The UK has agreed a new deal with France to prevent migrants attempting to cross the Channel and access the country.
The agreement will see the UK pay France £8 million more per year (£63 million in total) for more patrols, with an increased presence of officers on the French coast in a bid to stop boats from departing.
UK police will also be present on beaches and in control rooms under the plans to collaborate with French personnel.
There will be investment in further drones and night-vision technology to increase French security capability, as well as in the development of more reception and removal facilities in France.
French ports will be provided with funding to increase CCTV capability, while more detection dog teams will be deployed in a bid to intercept illegal migrants.
While UK prime minister Rishi Sunak warned that there was no “single” solution to “fix” the problem of illegal migration, he said he was “confident” that the UK and France could “bring the numbers down”.
The BBC reports that a record number of over 40,000 have made the Channel crossings in small boats in 2022, compared to 28,526 in the whole of 2021.
It added that 853 were spotted crossing the Channel on Sunday (November 13) after 972 had made the trip the previous day, quoting figures provided by the Ministry of Defence.
Much of the increase has been blamed on a higher volume of Albanian nationals coming to the UK via the Channel, with 12,000 having arrived on British shores in 2022 so far this year after just 50 were recorded as having done so in 2020.
The UK-France migrant deal has been struck after conditions at the migrant processing site in Manston, Kent, hit the headlines recently. The site has capacity for 1,600 people on a temporary basis, but at one stage there were over 4,000 migrants at Manston with some having been there for more than a month. The numbers have since been reduced.
Meanwhile, evidence has been given to the Commons Home Affairs Committee that the government is having to spend £7 million per day on hotel accommodation for asylum seekers.
The high volume of arrivals has led to a backlog in the processing of claims, with only four per cent of asylum applications by migrants who arrived via the Channel in 2021 having been processed.
The latest government figures covering the year to the end of June 2022 indicated that as many as 103,000 asylum applications were still pending.
The backlog prompted home secretary Suella Braverman to label the existing asylum system in the UK as “broken”.
Image by Chris Sampson on Wikimedia Commons
