Former head of Border Force: Illegal Channel migrants ‘should be returned to France’

The former head of the Border Force has said that those migrants who attempt to cross the Channel in small boats should be returned to France before they can apply for asylum. Tony Smith has said that this would be the only way to stop people smugglers engendering the lives of the people that are attempting to cross.  

Mr Smith also said that the agreement was needed between the French and British governments. The Home Office minister Chris Philp said yesterday that the government was currently “reviewing laws that prevent us from taking stronger action to stop illegal migration”.

However, these are not the first such signals to come out of government. In September 2019 Priti Patel and her French counterpart Christophe Castaner promised to make Channel crossings an “infrequent phenomenon” by the spring of 2020. However, according to the BBC website, this year alone more than 2,400 people have crossed the Channel in small boats. 

Tony Smith served as Border Force’s interim director general for a year from 2012 into 2013 and has said that told the BBC that removing migrants that cross back to France would “send a message to the smugglers that it’s not going to work”. Mr Smith is insistent that turning around overcrowded boats back whilst at sea is “really quite difficult” for safety reasons as these migrants have been “coached” by smugglers to resist rescue by the French and only accept assistance from British forces. 

As a result of this Mr Smith has said: “The only practical solution that I think can be achieved would be an international agreement with the French that would enable us to return people, once we have established they are safe and well”. The reasoning Mr Smith gave for this was that: “We have got to find a way of stopping this because people are going to drown”.

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