David Goodhart

Can we stop migrants crossing the Channel?

Luke Dray/Getty Images

How do we stop those pesky boats from crossing the English Channel? How about yet another reorganisation of the Home Office, that most reorganised of all Whitehall departments, as the government announced this week?

This is not actually as silly as it sounds. Since the last round of reorganisations, and reorganisations to the reorganisations, the immigration side of the Home Office has been divided into three ‘directorates’: UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI), Immigration Enforcement and Border Force.

It is now proposed that UKVI and the passport office will form a Services Directorate, that directly interacts with the public, and that the Enforcement and Border Force directorates will be re-merged. This is partly an attempt by the new permanent secretary, Matthew Rycroft, to stamp his authority on the department but it should also make the current cross-channel mess in and around Dover a little bit easier to handle.

At present Border Force officers are responsible for everyone arriving at the UK border and the cutters and ribs that patrol the coastline and English Channel. But once people arrive illegally the responsibility switches to Enforcement. It would make much more sense if they both operated under a single command structure.

This will not by itself improve the situation at Tug Haven near Dover, where make-shift refugee camps are overflowing with some of the nearly 6,000 people who have made the crossing already this year, nearly double the figure for the same period last year and heading for well over 10,000 for the year.

It will nonetheless simplify the bureaucratic response to this new irregular migration by sea and might also prompt a rationalisation of authority at the sea border itself. More than a dozen different departments and authorities currently have an interest in the coastline and it would make sense to have a single unified authority for the sea border similar to that in the US and France, as proposed in my Policy Exchange report, The

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Written by
David Goodhart
David Goodhart works at the Policy Exchange think tank. He is also a commissioner on the Equality and Human Rights Commission but writes here in a purely personal capacity.

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