The EU has rejected reports that it is not open to a new deal with the UK on returning people who have crossed the Channel, after a leak of purported discussions between London and Brussels.
A leaked copy of a memo on discussions with the UK’s national security adviser, Sir Tim Barrow, was reported to have included mention of an aide to the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, ruling out a post-Brexit “returns agreement”.
Von der Leyen’s aide Bjoern Seibert reportedly said in the memo that “the commission is not open to a UK-EU readmissions agreement”.
However, a spokesperson for the commission denied Seibert had said what was attributed to him in the memo, which was reported by the Daily Mail and the Times. “We have checked and Mr Siebert did not say that,” the commission spokesperson said when asked about the memo.
When asked on Tuesday morning about the reports and whether any refusal by the EU represented a setback, the UK health minister Will Quince said the government was taking a range of steps to quell illegal migration and one could not be taken in isolation.
“This a hugely complex and challenging issue and one the prime minister has put as part of his five priorities and I know that he and his home secretary are determined to address it and stop the boats,” he told Sky News.
“As a health minister I won’t have been over any of the details of the negotiations with the European Union. But if you look at the details of the discussions that we do have with Turkey, with Albania and indeed the French, they are starting to bear fruit and then more widely if you look at the deterrent factor, again that is making a difference.”
While the UK has reached bilateral agreements – including a recent deal with Turkey to disrupt people-smuggling gangs and tackle illegal migration – the UK is no longer part of returns agreements between the EU and 24 other countries after Brexit.
Rishi Sunak has pushed for a bilateral returns agreement with France but Emmanuel Macron has said any deal must be at an EU level.
The French president made clear during a UK-France summit in March that any returns mechanism would not be “an agreement between the UK and France, but an agreement between the UK and the EU”.
While Sunak has continued to lobby other European leaders within the confines of the meetings available to him, including at a gathering of the European Political Community in Moldova in June, he has faced increasing pressure from his backbenchers to take a different approach.
One such MP, Danny Kruger, told the Mail: “We have now tried legal efforts, technical fixes, and international diplomacy in an attempt to stop the boats within the confines of European human rights law. If the EU won’t consider a returns agreement, we will have no choice but to take back full control of our legal sovereignty.”
