Blitz Bureau
PRIME Minister Keir Starmer has said that a lack of coordination between UK 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. Addressing an international meeting on boosting border security and tackling people-smuggling, the PM 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.”
The Government is grappling with an issue that vexed its Conservative predecessors.
Despite law-enforcement cooperation with France and work with authorities in countries further up 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 – and neverimplemented – plan to send asylum-seekers who arrive by boat on one-way trips to Rwanda.
Starmer called the Rwanda plan a “gimmick” and cancelled it soon after he was elected in July. Britain paid Rwanda hundreds of millions of pounds for the plan under a deal signed by the two countries in 2022, without any deportations taking place.
The meeting was addressed virtually by Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, whose far-right government has opened centres in Albania to hold some asylum-seekers while their claims are processed – a project being closely watched by Starmer’s overnment.
