Keir Starmer has pledged to break up people-smuggling gangs in the same manner used to apprehend and jail hundreds of rioters this summer.
After a meeting with law enforcement agencies and cabinet ministers to discuss plans to stop small boats crossing the Channel on Friday, the prime minister said that the “high-level summit” mirrored the approach taken after disturbances fuelled by far-right activists.
“We sat round the table with law enforcement and the police to make sure that we got the desired outcome and made sure we could deliver – in that case – swift justice.
“I’m absolutely determined to take the same approach here: active government, an operational summit, making sure that we are going to retake control of our borders, take these gangs down,” he said.
Senior ministers, including David Lammy, the foreign secretary; Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary; and Richard Hermer, the attorney general, attended Friday’s summit at the National Crime Agency headquarters in London alongside representatives from the agency, Border Force and the intelligence community.
During the riots, the prime minister chaired Cobra meetings of police chiefs, ministers and officials as part of the government’s emergency crisis response.
Rapid arrests, charges and sentencing and high-profile policing appeared to act as a deterrent.
The summit comes at the end of a week which saw the deaths of at least 12 people after their boat was “ripped apart” off the northern French coast while they attempted to cross the Channel.
The 1,276 people who have already crossed the Channel this week bring the total for the year so far to 22,328 – about 648 more than at the same point last year but 5,269 less than in 2022. Since the general election 8,754 people have made the crossing, less than in the same two-month period in either 2022 or 2023.
Earlier on Friday, the former immigration minister Robert Jenrick accused Starmer and the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, of having “surrendered to the smuggling gangs” after scrapping the Conservatives’ Rwanda policy.
Jenrick, the frontrunner for the Tory leadership, said: “Yvette Cooper will meet the National Crime Agency and police chiefs today, and they’ll tell her what they told me when I was the minister, which is that although it’s important that we do that work, it is not sufficient.
“You have to have a deterrent.”
Starmer dismissed reports that Germany plans to adopt the UK’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda and insisted that it was an expensive gimmick.
“It cost us £700m to persuade four volunteers to go to Rwanda,” he said, adding that the money would be used on operational matters. “And I think the Germans have already cleared up that they’re not using the Rwanda plan, and that’s because they’ve concluded – like we have – that it won’t work,” Starmer said.
Asked by the BBC if he might consider opening more safe routes for asylum seekers – a majority of those who cross the Channel are subsequently granted asylum – Starmer dismissed the suggestion.
“I think the priority has to be on taking down the gangs that are exploiting vulnerable people … That has to stop now,” he said.
