Channel migrants enter UK in lorries while police ‘too focused on small boats'
Migrants are sneaking into the UK in lorries while police are focused on small boats crossing the Channel, a watchdog has said.
The HM Inspectorate of Constabulary said officials had missed opportunities to intercept illegal crossings while distracted.
The police watchdog also said in a report that the Government had failed to tackle organised crime effectively because police forces were not gathering and sharing intelligence properly.
It said the UK's Border Force, police and the National Crime Agency (NCA) needed to be better-connected, noting that some agencies had no access to police records to help them thwart people-smuggling gangs.
The report, commissioned and conducted in the first half of 2024, is a blow to Sir Keir Starmer's pledge to 'smash the gangs' as illegal migration continues across the Channel.
The Prime Minister repeated his vow to get tough on illegal immigration earlier this month, saying the UK risked 'becoming an island of strangers'.
The police watchdog claimed the Government and NCA's focus on Channel crossings left other routes into the UK vulnerable, with migrants sneaking in undetected in the back of lorries, or procuring visas through fraudulent means.
'Throughout this inspection, we often heard that the Government and the [NCA] were too focused on small boats crossing the English Channel', the watchdog said, warning that this might 'lead to missed opportunities in other areas of immigration crime, such as clandestine vehicle entries'.
The pace of migrant Channel crossings in small boats so far this year is higher than in previous years. As of May 17, about 12,700 migrants had been detected in the Channel, 30 per cent more than by that time last year, according to government data.
But it is impossible to forecast what might come for the remainder of the year. In 2022, when the UK hit a record high of nearly 45,800 small boat arrivals, the numbers only began to spike around mid-July.
While migrants crossing the Channel are easily recorded, lorry stowaways may reach the UK undetected.
Neville Blackwood, an international law enforcement specialist and former UK police officer, said: 'It's so visible when you've got these boats, and people being escorted by the border force; it's very impactful … and emotive.
' When they come in on a lorry, they aren't necessarily getting picked up and ushered to a hotel.'
The number of illegal migrants arriving in the UK by committing visa fraud is also challenging to track.
The watchdog said that the focus on small boats meant 'a complete picture of all types of [organised immigration crime] wasn't available'.
It said the Government and NCA must establish and co-ordinate their intelligence-gathering because small boats carry illegal migrants who 'are highly likely to have paid members of organised crime groups to arrange their transport'.
This makes the migrants potential witnesses and key sources of information on criminal gangs, the watchdog said.
But the current approach to intelligence-gathering was 'neither effective nor robust enough', the watchdog said, meaning that 'intelligence and investigative opportunities are being lost'.
An efficient and effective legal method should also be set up to allow the authorities to examine migrants' mobile phones and other devices, which might 'have valuable information about the criminals they have been in contact with before crossing, how they paid them, the modes of travel and the routes used', the report added.
The report comes after Sir Keir was snubbed last week on his first visit to Albania by Edi Rama, the country's prime minister, who ruled out allowing Britain to send failed asylum seekers to be detained there.
Sir Keir had attempted to open talks to establish 'return hubs' to process illegal migrants who have exhausted all options to remain in the UK.
Italy built a similar centre in Albania, but it mostly sits empty because of legal challenges in Italy.
The UK police watchdog's report issued ten recommendations, including the streamlining of intelligence-sharing within the UK among all agencies working on organised immigration crime, from the National Border Force to regional police forces.
It said they should all have access to the Police National Database, which could help them tackle the gangs involved on British soil.
Over time, information collected in the database could point to various patterns – for instance, whether a criminal group was operating primarily out of one part of the UK, or if it had a link to other countries, noted Mr Blackwood.
The NCA said in response that it had 80 ongoing organised crime investigations, and that 'tackling the networks…is a critical priority'.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BBC News
28 minutes ago
- BBC News
Dog helps police track down illegal vapes in Cambridgeshire
Thousands of illegal vapes, cigarettes and tobacco were seized as part of a multi-agency officers, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Trading Standards and HMRC were assisted by Wagtail dogs, who were trained to detect tobacco, in the inspections in Ely, Soham and Littleport on Tuesday, 3,171 illegal vapes and 32,000 cigarettes were seized. Some of the vapes had oversized tanks and incorrect labelling, and others had not been notified to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. There were also tobacco products without the correct warnings and labelling in English. Over the last two years, Trading Standards has seized about 13,000 illegal vapes and more than 100,000 illegal cigarettes across Cambridgeshire and Mat Lupton-Pike, from the East Cambs Neighbourhood Policing Team, said: "Illicit cigarettes, vapes and tobacco pose a serious risk to health as well as fuelling funding for other related criminal activity."We ask the public to continue to report any information or concerns to us."The more information we have, the more efficient we can be at targeting those causing harm to our communities."Peter Gell, service director, regulatory services for Cambridgeshire County Council said: "These ongoing, targeted enforcement operations send a clear message to the organised crime gangs that the sale of illegal tobacco and nicotine products will not be tolerated in Cambridgeshire, and that Trading Standards, the police and HMRC are committed to taking a hard line with anyone we uncover perpetrating these crimes." Follow Cambridgeshire news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
The Independent
29 minutes ago
- The Independent
I thought I knew what Keir Starmer believed – now, it's anyone's guess
Harriet Harman once described a politician's waking nightmare. As social security secretary in the New Labour government, she was delivering her first speech to the party conference in October 1997. 'All these unfamiliar words started coming up on the autocue. I couldn't go back to my notes, and just had to carry on. I realised that Gordon Brown had made the changes to delete all my references to spending plans.' Something similar happened to Keir Starmer in May, as he read a speech on immigration from the prompter in Downing Street. He told Tom Baldwin, his biographer, in an interview published on Friday, that when the unfamiliar phrase 'an island of strangers' scrolled up on the glass screens, he just read it out. 'I wouldn't have used those words if I had known they were, or even would be interpreted as an echo of [Enoch] Powell,' he told Baldwin. 'I had no idea – and my speechwriters didn't know either.' Starmer had arrived back from a three-day trip to Ukraine the night before, and learned that morning that his former home in Kentish Town had been firebombed in the small hours. His sister-in-law was living there and called the fire brigade: no one was hurt, but Starmer was 'really shaken up'. He said, 'It's fair to say I wasn't in the best state to make a big speech,' and that he almost cancelled it. Baldwin wrote: 'Emphasising he is not using the firebomb attack as an excuse and doesn't blame his advisers or anyone else except himself for these mistakes, Starmer says he should have read through the speech properly and 'held it up to the light a bit more'.' Now, a month and a half later, he said: 'That particular phrase – no – it wasn't right. I'll give you the honest truth: I deeply regret using it.' Both parts of his confession to Baldwin were unwise in the extreme. It was unwise to admit that he doesn't always read his speeches before he delivers them – or that he doesn't always read them 'properly', which is the same thing. The pressures on a prime minister's time are intense, and any prime minister has to rely on speechwriters they can trust to produce most of the words that have to be pumped out. But a politician should never admit that their words are not their own, or blame their speechwriters while insisting that they are not blaming them. Especially not one, such as Starmer, who already has a reputation for being the puppet of Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff, who saw him as the figurehead for his bid to take the Labour Party back from the Corbynites five years ago. But this confession was particularly unwise because it suggests that Starmer's critics were right to detect the echo of Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech in the prime minister's words. The message of the speech was entirely different. Powell complained that the effect of immigration was that the existing population 'found themselves made strangers in their own country'. Starmer's speechwriters, by contrast, were making the point that 'fair rules' hold a country together. 'In a diverse nation like ours – and I celebrate that – these rules become even more important. Without them, we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.' The sentiment is worthy and uncontroversial, even if the phrasing is a bit poetic. But the meaning was completely clear in the next paragraph: 'So when you have an immigration system that seems almost designed to permit abuse … you're actually contributing to the forces that are slowly pulling our country apart.' I don't know who would actually disagree with that – apart from Enoch Powell, who didn't want any immigration at all. Some of Starmer's critics have also seized on his comment – in the foreword to the immigration white paper, so he presumably did hold these words 'up to the light' – that the 'damage done to our country' by the Conservative 'experiment in open borders' is 'incalculable'. But again, it is hard to disagree: the writer of Starmer's foreword is not saying that immigration is damaging, but that quadrupling it when you promised to reduce it is. Even those who think the UK can easily absorb a net immigration of 906,000 in a 12-month period have to accept that the Tory failure to control immigration has, as the foreword's author said, opened a wound in 'trust in politics'. So Starmer should have defended 'his' words to Baldwin. The message was the right message: that there should be fair rules for immigration, and that immigration has been too high. Now we just do not know what the prime minister thinks. Is the real Starmer the liberal lefty human rights lawyer who implied to Baldwin that he thinks that any attempt to control immigration is Powellism? Or is it the man reading McSweeney's words off the autocue, saying, as he did just before he got to the 'island of strangers' paragraph: 'I know, on a day like today, people who like politics will try to make this all about politics, about this or that strategy, targeting these voters, responding to that party. No. I am doing this because it is right, because it is fair, and because it is what I believe in.' What does he believe in? I thought I knew, but now that he has given that self-pitying interview to his biographer, I am not so sure.
The Guardian
30 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Two men found guilty in deaths of 53 migrants in Texas will spend rest of their lives in prison
Two men face spending the rest of their lives in prison after a federal judge sentenced them on Friday for their roles in the deaths of 53 people – including six children – who were found dead in an abandoned tractor-trailer in Texas in 2022. A federal jury in Texas had found the two men, Felipe Orduna-Torres and Armando Gonzales-Garcia, guilty of various charges at the conclusion of a trial in March. Federal judge Orlando Garcia sentenced Torres to life in prison and Ortega to 83 years of incarceration, essentially a life sentence. The judge also imposed a $250,000 fine on each of the defendants. Five other men have also pleaded guilty for their role in the smuggling operation and are scheduled to be sentenced later. The truck was holding 64 migrants from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. The vehicle had a broken air conditioner and no water, which amounted to suffocating conditions in the Texas summer. Only 11 of those who were in the tractor-truck survived an ordeal that grimly illustrated the risks migrants are willing to take to cross the US border in order to escape violence or financial turmoil in their countries. The migrants had paid the smugglers between $12,000 to $15,000 each to be taken across the US border, according to the case's indictment. They were placed in the vehicle in Laredo, a town at the border, and then headed to San Antonio, which is a three-hour drive away. As temperatures rose inside the truck, the people inside screamed and banged on the walls. Many eventually passed out. When the truck was found on 27 June 2022, more than a dozen of them were taken to the hospital, where five more died. The men had known the air conditioning in the truck was broken, according to prosecutors. And they had discovered dozens of the people inside had died when they opened the back of the truck at the end of the three-hour trip. 'Three years to the day after these two smugglers and their co-conspirators left dozens of men, women and children locked in a sweltering tractor-trailer to die in the Texas summer heat, they learned that they will spend the rest of their lives locked away in a federal prison,' said a statement from the US attorney for the western district of Texas, Justin Simmons. Prosecutors said that Orduna-Torres was the leader of a group of men who smuggled people from Mexico and South America between December 2021 and June 2022. He and Gonzales-Garcia shared routes, vehicles, stash houses and transporters to 'consolidate costs, minimize risks and maximize profit', according to a statement from the justice department. Migrant smuggling has become a multibillion-dollar industry that is often run in coordination with some of Mexico's most violent cartels. While the number of migrants apprehended at the border has dropped since Donald Trump's second presidency began in January, reports have said people are still being smuggled into the US through methods and routes that are even more dangerous.
