ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

TWO MONTHS after taking office, there are tentative signs Keir Starmer and the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, may just be starting to get to grips with the Government’s most significant – and seemingly intractable – problem. Stopping the small boats.

Recent headlines have been telling a very different story. “Migrant crossings top 20,000 so far this year,” announced the BBC in the last few days. “Record numbers of people have crossed the Channel in small boats since January,” declared the Guardian. Neither headline was from a media outlet exactly famed for highlighting the perils and extreme dangers of illegal migration.

But inside the corridors of Government, they’ve been crunching the numbers, and they paint a different picture. The line Labour’s political opponents have been trying to peddle is of a new liberal administration losing control of the nation’s borders by axing the deterrent supposedly provided by the much-maligned Rwanda deportation scheme.

Yet, in reality, the actual figures show Starmer performing slightly better than his predecessors.

Our new Prime Minister hit the dubious milestone of 6,000 new arrivals on August 27, the 54th day of his premiership. Liz Truss reached it after just 29 days, Rishi Sunak after 38.

Similarly, the period between the start of the year and election day saw the highest number of small boat arrivals on record, with more than 13,000 people landing on Britain’s shores.

But since then, the rate of new arrivals has actually fallen – it is currently 25 per cent lower than the 25,000 who had arrived by this stage in 2022. And that’s despite the warm weather and calm seas of the past month.

Ministers believe there are several reasons for this positive turnaround. The first is a decision to redeploy the huge resources the Home Office was funnelling – and failing – to get the Rwanda flights off the ground. One of the first acts of the new Home Secretary was to move 300 officials off the Rwanda scheme, and on to ordinary deportations.

This produced immediate results. Although it was implemented with little fanfare, on August 23 a flight left the UK with 220 illegal migrants on board. Ministers refuse to reveal the destination for reasons of diplomatic protocol, but it represented the biggest single-day deportation in British history. It was processed without the last-minute legal wrangling and recrimination normally associated with previous removal efforts. Ostensibly, one of the reasons for this improved efficiency is the burgeoning working relationship between the Home Secretary and the Director General of Immigration Enforcement, Bas Javid.

Mr Javid, a former police officer, impressed Ms Cooper during the “access talks” that took place before Labour entered office.

Javid, the brother of the former Tory home secretary, Sajid Javid, made two important recommendations that Cooper has decided to implement. The first was to focus on the removal of illegal migrants from those countries with “low grant rates”. In other words, those nations where there is virtually no chance of an asylum request being approved and options for a successful legal challenge are much more limited.

The second was to align those removals with enhanced operational intelligence on where those particular illegal migrants are operating within the black economy. For example, it was discovered a large number of those with low grant rates are working in carwashes, nail bars, and some specific areas of the hospitality sector. So, the decision was taken to start prioritising raids on those sectors. And it’s working.

A third component of the Government’s strategy is down to Keir Starmer’s own personal “obsession” with smashing the people-smuggling gangs. It’s one of those issues that invariably takes him back to his time as Director of Public Prosecutions: he’s wholly committed with stopping the boats. The Prime Minister is convinced we can take these gangs down, smash them, and destroy their business models.

As part of this process, Labour’s Eliot Ness believes the key is not just preventing the smugglers from launching their boats from the beaches of France but tackling their operation “upstream”. In particular, he has demanded a new emphasis on targeting the corridor that operates between Germany and France and is used to transport the large dinghies that carry the migrants to the South Coast of England. A crackdown on human-traffickers is very much a priority for Sir Keir Starmer’s Government. Mr Ness is the US lawman whose team of Untouchables brought down Al Capone.

Analysis by the National Crime Agency indicates the clampdown is already having an impact. The larger dinghies operated by the smugglers carry an average of 50 people. Since 2018 there have been 32 instances of boats with higher occupancy rates, and a third of those have been intercepted since the election.

In addition, UK and French border officers have noticed an increasing number of engine failures and dinghies failing to make it out of French waters.

This shows the smugglers are finding it more difficult to secure the boats and equipment they need to facilitate the crossings – helped by shutting the German corridor. But the fight with the profiteers in human misery is set to be a protracted one. The Prime Minister, Home Secretary, and their Cabinet colleagues are a long, long way from declaring victory.

They are well aware that the traffickers will adapt their own tactics. And there’s a recognition they are in part at the mercy of the elements, with a mild autumn and winter potentially reversing the successes of the summer.

There’s also an acceptance within Government that to really break the people-smugglers’ stranglehold some major new deterrent policy may have to be unveiled. With the Rwanda scheme deemed a costly shambles, Labour might have to look at some sort of offshore processing model in order to send a firm signal.

Rishi Sunak famously pledged, “We will finally stop the boats”. His failure to do so cost him his premiership.

We will not be hearing Keir Starmer making the same rash promises. But, there is no doubt, Labour believe they are in a war with the small-boat traffickers. And, so far, in these early days of rule, they are doing a good job in smashing the gangs.