Priti: Use foreign aid to stop illegal migrants
MILLIONS of pounds of foreign aid money would be diverted into a new crackdown on people smugglers who help migrants enter the UK, under plans being drawn up by Home Secretary Priti Patel.
Ms Patel has argued with Chancellor Sajid Javid that a proportion of the £14.5 billion which Britain hands out in overseas aid every year should instead go to teams trying to combat organised crime networks sending migrants across the Channel in small boats.
The move by Ms Patel – a former International Development Secretary herself – follows growing calls for the bloated aid budget to be channelled more directly towards the British national interest, amid a number of high-profile exposés of waste and mismanagement.
British immigration officials are now working with French counterparts in Calais and Dunkirk to break up the migrant networks and have told Ms Patel that they need an injection of funding and manpower to deal with the increasing sophistication of the operations.
Border Force staff have reported that the camps where migrants wait before attempting to reach the UK have become increasingly complex mini-towns, with barbers, waiter- service restaurants and even Amazon deliveries.
Last month the Border Force intercepted the highest number of migrants trying to reach the UK in a single day, with 86 people attempting the journey in small boats. Gangs are now co-ordinating their actions in France to send ‘surges’ of small boats across the Channel in an effort to outmanoeuvre patrol boats.
The UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), which is in charge of moves to thwart the operations through its Invigor task force, says smugglers wait until there is ‘pent-up demand’ from migrants before orchestrating ‘mass departures’ in the knowledge that not all of the boats will be stopped. Last year more than 1,300 migrants used the dangerous shipping lane to reach Britain.
Following a crackdown on the supply of boats to northern France, the NCA says dinghies are being bought from as far away as Germany.
After the teams cleared a migrant camp containing about 1,000 people in Dunkirk last month, they told how gang leaders use phones with ‘self-destruct’ buttons which erase evidence about migration routes.
When Ms Patel was International Development Secretary, she protested about the way much of the aid budget was spent. Critics say the pressure to spend it leads to waste and corruption.
A source close to Ms Patel said: ‘It is in the interests of the migrants and the UK that these crossings are stopped. Some of these migrants are being loaded into tiny boats at gunpoint after handing over their life savings to criminal gangs and are in severe danger of losing their lives on the treacherous crossing.
‘The public are deeply sceptical of aid spending, which is hardly surprising given some of the farcical projects that have been in the papers in recent years. It would be much better to spend some of that money tackling small boat crossings.’