Border Security and Asylum

Lee Anderson Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend will know that there are long-standing arrangements for family reunion and for refugees. There are also different concerns that have been raised around Gaza, because there is a real importance to people’s being able to return to their homes in the middle east too. If she has an individual case that she would like to raise with my hon. Friend the Immigration Minister, she is very welcome to do so.

[Lee Anderson (Ashfield) (Reform)]

When I was in the migrant camps in northern France last year, the migrants told me and some of my colleagues that one deterrent that would stop them coming would be if they were turned back in the channel or sent back the same day. We saw the Border Force agency take a boatload back just last week. Will the Home Secretary now, with that advice, grow a political backbone and order the Border Force to send the boats back the same day?

[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. Member refers to an incident in the channel where there was co-operation between Border Force and the French authorities that also involved returning people to the French coast. That operational co-operation is important, but I would just say to him that “co-operation” is the really important word. If we want to prevent gangs operating and organising, and prevent boats from reaching the French coast in the first place, we have to work closely not just with France but with Germany and other European countries, and with the countries through which some of the supply chains are operating. It is that co-operation that he and some others in his party have quite often refused, but it will be important and is our best way to stop the criminal gangs.