Rishi Sunak vows crackdown on Channel crossings

Rishi Sunak today vowed 'enough is enough' on illegal immigration as he vowed to end the Channel crisis. 

The PM said the public was 'right to be angry' and 'we have to stop the boats', insisting that 'fairness' was the guiding principle.

He said current arrangements are too 'fragmented', and the government will create a 'permanent unified small boats operational command' with hundreds more staff. 

Holiday parks, disused student halls will be used to house up to 10,000 arrivals, to save around £5million a day in hotel bills.

But Mr Sunak said he wants to tackle the root of the cause by raising the threshold for people covered by 'modern slavery' rules. There will be a presumption that Albanians can be returned to their own 'safe' country, as 55 per cent are being allowed to stay at the moment.

And the premier suggested that everyone who comes to the UK illegally will be banned from settling here. 

Mr Sunak told MPs: This is not what previous generations intended when they drafted our humanitarian laws.' 

'Unless we act now and decisively this will only get worse.' 

Mr Sunak was setting out the first steps of his strategy to deal with small boat crossings with a plan to speed up the assessment of claims from countries deemed 'safe'.

Home Office figures from September showed there were more than 143,000 asylum seekers waiting for a decision on their claims, while nearly 100,000 had been waiting more than six months.

The overall figure was more than three times higher than it was over the same period in 2019, when 26,125 had been waiting for more than half a year.

The Government is under pressure to tackle the perilous unauthorised journeys across the Channel, believed to have exceeded 43,000.

Ministers have singled out Albanians as accounting for more than a third of the 33,000 migrants who crossed the Channel in the first nine months of the year.

This was a sharp increase compared with the 3 per cent recorded in the whole of 2021.

Mr Sunak said a third of all those arriving in small boat were Albanian - around 13,000 people so far this year.

But while many other comparable nations returned almost all would-be migrants from Albania the UK's rejection rate was just 45 per cent.

He said he has struck a new agreement with Albania that will include border force staff being embedded in Tirana.

British case workers will be given clear guidance that Albania is a safe country for returns.

The modern slavery threshold will also be raised, so case workers are required to have 'objective evidence' rather than just a 'suspicion' to classify someone as a victim.  

'Albania is a safe, prosperous European country,' Mr Sunak said. 

Mr Sunak recently held his first talks with Albanian prime minister Edi Rama, during which they agreed to close 'loopholes' preventing the rapid return of failed asylum seekers.

But Mr Rama has been angered by comments from Home Secretary Suella Braverman, saying she was using his citizens as scapegoats for failed immigration policies.

Mr Rama criticised her 'crazy' use of language and said she was 'fuelling xenophobia' after she claimed there was an 'invasion' of England over the Channel.

Last month Ms Braverman admitted the Government has 'failed to control our borders' as she came under pressure over the number of crossings and the conditions asylum seekers were facing after arriving in the UK.