Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, when and how she plans to assess the effectiveness of steps taken to tackle criminal people traffickers on the coast of France.

The Government remains committed to tackling Organised Immigration Crime (OIC) and disrupting the Organised Crime Groups (OCGs) responsible. The Government and law enforcement agencies work tirelessly to tackle the criminal networks who facilitate people smuggling from source countries to Europe and then the UK.

Tackling people smuggling of all types is a priority for Immigration Enforcement, they work through their international network upstream as well as conduct investigations within the UK to disrupt OCGs. Additionally, the dedicated multi-agency OIC Taskforce, led by the National Crime Agency, is committed to dismantling OCGs engaged in immigration crime internationally. The Taskforce is active in 17 countries worldwide, and its activities include supporting judicial and intelligence capacity building in source and transit countries, and intelligence sharing in key near Europe countries.

The tragedies in the Channel over the last year and most recently this week demonstrates the high-risk routes OCGs facilitate. In response to this increasing threat the Home Office, Ministry of Defence, NCA, and UK police forces have increased cooperation with French counterparts to tackle the criminals behind the majority of these crossing attempts and protect lives at sea. Our joint efforts are resulting in continued arrests and prosecutions of these criminals, so that we deter, disrupt and dismantle the networks responsible for facilitating many of these crossings.

Since the UK-France Joint Intelligence Cell (JIC) was established in July 2020, 59 organised criminal groups involved in small boats crossings, in France, have been dismantled. In order to counter the small boats threat, we continue to work closely with French law enforcement who have so far during 2022 secured the arrests of 384 suspected people smugglers.