Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, for what reasons there was a sixfold increase in the number of migrants crossing the English Channel in 2019 compared to the previous year.

The Home Office works closely with partners in the UK and overseas to strike people smuggling at source – identifying and dismantling the organised crime groups that facilitate illegal immigration.

Last year, more than 35,000 attempts to cross the Channel illegally were prevented at our juxtaposed controls in northern France and Belgium.

It is an established principle that those seeking asylum should claim it in the first safe country they reach and, since January 2019, we have returned over 125 migrants who entered the UK illegally via small boat to Europe.