A senior Home Office official has praised the French for intercepting 28,000 illegal immigrants and destroying more than 1,000 boats but has admitted the number of people crossing the English Channel was still “unacceptable.”
Dan O'Mahoney, the Home Office’s Clandestine Channel Threat Commander, told the Home Affairs Committee on Wednesday 38,000 people had crossed the channel in 936 small boats this year.
He said a further 28,000 migrants had been stopped from crossing by the French authorities, who had also destroyed 1,072 boats.
O'Mahoney said there had been an “exponential” rise in the number of Albanian migrants crossing the channel, from 50 in 2020 to 800 last year and 12,000 so far this year.
Many Albanians ‘Gaming the System’
O'Mahoney said: “Within that cohort ... there are undoubtedly people who need our help, but there are also a large number who are deliberately gaming the system.”He said many people flew from Albania to Belgium and then made their way to the French coast to board the small boats.
O'Mahoney said the grant rate for asylum claims for young Albanian men was only around 12 percent so, he said, many do not bother to claim asylum.
He said, they “will typically put them in a hotel for a couple of days, and then they‘ll disappear, work illegally in the UK for maybe six months, maybe a year, send the money home, and then they’ll go back to Albania.”
O'Mahoney added: “They are able to do that because the way the asylum system works and the NRM [National Referral Mechanism] works makes it quite easy for them to do so.”
O'Mahoney praised the work of a Joint Intelligence Cell in Calais, where the Home Office, the National Crime Agency, and French authorities share information on people traffickers.
He said the Joint Intelligence Cell had managed to dismantle 55 organised crime groups this year and he highlighted one particular operation last week which led to the arrest of six men who were involved in bringing illegal immigrants across the channel in small boats.
The NCA said, in a statement, four boats and 133 lifejackets had been seized and said six men, from Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and France, will now stand trial in the French courts in February 2023.
Abi Tierney, the Home Office’s Director General, Customer Services Capability, said they were spending £6.8 million a day housing asylum seekers in hotels, up £2 million since February.
Dan Hobbs, the Home Office’s Director of Asylum, Protection, and Enforcement, told the committee that 96 percent of asylum claims from 2021 had still not reached a final adjudication and, of the four percent which had, 85 percent had been successful.
Conservative MP Tim Loughton called the 96 percent figure “ridiculous” and said: “So a vast number of people are still not knowing if their claim is going to be successful or not and are residing in the UK at the taxpayers’ expense?”
“Yes, they will be at different stages, some may be pending appeal,” Hobbs replied.
Hobbs went on to say: “As is well-documented ... there is a challenge in processing asylum claims in a timely way.”
“Challenge isn’t the half of it,” replied Loughton.
The committee also heard evidence about Manston, the former army base in Kent which is being used to process those who arrive on small boats.
O'Mahoney told the committee when Manston was brought into use in February, “the aim was to run a site that had between 1,000 to 1,600 people passing through it every day. And that all of those checks will be completed in under 24 hours.”
“The Manston model relies on outflow ... into detention or into asylum accommodation,” he said. “As the year went on it became increasingly difficult to move people off the site.”
SNP MP Stuart McDonald, who visited Manston earlier this year, said he understood around 3,000 people were currently being held there which, he said, was more than are being held in any British prison.
“Those numbers are broadly accurate,” replied O'Mahoney.
McDonald asked about a “potentially very dangerous” outbreak of diphtheria at Manston.
Inspector Left ‘Speechless’ by Situation at Manston
David Neal, the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, later told the committee he had visited Manston on Monday and had been left “speechless” when he discovered 2,500 migrants at the former army base were being guarded by untrained custody staff, who he described as a mixture of immigration enforcement officers and security guards.He said he wrote to the then Home Secretary Grant Shapps on Monday to “alert” him to the situation.
Shapps was replaced by Suella Braverman in Tuesday’s Cabinet reshuffle.
Neal said that when he visited Manston there were 2,800 being held there, with another 190 at the Western Jetfoil facility in Dover and a further 24 en route from Dover to Manston.
He said 78 migrants had been moved out of Manston in the previous 24 hours and he said: “What was alarming was the numbers [coming in] ... are outstripping the capacity of the site.”
The committee’s chair, Diana Johnson, said Immigration Minister Tom Pursglove had also been due to give evidence on Wednesday but he was replaced by Robert Jenrick in Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Cabinet reshuffle and Jenrick was not in a position to attend.
She said she very much hoped the Home Secretary Suella Braverman would keep a commitment to speak to the committee next month.
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