A report out from Durham University could make some awkward reading for prime minister Rishi Sunak.
Stopping the small boats is one of the PM’s top five pledges with new laws passed to ensure that “if you come to this country illegally, you are detained and swiftly removed”.
Sunak’s Government has succeeded in securing its Illegal Migration Act after months of controversy before Parliament went on summer recess, but officials are still working on when the legislation will come into force.
The Act places a legal duty on the Government to detain and remove those arriving in the UK illegally, either to Rwanda or another “safe” third country, but there are no similar return deals with any other countries and the Rwanda plan was ruled unlawful by the Court of Appeal.
Ministers are challenging the judgment and the Supreme Court hearing is expected this autumn.
Furthermore, at the beginning of summer, Mr Sunak insisted his plan was “starting to work”, saying the number of people making the journey had reduced compared with last year and playing down suggestions this was linked to poor weather conditions rather than policy decisions.
However, migrant crossings not only set a new record for the month of June, but fresh arrivals on Thursday pushed the total number of people crossing the English Channel on small boats since 2018 to 100,000.
But, as Peter Stefanovic pointed out in his latest video, the government could well be trying to tackle a problem of their own making.
In a highly damning assessment of the government’s immigration strategy, a report by Durham University recently found that the deal Boris Johnson struck with the EU is the leading cause of the rise in the number of small boats crossing the English Channel.
The ‘Sea Change on Border Control: A Strategy for Reducing Small Boat Crossings in the English Channel’ was authored by Professor Thom Brooks, Chair in Law and Government at Durham University.
The report claims that the public has lost trust in the government to put the UK’s asylum system right. A key part of the issue is that the government failed to secure a post-Brexit returns agreement with the EU.
The deal was made without a returns agreement in place. Under the Dublin Convention, an EU law which sets out which country is responsible for looking at an individual’s asylum application, the UK could ask other EU countries to take people back if they had entered the UK via safe countries. However, under the post-Brexit deal, no alternative to the Dublin Convention returns agreement was put in place.
“The government used to have a deal on returning migrants, but it ended with Brexit and no alternative was agreed. This made it far more difficult to return any new arrivals, and numbers have skyrocketed after this deal stopped,” says Professor Thom Brooks.
The study found that up until 2018, there were no recorded small boat crossings. Prior to this year, would-be refugees and immigrants more commonly hid aboard lorries, trains and ferries to enter the UK, and small boat crossing were rare. Levels of migration were also steady until the Brexit transition period ended in 2020, the report found.
Professor Brooks said he had forecast as far back as 2016 that migrant numbers to the UK would rise sharply without a returns agreement in place. According to the academic, the Conservative government had been warned repeatedly that a returns policy needed to be implemented.
It is believed that the European Union this week has told the UK it is not willing to negotiate a returns agreement for migrants arriving via unauthorised routes.
According to reports in The Times and the Daily Mail, a leaked memo has suggested that such a pact is not being entertained by Brussels, which is dealing with its own internal rows over migration and refugee returns reforms.
The Times suggested any Brussels deal would likely come with the condition that Britain share in Europe’s effort to resettle hundreds of thousands of migrants entering the EU through irregular means, including migrants arriving by boat to Italy or Greece.
Related: Sunak’s claims that there are ‘safe and legal routes’ for asylum seekers rubbished
