Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent assessment he has made of the adequacy of the number of (a) vessels and (b) personnel patrolling the English Channel in relation to people attempting to enter the country illegally.

During 2018, over 500 migrants - mostly Iranian - attempted to travel to the UK on small vessels. 80% of them attempted this in the last three months of the year.

As a result, the Home Secretary redeployed two Border Force cutters from overseas to the UK providing four cutters available to operate in channel UK waters. In addition to the four cutters, Border Force has two Coastal Patrol Vessels on operation in the English Channel.

However, this is not an issue that can be resolved by maritime resources alone. Border Force Cutters form part of a layered approach to coastal defence, including on-shore resources and intelligence and surveillance to detect efforts to smuggle guns and drugs or facilitate illegal entry into the country.

But we haven’t been doing this work alone. We have been working closely with French authorities to tackle this issue. Around 40% of the attempts last year were either disrupted by French law enforcement or returned to France via French agencies.

Through these efforts, we reduced the number of individuals attempting the crossing from around 250 in December to around 90 in both January and February.