Whatever happened to the great promise to ‘smash’ the smuggling gangs? When it came to power just under a year ago the Starmer government promised to pour resources into securing Britain’s borders. There was going to be a new Border Security Command – which was actually set up with £150 million of funding, although if anyone can tell me what it has done or what it has achieved, I am all ears. However, it now seems that the UK Border Force is one of the areas which Rachel Reeves has earmarked for spending cuts. The agency has an annual budget of £1.2 billion and employs 11,400 staff, who enjoy extremely generous overtime – an ‘annualised hours allowance’ to compensate staff for working unsociable hours can add between 20 to 43 percent to their earnings.
Naturally, the unions are incensed, and claiming cuts will threaten us all. According to the Immigration Service Union, cuts would present a ‘real threat to national security’. Fran Heathcote, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) Union, says that any reduction in budget ‘will inevitably have a direct impact on staff numbers and therefore border security’. To which the obvious reply is: they would say that, wouldn’t they.
Obviously, the Border Force requires staff to do its job – even if the use of e-gates at ports and airports has somewhat reduced the numbers of officers required. But you have to wonder: what is the point of chucking ever more money at officials supposedly to police our borders when their rules of engagement seem to forbid them from actually stopping people entering the country? Given that the Border Force seems increasingly to be acting as a taxi service for boatloads of migrants, perhaps cutting back its resources might actually help to slow down arrivals.
There is another obvious area for cuts: the £480 million we are paying the French government to beef up their own border control. Under a deal signed by Rishi Sunak in 2023, the French promised to double the number of border staff employed to stop migrant boats setting off from the French coast from 400 to 800. The result? The number of migrants arriving in Britain is at record levels and the proportion of migrants being intercepted has fallen from 47 per cent in 2023 to 38 per cent so far this year. That doesn’t pass any value-for-money test. We saw last week how all these extra French border staff are spending their time – a photograph was published of several of them standing and watching as boats were launched, apparently under instructions that they must not enter the water to prevent the crossings.
The farce over small boat arrivals is a classic example of how, in some instances, state spending can actually make a problem worse. We are being fobbed off by being told that the Border Force is keeping us safe when in fact it is aiding the conveyor belt of illegal migrants travelling from France to claim asylum in Britain. The Border Force should not consider itself to be immune from the desperate need to get the public finances under control.
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