The Home Office is aware of a total of 69 persons known to have died while attempting to cross the English Channel in small boats since 2020:

2020: 6 deaths reported

2021: 34 deaths reported

2022: 4 deaths reported

2023: 12 deaths reported

2024: 13 deaths reported (as at 30 April 2024)

The Home Office is working at pace to introduce legislation to tackle illegal migration.

The Bill will deliver the Prime Minister’s commitment, as set out in his oral statement on 13 December 2022 (Official Report, column 885 to 888), “to make it unambiguously clear that, if you enter the UK illegally, you should not be able to remain here. Instead, you will be detained and swiftly returned either to your home country or to a safe country where your asylum claim will be considered. You will no longer be able to frustrate removal attempts with late or spurious claims or appeals, and once removed, you should have no right to re-entry, settlement or citizenship.”

Further details will be set out in due course.

I thank my hon. Friend for his support. I share the same desire to stop the boats, for all the reasons we have discussed. He should rest assured that the Home Secretary and I are working intensely and as quickly as possible to bring forward that legislation, because I want what he wants: to ensure that those people who come here illegally will simply not be allowed to stay.

Rubber dinghies and boats seized under the immigration act are stored under the control of the Queen’s warehouse. All goods that are seized that are not required for forensic and/or criminal proceedings are required to be held for a period of 12 months before consideration of disposal.

Where no claim request has been received by the Queen’s warehouse the goods will be disposed of after the required time.

Due to the duration that the goods seized are held, they have not been worthy of consideration of sale or donation due the question of their seaworthiness and significant deterioration whilst in storage.

A Statutory instrument has been developed to amend current legislation to enable the disposal of said goods in a reduced time where no forensic or criminal proceedings are outstanding.

People crossing the Channel to enter the UK have come from a safe country – usually France – and so there is no reason why they need to make this trip in order to claim asylum. Those fleeing persecution should stay in the first safe country they enter.

The number of migrants arriving in the UK crossing the Channel by small boats for the months of January to March 2020 is approx. 450. These are provisional figures based on operational management information. The figures for April and May have not passed through a data quality check and cannot be assured. The final figures for all months will be published at a later date, once they have been verified and fully quality assured.

The UK continues to work closely with France and other countries to return migrants who have entered the UK by small boat in order to provide a strong deterrent against these dangerous crossings.

Organised criminal groups (OCGs) continue to facilitate the majority of migrant journeys to the UK. The threat we are facing from organised immigration crime spans multiple countries, nationalities and criminal methodologies.

It is complex, and we are working to tackle the criminal groups who facilitate the travel from source countries to Europe and the United Kingdom.

The migrants making the dangerous journey to Europe include illegal migrants who have paid to travel, trafficked people, as well refugees and asylum seekers. Each of these groups of individuals has very different needs in terms of our response towards them. However, in all cases we are tackling the OCGs who make profit from them all.

The UK is playing a leading role in tackling organised immigration crime and protecting UK borders is just one element of that. We work with and support our European partners to detect and pursue these OCGs as well as raising awareness of the dangerous methods they use to move migrants and the exploitation that occurs in many cases.

Preventing organised immigration crime upstream is a core objective of Immigration Enforcement. Its network of staff based in embassies and consulates in over 30 key source and transit countries carries out the following key activities:

• Working with carriers around the world to reduce the threat of inadequately documented people (IDPs) reaching the UK by air, through training and a 24/7 advice service which is staffed both locally and in the UK;
• Developing intelligence packages related to the visa or air threat for subsequent criminal investigations and prosecutions overseas and in the UK;
• Targeted capacity building programmes to improve capability of local partners to tackle immigration crime; and
• Providing intelligence support to the visa operation.

Additionally, the UK has established the Organised Immigration Crime Taskforce, which brings together officers from Border Force, the National Crime Agency, Immigration Enforcement and the Crown Prosecution Service. The Taskforce takes a “whole of route” approach to identify and tackle the groups involved in organised immigration crime, seeking to use every opportunity to disrupt them in source countries, in Europe and in the other countries migrants travel through to reach the UK. It has successfully disrupted organised crime groups involved in immigration crime through participating in intelligence development and sharing, as well as arrests and prosecutions.

The UK and France maintain a strong relationship on the issue of migration and those attempting to access the UK illegally, ensuring that the necessary support is delivered to vulnerable migrants whilst upholding security at our shared border. Officials from both governments maintain a regular pattern of engagement on tackling the issue.

The Home Secretary and French Interior Minister Christophe Castaner spoke most recently on the 6^th May and discussed cooperation on tackling Covid-19 as well as our bilateral response to migrants crossing the English Channel using small boats. They are due to hold a follow-up call within the coming week.

Border Force vessels covering the South East Channel are usually tasked to identify migrant events by the Coastguard, with the priority being search and rescue and the safety of life. Border Force work closely with the Coastguard and French Authorities to ensure we provide an effective response to migrant events at sea. Migrants undertaking these dangerous journey’s in unsuitable and overloaded small boats are putting the lives of themselves and others at considerable risk and the priority at sea for all assets deployed is safety.

At sea, under international law, the preservation of life is paramount. In some cases, French boats will remain with migrants if they refuse rescue. But we are clear no-one should be crossing at all and we are developing plans to reform policies and laws to help to stop these crossings completely.