Philp called the measures “laughable” and said the government should reinstate the scrapped Rwanda scheme, which originated under the Conservatives and planned to send some asylum seekers from the UK to Rwanda.
He said: “Labour have a cheek claiming to be tough on people smuggling gangs – they voted against higher sentences for these very same smuggling gangs in the last parliament.”
He added that “what would have stopped the boats would have been a removals deterrent – but Labour cancelled Rwanda before it even started”.
Meanwhile, Sir David Davis, the former Conservative cabinet minister, called the measures announced by the Labour government “unnecessarily draconian”.
It comes after the English Channel saw its deadliest year on record last year. The International Organization for Migration (IOM), a UN agency which tracks the number of people who die crossing the Channel, said 77 people died attempting to make the journey.
The latest incident on 29 December saw three people die attempting to cross the Channel in a small boat, the French coastguard said.
The Refugee Council said small boats being used to cross the Channel were “increasingly unseaworthy”, with more people travelling on each vessel.
“The change is almost certainly a result of UK and French government attempts to disrupt the criminal gangs who profit from the dangerous journeys and the focus on enforcement as the principal way of doing this,” the charity said.
Provisional Home Office numbers released on New Year’s Day showed that 36,816 people arrived in Britain by small boats in 2024, a quarter more than in 2023 (29,437).
People from Afghanistan accounted for the single largest group of arrivals in the first nine months of 2024, making up 17% of the total number who had arrived by the end of September. Iranians were the second-largest group (13%), followed by Vietnamese and Syrians (12%).
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer previously said his government “inherited a very bad position” with record numbers of migrants in the first half of last year “because the entire focus until we had the election was on a gimmick, the Rwanda gimmick, and not enough attention was on taking down the gangs that are running this vile trade”.
