Small Boat Channel Crossings

Question

What progress has been made to reduce the number of illegal small boats crossing in the Channel? The crossings are considered unfair, unacceptable, and lethal. They are unnecessary as France and other EU member states have safe asylum systems.

Question

Thanks Home Secretary for her reply. Requests growing cooperation between Home Office and MOD to shut down routes used by people smugglers and protect lives at sea using all available resources and tools.

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Echos Home Secretary's comments about illegal channel crossings. Notes public anger due to illegal migration issues while acknowledging respect for those seeking asylum legally.

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Asks if time has come to turn around and escort boats back into French waters on humanitarian grounds and to protect UK borders from illegal immigration.

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Expresses disappointment that Opposition refused to support Government's measures to end vexatious and unmerited claims in favour of illegal entry.

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Questions reports on offshore processing in countries like Gambia. Asks if such a country has agreed and acknowledges that distant processing might meet the letter but not spirit of obligations.

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We very much look forward to the tributes later this month. Especially today, at Home Office questions, we very much miss his kindness, his passion and his wit alongside us on the Front Bench. We hear that responsibility for ending dangerous crossings of the channel is to be taken away from the Home Office and handed to the MOD, but we have been here before. In 2019 the Government brought in the Navy to patrol the channel, and those patrols ended after just six weeks, having cost £780,000 and without a single boat having been intercepted. Can the Home Secretary explain how today's proposal will be any different from 2019 and prevent lives from being lost at sea?

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I wholeheartedly endorse the Home Secretary's comments about the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington. The Home Secretary should have pointed out that, unlike the endless Downing Street parties, arriving in the UK to claim asylum is not unlawful, as the Court of Appeal reminded her just last month. It is only her atrocious anti-refugee Bill that will see Afghans, Syrians and Uyghurs arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned for up to four years. Why does she see relentless flouting of lockdown rules as forgivable for the Prime Minister but seeking safety here from Assad, the Taliban or genocide as worth four years in prison?

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That answer was about as convincing as the Prime Minister's apology. The Home Secretary has quite a nerve to talk about political gimmicks, given that she is the first person to be sent out to the Dispatch Box to further Operation Red Meat; the proposals leaked out over the weekend have absolutely nothing to do with saving lives and everything to do with saving the Prime Minister's career and her political career. The Home Secretary sending in the Royal Navy against small boats full of refugees and asylum seekers is pathetic, inhumane and an abuse of the Royal Navy, and her grubby shopping around for places to offshore asylum seekers to is an outrageous and dangerous big white elephant. Instead of ripping up the refugee convention and locking up refugees, why does the Home Office not start working with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and others to live up to our humanitarian obligations?