ANALYSIS: Interception rates have fallen, from around half to a paltry 37%. And that’s while they’ve been funded by Rishi Sunak’s £475 million deal with Emmanuel Macron.
Migrants are able to launch a staggering number of boats (Image: Getty)
Let’s cut to the chase. French attempts to stop migrants leaving their shores are often pitiful.
That old slapstick gag from a children’s cartoon often comes to mind when we think about what happens in Calais.
The protagonist says to the villain “look over there”.
The moment they turn their head to look, the hero can run away.
It’s not an unfair comparison.
The French know where the migrants are hiding. They know where the launch points are. They know which canals the smugglers favour.
Yet migrants run past the police and jump onto a floating death-trap. Once that dinghy is full, a French naval vessel will often be within touching distance.
And it will splutter its way into one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world before eventually being picked up by Border Force.
Why is it so easy for them?
In the business world, if your performance gets worse after your organisation has been bankrolled, it triggers alarm bells. In most cases, it would be the end of the working arrangements, or at the very least a radical overhaul of how things are being done.
The proportion of boats that are intercepted has fallen from around half to a paltry 37%. And that’s while they’ve been funded by Rishi Sunak’s £475 million deal with Emmanuel Macron.
Sources within the Home Office and Foreign Office have admitted they have lost patience with the French over repeated promises of action, yet little seems to change.
And here we are, three years on from Rishi Sunak’s visit to Paris, with the French Government asking for more money.
But one question I’d be asking, if I was Home Secretary, is “when are you going to routinely intercept dinghies in the water?”
I emphasised the word routinely deliberately. One PR stunt for the BBC cameras doesn’t cut it.
Martin Hewitt, the now departing Border Security Commander, admitted he was frustrated the French hadn’t been intercepting boats in the water.
So, this should be an important condition attached to any new migrant funding deal.
And so should the one-in-one-out deal. Just 2% of migrants have been returned to France. That is not a deterrent.
So, Ms Mahmood should be demanding Paris takes in far more people than they currently are. Excuses over a lack of infrastructure no longer hold.
They have received £700million from British taxpayers since 2018. What have they got to show for it, in terms of results?
The negotiating teams must learn from the World of business. The funding must be conditional on things that actually work.
Vague promises of action and frankly embarrassing scenes on the French coast should shame Paris.
The British taxpayers are not an endless supply of funding for the bungling gendarmes.
They expect one of the World’s richest countries to show they can control their borders.
And if they can’t deliver, Britain must withhold further payments and consider how else it can incentivise France to take the action it has repeatedly promised.
