Tories offering illegal migrants ‘Travelodge amnesty’, says Starmer

An excoriating attack on the government's 'gimmick' Rwanda policy.

Rishi Sunak is offering illegal migrants a ‘Travelodge amnesty’, Keir Starmer will say in Dover today in a major speech on the small boats crisis.

Just days after the Kent coastal town’s Tory MP Natalie Elphicke defected to Labour, Starmer will launch an excoriating attack on the government’s ‘gimmick’ Rwanda deportation scheme.

He will also unveil his party’s plans to replace the scheme with a new £75m Border Security Command, staffed by up to 1,000 specialist investigators, who will make UK shores ‘hostile territory’ for smuggling gangs.

Claiming Sunak is guilty of ‘rank incompetence’, Starmer is expected to say the controversial Rwanda plan has failed to deter smuggling gangs and has run up ‘a perma-backlog’ in the asylum system with taxpayer-funded hotels and accommodation filled with people waiting for a decision.

‘A scheme that will only remove 1% of small boat crossings a year can not, and never will be, an effective deterrent,’ he is expected to say.

‘It’s an insult to anyone’s intelligence, and the gangs that run this sick trade are not easily fooled.’

‘In fact – by allowing vast numbers of people into the country via this route, running up a perma-backlog of nearly 100,000 people, refusing to process the claims, so that even if they have absolutely no right to be here they cannot be removed, billing the taxpayer for expensive hotel accommodation, the Government has achieved the complete opposite of what they claim: a Travelodge Amnesty, handed out by the Tory Party that, if nothing else, is warmer and safer than spending winter under canvas near a beach in Northern France.

‘If you don’t think that’s what the gangs are telling the people they exploit – you don’t know them.’

Labour says it would ‘replace gimmicks with graft’ by scrapping the Rwanda scheme and recruiting a former police, military or intelligence chief as head of a new ‘Border Security Command’. They would report directly to the Home Secretary and work with international agencies drawing on tough new powers.

The party says its overhaul of border security would bring together the National Crime Agency, Immigration Enforcement, the Crown Prosecution Service and MI5. It would be paid for using existing resources and £75m earmarked for the first year of Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda deportation scheme.

Starmer will also back serious crime prevention orders to be used, with High Court approval, prior to arrest to shut down people smugglers’ internet access and bank accounts, and help with tracing gangs’ movements.

He will add: “I know we use the term small boats, but these boats are not, for the most part, that small. The gangs now use dinghies that are on a scale way beyond anything you would see for legitimate recreational activity. 

‘We should be working with our European partners to seize those boats, and seize material here in the U.K. to collect further evidence. We should turn over every stone and use every reasonable power – that is my message to the smugglers: these shores will become hostile territory for you.’

Some 8,826 migrants have arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel so far this year, provisional Home Office figures show.

This is up 32% on this time last year, when 6,691 migrants were recorded, and a 14% rise compared with the same period in 2022 (7,750), according to PA news agency analysis of the data.