Home Secretary Yvette Cooper (Image: GETTY)
Labour’s plans to boost migrant deportations and recruit extra officers to target people smuggling gangs have been branded "baby steps" by a former Border Force chief.
Tony Smith, the former director-general of UK Border Force, said the measures do not offer a solution for stopping small boat Channel crossings.
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He said Home Secretary Yvette Cooper's pledge for a five-year high in deportations was a “step in the right direction” but would only lead to an increase of about 3,000 a year.
He also said plans to increase staffing at the National Crime Agency (NCA) would help identify gangs would fail to “crack the problem” because there were always others “waiting in the wings to take their place”.
Mr Smith told Talk TV: “We were doing 45,000 on my watch in 2013 so I think these are all sort of baby steps in the right direction to say the right things [but] we haven’t got a solution for stopping the boats … that’s the problem. This does not solve the problem.”
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The ex-Border Force chief said Labour lacked a plan for removing failed asylum seekers from countries that are unsafe for them to be returned to such as Afghanistan, Iran and Syria.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We need to remember that it’s easier to remove some nationalities than others.
"So I suspect there will be a focus upon those countries where we do have good relationships, where we are able to secure documents and secure flights where it is easier to return them.”
Mr Smith said the Rwanda scheme which was scrapped by Sir Keir Starmer “would have been an outlet for those nationalities that are much harder to remove, which would not have involved a removal back to source country, but a removal to a safe third country”.
The Home Secretary yesterday announced the Border Security Command is "gearing up" after the number of migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats topped 19,000 this year so far.
The unit is designed to draw together work of different intelligence agencies, police, Immigration Enforcement and Border Force.
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She signalled she will press ahead with the previous government's plan to reopen two immigration centres in a bid to achieve the highest rate of removals since Theresa May's premiership.
In addition to new beds at immigration removals centres near Oxford and Portsmouth, Ms Cooper will front plans to boost staffing at the NCA, the UK-wide body which has around 70 active investigations into people smuggling and trafficking groups.
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Ms Cooper said: "We are taking strong and clear steps boost our border security and ensure the rules are respected and enforced.
"Our new Border Security Command is already gearing up, with new staff being urgently recruited and additional staff already stationed across Europe, working with European enforcement agencies to find every route in to smashing the criminal smuggling gangs organising dangerous boat crossings which undermine our border security and putting lives at risk.
"And by increasing enforcement capabilities and returns we will establish a system that is better controlled and managed, in place of the chaos that has blighted the system for far too long."