Following acceptance at conference a letter was sent to the Minister of State for Illegal Immigration as follows:
Every day we awaken to the news that another group of illegal immigrants have crossed the channel and arrived on the Kent coast in rubber dinghies. As an association we are not going to quote numbers at you, the vast numbers are well documented by news reports and on line.
The fact is our country simply cannot cope with this huge number of illegal immigrants, we know other countries are having the same problem but compared to them we are a very small by comparison.
Criminal gangs are making a fortune out of these people and it will continue to happen. It is a wonder in fact where on earth the people get their money to pay these traffickers. They are always seen on the news coming off the boats, with their smart phones in hand, but minus their passports dumped overboard in the channel, and we, the British people are left to pick up the pieces.
To be clear we are talking about illegal economic migrants here, of course due consideration must be given to refugees from such places as Afghanistan that assisted the UK but only if they use legal routes. As already stated we are a small island and it seems we are being overrun by groups of young males mostly from a country like Albania, which has no political problem. Genuine refugees also suffer because of these illegal economic migrants, we all do, due to the strain and pressure on our infrastructure, health and housing.
Costs to the benefit system, and asylum-related hotel provisions are rising amidst a mounting case backlog and record dinghy crossings. The cost of such hotel accommodation to taxpayers, is quoted as nearly £1.3 billion per year, over a billion more than the forecast of up to £70 million that was issued by the government back in in March 2021. The additional costs and strains on our NHS are also well documented.
Stop the trafficking at source would be a better option surely, but it appears that France do not want to help even though we have given them huge sums of money. From our research we understand that The UK committed slightly more than £232 million between 2014 and the end of financial year 2022/23, to France to prevent irregular migration, this was through successive published agreements with the French government.
As at March 10th 2023 it was announced and we quote that: “Hundreds of extra French law enforcement officers will use enhanced technology and intelligence insight to prevent illegal Channel crossings under a new agreement struck by the Prime Minister and President Macron in Paris today”. And in May 2023 it was agreed that a further £476 million will be given between 2023/24 and 2025/26. It was also reported in late summer of 2023 that France will try to seek out the boats and make them unseaworthy, but it seems the gangs have just moved further up the coast.
Also one report in the Express Newspaper showed French Police waiving off one boat, not exactly stopping boats then.
By the end of World War II Britain had amassed an immense debt of £21 billion. It took us to December 2006 to finally pay off that debt.
How long will it take Britain to pay off the debt we are in now with the extra burden of immigrations costs mounting by the day ? There is talk that the triple lock on pensions may be abandoned as it is not sustainable, dare we say once again if we were not paying out so much on illegal immigration this would not be the case. Our country has enough of a funding crisis in many areas as it is, so this level of extra financial burden is also not sustainable.
Reply received from:
The Home Office
Direct Communications Office
J Emanuel Correspondence Enquiries Officer
The Government is clear that no one should be risking their lives by crossing the Channel.
This is a hugely dangerous journey through one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes which has already claimed lives, and so our primary responsibility is to do all we can to prevent any further loss of life at sea.
That effort to preserve Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) is led by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, and Border Force plays a lead role in preventing the kind of tragedies that we have seen all too often in the Channel in the last few years as a result of these crossing attempts.
These crossings are also unnecessary: France, where these crossings originate, is a safe country with its own asylum system, and it is an established principle that asylum should be sought in the first available safe country. It is unacceptable that, instead, criminal gangs entice migrants to make this perilous journey for their own profit.
We must therefore act to prevent these crossings in the first place. Since the Government brought in the Nationality and Borders Act, these crossing attempts have also been illegal. That said, resolution of this situation is not straightforward and does not lie completely in the hands of Ministers or Government agencies. Illegal migration is an international problem, and it requires an international solution. It also touches upon international legal frameworks within which the United Kingdom is bound and from which it cannot easily decouple. Our response is necessarily incremental, and that means that resolving the issues can appear to be frustratingly slow.
However, we are continuing to make progress and it will be helpful if I outline latest developments. In December 2022, the Prime Minister set out his five-point plan for tackling illegal migration. This includes the Home Office establishing a new, permanent, unified Small Boats Operational Command within Border Force, which took back primacy for the operational response to Channel crossings from the MOD with effect from 1 February 2023. This new Command brings together our capabilities to coordinate intelligence, interception, processing, and enforcement efforts against Channel crossings by migrants in small boats. We are continuing to use all available technology, including drones for reconnaissance and surveillance, to pick people up and identify and then prosecute more gang-led boat pilots.
We are also adding more than 700 new staff and doubling the funding given to the NCA for tackling organized immigration crime in Europe.
The UK Government has re-established the Calais Group of Northern European nations, to disrupt traffickers all along the migration route, and in early December 2022 this group set a long-term ambition for a UK-EU wide agreement on migration.
In 2022, joint efforts by the UK and France resulted in the prevention of nearly 33,000 crossing attempts. Already this year, our joint activity with the French has seen over 13,000 crossing attempts prevented. Since the Joint Intelligence Cell (JIC) was established in July 2020, through our joint work with France, we have dismantled 82 organised crime groups linked to small boats. In 2022 alone, the JIC and law enforcement partners secured the arrest of around 400 people smugglers.
The provisions in the Nationality and Borders Act increase the penalties for those endangering life in pursuit of profit in this way, with the maximum sentence for people smuggling now raised to life imprisonment. The Illegal Migration Act, which received royal assent on 20 July 2023, is designed to ensure that people who enter the UK illegally from a safe country do not benefit from the same legal protections as those arriving by safe and legal routes. I should emphasize that we have simultaneously made one of the largest commitments of any country to resettle at-risk Afghan citizens and we are stepping up our efforts to tackle the humanitarian crisis resulting from the war in Ukraine. We have extended our Ukraine Family Scheme to allow British Nationals and those settled in the UK to bring family members here, as well as establishing a Ukraine Humanitarian Sponsor Scheme to facilitate sponsorship of those without family ties.
We’ve been honest that there is no overnight fix. That’s why we continue to work hard, including with our European partners, to bear down on these dangerous and illegal crossings.
We hope this response helps your concerns.
