Solving the migrant crisis is going to require hard graft not quick fixes - Yvette Cooper

Criminal gangs have been allowed to take hold along our border and they are making huge profit from undermining our border security and putting lives at risk. They should not be able to get away with it.

Crossings in the first half of 2024 are up by 10 per cent on last year - the number is going up, instead of coming down. At the same time, the asylum backlog is getting worse, as decision making in the Home Office has dropped. Home Office spending on asylum support has increased sevenfold in the space of just three years. This cannot go on.

Since my appointment, I have reviewed the policies, programmes and legislation that we have inherited from our predecessors, and I have been shocked by what I have found. Not only are there already serious problems; on current policies, the chaos and costs are likely to get worse.

On our border security, it is clear that the security and enforcement arrangements we have inherited are too weak. Criminal gang networks are operating with impunity along our border, across the continent and beyond and across the UK too. Action between Britain and France in the channel has improved and is preventing some boat crossings.

The work of the small boats operational command in the channel is important and will continue, but we need to go much further. We should be taking far more action upstream, long before the boats ever reach the French coast. Cooperation with Europol and other European police forces and prosecutors is far too limited, and enforcement against exploitation and trafficking in the UK is far too weak.

Information sharing with our European neighbours has reduced, rather than increased. As a result of these weak arrangements, I am extremely concerned that the high levels of dangerous crossings that we have inherited are likely to persist throughout the summer.

Let me turn to the Rwanda migration and economic development partnership. Two and a half years after the previous Government launched it, it has already cost the British taxpayer £700m - in order to send just four volunteers. That includes £290m in payments to Rwanda and the costs of chartering flights that never took off, detaining hundreds of people and then releasing them, and paying for more than 1,000 civil servants to work on the scheme - for a scheme to send four people. It is the most shocking waste of taxpayers’ money I have ever seen.

There are no quick fixes to the chaos created over the last 14 years. It will take time to clear the asylum backlog, to bring costs down and to get new enforcement in place to strengthen our borders and prevent dangerous boat crossings, but there is no alternative to serious hard graft. We cannot waste any more time or money on gimmicks.

An abridged version of a speech by Yvette Cooper, Home Secretary and Labour MP for Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley, in Parliament.