Dover and Portsmouth: Protests

Debate between Mike Tapp and Sarah Jones

Monday 7th September 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones]

I thank the shadow Home Secretary for the start of his remarks; I think we would all agree that the right to protest should never be violently exercised. We all agree that it is not just protesters who feel angry about the current system, and we are doing all that we can to bear down on it and change what we inherited.

I know that the shadow Home Secretary was in France—we all saw and enjoyed the videos over the summer. He claims that the weather accounts for the improved situation we find ourselves in. The 43% cut in the number of people coming across on small boat crossings this year compared with last year cannot be accounted for by the weather; that is just a fact, and I hope he accepts that. I also know that he spoke to some land officers, who were not maritime officers—the officers who can enter the water. We have footage, which he has hopefully seen, of maritime officers going into the waters and doing exactly what he wants them to do. I hope he can learn a bit more about what our deal is and what responsibilities we are paying for.

The shadow Home Secretary said that we are just giving the French money without results. He knows that the new deal we have done with the French introduces payment by results for the first time. Under his Government, there was nothing; we were throwing money with no payment by results. Some £110 million of what we give to the French is dependent on their delivering results, which is why we are seeing an improvement. We are also funding more than 1,000 French police—a historic level of funding—and working in partnership with them to ensure that we are doing the things we need to do to stop the small boats from coming and to strip the criminal gangs of their armoury. Germany, for example, where a lot of the boats were being warehoused, has just passed a law to make it an offence to sell them for use in this kind of smuggling activity in another country. We are doing every single thing that we can and pulling every single lever, and the results speak for themselves.

Sadly, I think the shadow Home Secretary is the only person in this place who thinks that the Rwanda scheme would have worked. The rest of us—including, I suspect, people on his own Opposition Benches—have come to the conclusion that it was a gimmick and would never have worked. The numbers and the results we have seen over the last two years speak for themselves. In partnership with French law enforcement, we have prevented over 48,000 attempted crossings. That is substantial.

Of course, we have a lot further to go, and the shadow Home Secretary is right to have met the family of Rhiannon Whyte. What happened to her is horrific—nobody would claim anything else—and it is in her memory, and the right thing to do for every single one of our constituents across our country, that we take control of our borders and make sure we have a fair migration system. The Government are doing the hard work of restoring control at our borders. We are seeing progress. We are not complacent—we will continue to work—but I will end where I began, which is by agreeing with the shadow Home Secretary that we must allow the police to exercise the powers they need to exercise to stop thuggish and violent protest behaviour. That is what we are looking at, and if we need to learn lessons from what happened over the weekend, we will learn them. I am working closely with the police, as the shadow Home Secretary would expect, and we will make sure they have the resources they need to do their job.

[Mike Tapp (Dover and Deal) (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for her extremely important statement. As we know, on Saturday, hundreds of masked men, dressed uniformly in black, travelled from around the country to Dover, blocked key roads around Britain’s busiest port, intimidated my constituents and caused disruption. This has been described as a “dummy run” by the group. It was not spontaneous; it was well organised. Will the Minister please ensure that the intelligence picture is strong enough that the police can respond accordingly to future incidents? Will the Government also look again at whether the law on face coverings at protests goes far enough?

[Sarah Jones]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question. I was pleased to be able to talk to him earlier today, and we were in touch over the weekend as well, as the House would expect. As the Member of Parliament for that area, it is absolutely right and proper that my hon. Friend should lead the way in asking for the right lessons to be learned from what happened.

I spoke to Deputy Chief Constable Peter Ayling and Assistant Chief Constable Nicola Faulconbridge today, and they took me through the order of what happened and how it happened. It was a no-notice protest—with a lot of a protests in this country, the police are told in advance, and can then think about whether they want to impose conditions and what those conditions should be. This was a no-notice protest, in the sense that the police were not told about it. Clearly it was planned, and clearly it was people from outside the area coming in and causing chaos.

Of course, we need to learn whatever lessons we need to learn when it comes to intelligence. Since the 2024 riots, we have beefed up the structures around the national co-ordination of protests and intelligence sharing, giving us a stronger capability to look across the internet and see what we can find out there. There is more co-ordination, and the offer of mutual aid worked very well this weekend, as it always does. However, I will of course listen to any intelligence that my hon. Friend has, and we will make sure we learn the lessons.