The borders watchdog has said he is ‘not convinced’ Labour’s plan to ‘smash the gangs’ will end the Channel crisis, and predicted ministers will fail to end use of asylum hotels by end of this Parliament.
Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration David Bolt said he had written to ministers to express his doubts about the plan.
Labour scrapped the previous Tory government’s Rwanda asylum scheme within days of taking office last July and said they would tackle small boats by increasing law enforcement action against people traffickers.
But Mr Bolt told a House of Lords committee today: ‘I did write to ministers to say that I wasn’t convinced that smashing the gangs was the right way of thinking about things.
‘It did seem to me that the challenge was to change the “risk/reward ratio” for those people that are involved in organised immigration crime, and that is really quite a difficult thing to achieve because it’s relatively low cost, relatively low risk for the perpetrators and highly profitable.
