IT WON’T WORK.
Not that this stopped the PM confidently announcing his new “one in, one out” migrant deal with great fanfare at the end of his Downing Street summit with French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday.
Instead of “smashing the gangs”, as he promised to do last year, Starmer has decided to play swapsies with Macron by agreeing to take a supposedly “genuine” asylum seeker from France in return for every illegal Channel migrant we return to them.
The two men announced the plan for a trial of this migrant exchange scheme, to start later this summer, with initially just 50 Channel migrants being sent back to France each week, in return for 50 asylum seekers coming here.
Fifty migrants account for just one in 17 (or less than six per cent) of the 44,000 illegal migrants who have arrived on dinghies in the past 12 months of this Labour Government.
Indeed, more than 600 migrants were picked up in the Channel on Thursday alone.
That’s 12 weeks’ worth of exchanges coming in just one day.
So I, like everyone else, have some questions about this much-touted plan to stop the boats.
How long will the trial last? What will count as a “successful” trial? How many people do they eventually hope to swap if the trial is extended?
Oh, and my final question: Are they out of their friggin’ minds?
Because Starmer must be absolutely barmy if he thinks voters are going to fall for this nonsense. We don’t want “one in, one out”.
We want “NONE in, ALL out”!
There are so many problems with this plan that it’s difficult to find the space to list them all, but I’ll have a go anyway.
First, as I’ve already pointed out, the chances of ever being sent back to France are so vanishingly small that they don’t provide any deterrent.
And even if a Channel migrant was among the unlucky few sent back to France, he would simply head back to the beaches at Calais and pay the smuggling gangs for a place on another dinghy.
Added to that, as Macron rightly said in his Westminster speech this week, Britain is the first-choice destination for a third of all illegal migrants who arrive in Europe because of the “pull factors” that this new plan will do nothing to end.
After all, why stay in France — where you get nothing — when you can come to Britain and get housed in a hotel or even your own flat, be given some spending money and are free to work in the black market as a food delivery rider or any other job, without any realistic risk of ever being deported?
That’s why the smuggling gangs are making fortunes, with hundreds every day paying upwards of £1,500 each for a place on a small boat, with Eritreans, Afghans and Somalians now making up the largest number of arrivals on our shores.
The French authorities claim to have stopped 12,000 migrants from crossing so far this year, but almost double that number — at least 21,000 — have successfully made it across, a 48 per cent increase compared with the first six months of 2024.
And all of this ignores the huge backlog of tens of thousands of arrivals in the past few years, with 32,000 asylum seekers still in hotels, while we fund the rents for hostels and flats for tens of thousands more.
Another major flaw in this plan is that the so-called legitimate asylum seekers coming from France via a “safe route” will be chosen from those who have a family link to someone already here.
After all, why stay in France — where you get nothing — when you can come to Britain and get housed in a hotel or even your own flat, be given some spending money and are free to work in the black market as a food delivery rider or any other job, without any realistic risk of ever being deported?
That’s why the smuggling gangs are making fortunes, with hundreds every day paying upwards of £1,500 each for a place on a small boat, with Eritreans, Afghans and Somalians now making up the largest number of arrivals on our shores.
The French authorities claim to have stopped 12,000 migrants from crossing so far this year, but almost double that number — at least 21,000 — have successfully made it across, a 48 per cent increase compared with the first six months of 2024.
And all of this ignores the huge backlog of tens of thousands of arrivals in the past few years, with 32,000 asylum seekers still in hotels, while we fund the rents for hostels and flats for tens of thousands more.
Another major flaw in this plan is that the so-called legitimate asylum seekers coming from France via a “safe route” will be chosen from those who have a family link to someone already here.
Quite why anyone should have a right to come here just because their uncle lives in Leicester is beyond me but, more worryingly, what’s to stop those asylum seekers from bringing in their entire extended families, from their wife and kids to their parents, siblings, brothers-in-law, long-lost second cousins and everyone in between?
And then THEIR relatives would claim a right to come here too!
We’d end up swapping one migrant for an entire village.
We’ll also see the rise of a brand new money-making racket for the criminal gangs: Rent A Relative.
If you want to apply for asylum in the UK, the gangs will find a suitable “brother”, “cousin” or “in-law” living in Bradford to vouch for you, in return for a hefty fee.
Meanwhile, if the number of deportation exchanges is ever ramped up at the end of the trial to the thousands needed to offer some deterrent to making the Channel crossing, we all know what will happen: The migrant arrivals will quickly disappear from their hotels and hostels and into the black market, never to be seen again.
