Border Force has a large day to day budget with more than 10,000 staff and capital investment this year of £154 m. It has a fleet of 11 vessels, 5 cutters and 6 coastal protection vessels. Its prime tasks are to prevent illegal smuggling of people and goods across our borders. At least 1 cutter…
Border Force has a large day to day budget with more than 10,000 staff and capital investment this year of £154 m. It has a fleet of 11 vessels, 5 cutters and 6 coastal protection vessels. Its prime tasks are to prevent illegal smuggling of people and goods across our borders.
At least 1 cutter and 2 coastal protection vessels are in continuous use to pick up people on overcrowded illegal small boats in the Channel, and 1 cutter is provided for the EU’s search and rescue missions in the Med under Frontex. This leaves Border Force short of vessels for the 12,000 miles of exposed UK coast not close to France and the small boat routes.
Border Force helps Customs enforce against goods smuggling as well as acting against illegal entrants to the UK. The difficult thing to understand is why they do not do more to smash the gangs and implement stated government policy to stop the small boats.
When the last government needed to stop lorries bringing illegals into the UK, often endangering their lives, it took strong action. Even if the lorry driver and truck owner knew nothing about the illegal person hiding themselves in or on some part of the truck, the driver/ company was accused of a crime and fined. When Border Force or some other safe boat service brings illegal migrants in they are not treated as helping the criminal gangs that offer a trip to the UK for profit. The illegal migrant often relies on the pick up mid Channel and the profiteer probably tips them off on how to contact Border Force to give them a free ride.
This is a very unpopular way of spending taxpayer cash, and clearly a way to boost numbers of migrants, not a way to reduce them. The last government legislated to make it impossible for an illegal migrant to be granted asylum, and to send people to Rwanda. This government scrapped those ideas. Its substitute of spending more on Border Force is not working. To break the business model of the gangs, the governments stated policy, it needs to change the operating guidance to Border Force.
