Starmer to announce funding and powers for officers to launch anti-smuggling operations. A new organised immigration crime intelligence unit of specialist investigators is being created to tackle the crisis
Prime Minister Keir Starmer says he will double funding for Britain’s border security agency and treat people-smuggling gangs like terror networks in an attempt to stop migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats.
In a speech Monday to a meeting of the international police organization Interpol, Starmer will say the gangs behind irregular migration are a serious threat to global security.
Arguing that “the world needs to wake up to the severity of this challenge,” Starmer will say that “we’re taking our approach to counterterrorism, which we know works, and applying it to the gangs,” according to extracts released by his office.
He’ll call for more cooperation between law-enforcement agencies, closer coordination with other countries and unspecified “enhanced” powers for law-enforcement.
Starmer plans to increase the UK Border Security Command’s two-year budget from 75 million pounds ($97 million) to 150 million pounds ($194 million). The money will be used to fund high-tech surveillance equipment and 100 specialist investigators.
Like previous Conservative British governments, Starmer’s Labour Party administration is struggling to stop thousands of people fleeing war and poverty from trying reach the UK from France in flimsy, overcrowded boats.
More than 31,000 migrants have made the perilous crossing of one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes so far this year, more than in all of 2023, though fewer than in 2022. At least 56 people have perished in the attempts this year, according to French officials, making 2024 the deadliest since the number of channel crossings began surging in 2018.
Starmer will argue on Monday that “there’s nothing progressive about turning a blind eye as men, women and children die in the channel.” The opposition Conservative Party argues that Starmer should not have scrapped the previous government’s plan to send some asylum-seekers who reach Britain by boat on one-way trips to Rwanda. Supporters of the proposal say it would act as a deterrent. Human rights groups and many lawyers say it is unethical and unlawful to send migrants thousands of miles to a country they don’t want to live in.
Starmer called the plan a “gimmick” and canceled 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.
Senior police and government officials from the 196 Interpol member states are attending the global police body’s four-day congress in Glasgow, Scotland.
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‘UK asylum system would descend into chaos’
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Meanwhile, Home Office minister Angela Eagle, the minister for borders, security and asylum, said officials had been forced to find more private accommodation for new arrivals and blamed the backlog of tens of thousands of cases built up under the last government.
She said that the system would “descend into chaos” if Labour refused to open more hotels for people seeking refuge in the UK.
The government’s decision to open asylum hotels despite Keir Starmer’s pledge that he would close them have been condemned by the Tories and Reform.
In Labour’s election manifesto, Starmer said he would “end asylum hotels, saving the taxpayer billions of pounds”. On Thursday, hundreds of people were removed from the Bibby Stockholm barge and put into hotels across the country.
Asylum seekers were also seen moving into two hotels, in Berkshire and Greater Manchester, after the Home Office received “ministerial approval” to use them. In her first public comments on the development, Eagle said ministers had no choice but to make the temporary move after discovering nearly 120,000 unprocessed asylum claims after Labour took power.
She said: “It remains our commitment to end the use of asylum hotels and house people in more cost-effective and suitable accommodation in communities. But the size of the existing backlog means we are forced to use hotels in the meantime. This is not a permanent solution. It is a necessary but temporary step to ensure the system doesn’t descend into chaos. “When this government took over in July, we inherited an asylum system under exceptional strain, with tens of thousands of cases at a complete standstill in a backlog, without their claims processed and a record number of people arriving on small boats in the first half of the year.
“The home secretary took immediate action by restarting asylum processing and scrapping the unworkable Rwanda policy – this will save an estimated £4bn for the taxpayer over the next two years,” she said.
Labour is acutely aware that keeping asylum seekers in hotels can quickly become a toxic issue. During last summer’s riots, several hotels were targeted by far-right activists. The latest figures from June show there were nearly 30,000 migrants living in more than 250 hotels at a cost of £4.2m a day. Since then, more than 15,000 people seeking asylum have arrived across the Channel, the majority of whom will have to be housed in hotels.
At the same time, the asylum backlog – the number of people claiming asylum whose cases were yet to be processed – soared over the final months of the Conservative government.
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