HOME Secretary Suella Braverman has not ruled out a report suggesting that the Home Office is considering fitting asylum seekers with electronic tags.
Speaking to Sky News on Monday, Braverman said she is willing to use a "range of options" to deal with migrants who cross the Channel in small boats.
According to reports, officials are considering electronic tags as a way to prevent migrants who cannot be housed in limited detention sites from absconding.
She said: “We’ve just enacted a landmark piece of legislation in the form of our Illegal Migration Act. That empowers us to detain and remover those who arrive here illegally and thereafter to swiftly remove them to a safe country like Rwanda.”
She said: “We need to exercise a level of control of people if we’re to remove them from the United Kingdom.
“We are considering a range of options. We have a couple of thousand detention places in our existing removal capacity. We will be working intensively to increase that but it’s clear we’re exploring a range of options, all options, to ensure that we have that level of control over people so that they can flow through our systems swiftly to enable us to thereafter remove them from the United Kingdom.”
Braverman later insisted the Bibby Stockholm barge is safe, but could not say when asylum seekers would return to the vessel.
The Home Secretary told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We’re waiting for the processes to complete and once they are done, we will be moving people back onto the barge.
“I’m very confident about the safety standards on the barge.”
Braverman also hit out at the fire brigades union after reports that she would not meet with them to discuss their safety concerns for the barge, saying "it is a Labour affiliated union and they're carrying out a political attack on the government".
