Cooper won’t set timetable for eliminating ‘dangerous’ boat crossings

Cooper will not set timetable for reducing ‘dangerous’ boat crossings /Screenshot/ BBC

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told the BBC that the level of Channel crossings by “dangerous” small boats was “far too high”, but she refused to set a timetable for reducing the number.

More than 20,000 people have made the crossing to the UK since Labor took power, compared to 17,020 in the same period last year.

It comes as the Home Office said it was on course to return the highest number of failed asylum seekers in five years, with almost 13,500 people sent back to their home countries since the election of July.

During a visit to Rome, Cooper told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg show on Sunday that there had been a “bad history” of interior ministers giving commitments on migration that They then did not last.

Also speaking to Kuenssberg, shadow home secretary Chris Philp said rising yields were part of a “trend” that began under the previous government.

He said Labor had made a “huge mistake” by scrapping the Conservative government’s Rwanda project. expulsion project, which had not yet seen the light of day at the time of the July elections, two years after its announcement.

The number of migrants crossing the border in the first five months of Labor’s term is down on the same period in 2022, a record year for arrivals, but similar to the number of migrants crossing the border in this period in 2021.

Cooper said the number of crossings was still “deeply damaging” and “dangerous”, and was undermining border security and putting lives at risk.

“Of course we want to continue to progress, of course we want to see boat crossings decrease as quickly as possible.

“What we’re not going to do is treat this with slogans. Rishi Sunak said he would stop the boats in a year.”

Asked whether the government’s reluctance to set public targets for reducing the number of small boat crossings shows it is not a priority, Cooper said: “Quite the contrary.

“We’ve made it clear that border security is actually one of the fundamental issues.”

The work has already expressed an interest by studying the agreement between Italy and Albania, under which some migrants rescued by the Italian coast guard will be sent there to have their asylum applications processed.

This five-year agreement has faced significant challenges, with transfers recently arrested by a court in Rome.

Asked whether Labor would also consider processing overseas asylum applications, Cooper said the government would “look at whatever would work”, but stressed that such a system would have to be “effective”. .

She also blamed the increase in hotel places for asylum seekers since the election on a “collapse in decision-making” before the vote, which she said had left Labor with a “backlog considerable” of files when he came to power.

Speaking on Sky News, Home Secretary Angela Eagle defended the lack of an official timetable for reducing crossings, adding that the public wanted to see “steady progress” rather than a “stolen date from the wind “.

But Philp told the BBC that Australia’s offshore processing policies had been shown to have “deterrent effects” – and promised the Tories would seek to resurrect a Rwanda-style deal if they returned to power .

It is “telling”, he argued, that reducing Channel crossings is not among the government’s six “milestones”. presented by Sir Keir Starmer last week.

Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives have also separately pledged to set a cap on annual legal migration to the UK.

When asked where the cap would be set, Philp did not give details, only saying it would be “much, much lower” than the 350,000 projected for the coming years by official economic forecasters.