Why increasing police at the borders won’t stop people dying in the Channel

“New UK-French action to go after smuggling gangs,” announced the Home Office in big bold letters on Friday.

A lengthy press release followed, declaring a “stronger law enforcement response on migrant Channel crossings”. It went on to list a series of action points agreed between home secretary Yvette Cooper and her French counterpart Bruno Ratailleau the previous day, as they toured UK-funded security facilities in northern France.

The word “new” appeared in the press release no less than a dozen times: “new specialist intelligence”, “new law enforcement action”, “new Border Security Command” – as though the Home Office press team was desperate to convince us all that this was not a recycling of old ideas.

Unfortunately, though, that is exactly what it was doing.

The meeting between Cooper and Ratailleau had gone well, with warm words exchanged by both sides (the French minister addressed his British guest as “dear Yvette” several times, and they each referred to one another as a “friend”). But while UK-France relations seem to have advanced since the days of Boris Johnson’s premiership, progress on tackling the issue they were there to discuss does not.

The fanfare announcement of “new measures” on the Home Office website boils down to the allocation of £7m worth of existing funds under the Sandhurst agreement – the bilateral deal the UK and France signed in 2018 – towards more policing and surveillance in northern France.

To be more precise, it will go towards reinforcing policing on beaches, bolstering drone use to intercept boats before they reach the sea, and boosting special intelligence capacity to “disrupt organised immigration crime activity and the flow of small boats equipment”.

Only a year ago, the then-home secretary James Cleverly was pictured shaking hands with then-French minister of interior, Gérald Darmanin, in Paris, as they agreed to “expedite the deployment of key aerial surveillance equipment [...] to intercept crossing attempts as quickly as possible” and “enhanced intelligence sharing” to disrupt the supply of small boats.

Rewind to 2022 and Suella Braverman announced “investment in cutting-edge surveillance technology to enable swifter detection of crossing attempts”, “increased joint efforts to target the movement of goods that facilitate crossings,” and the “deployment of more French officers to patrol beaches”.

Nothing about last week’s announcement indicates anything new in the UK’s strategy for tackling the issue. And this is despite the fact that it is clearly not working: as of Monday, 2,716 people had arrived in the UK on small boats so far this year – 20 per cent up from the same point last year.

Not only does the government appear to be hell-bent on pursuing a strategy that is proving ineffective – the strategy is also proving to be a deadly one.

As the UK funding for security measures on the French coast aimed at stopping the boats has increased, so too has the number of people perishing at sea while attempting to make the journey – and at a far higher rate than the increase in crossings.

The figures speak for themselves: at least 82 people died while trying to cross last year, compared with 24 the year before and 16 in 2022. At least 14 of those who died in the Channel last year were children. Among them were two seven-year-old Iraqi girls, Rola Al Mayali and Sara Al Ashimi, and Maryam Bahez, from Iraqi Kurdistan, who was just a month old when she fell from her father’s arms in an overloaded boat on 17 October.

The correlation between heightened security on beaches and higher death rates is no coincidence. There is a clear link between the bolstered security and fatalities. Many deaths last year occurred within a few hundred metres of the shore, in shallow waters. More police on beaches and more drones in the sky have led to increasingly chaotic embarkations as people rush to try to set sail before they are caught. In this rush, dinghies have collapsed, leading to deadly crushes.

In this context, it was somewhat jarring when Home Office minister Angela Eagle, questioned on Monday about what deterrent the government had to stop people making the crossing, retorted: "One is they may die.”

It raises the question of whether ministers see the soaring deaths, clearly linked to UK-funded enforcement, as necessary in their effort to curb the crossings – as though if enough people perish, others will eventually be put off trying.

Aside from such an approach being clearly inhumane, it clearly is not working. Yet the UK and France continue on this trajectory of incrementally bolstering security. The French interior minister even said last week that he hopes to change French policy so that police can intercept boats once they're on the water, a move quickly supported by Cooper.

Such interceptions have already been tried out by French maritime police, as revealed by Lighthouse Reports and partners last year, and proven to be highly dangerous. On a larger scale, this would surely only lead to more deaths.

But as long as UK taxpayers’ money continues to be thrown at “new” law enforcement measures that are in fact only a recycling of old ideas that haven’t worked – instead of looking at viable solutions such as creating safe routes and tackling the root causes of migration – the boats will continue to arrive and growing numbers of people will continue to have their lives cut short in pursuit of a better one.

May Bulman is an investigations editor at Lighthouse Reports