Yvette Cooper

The Prime Minister and the French President set out their expectation that we will be able to operationalise this agreement and begin the pilot in the coming weeks. The numbers will vary, and it is a pilot that will need to be developed. We will need to trial different approaches as part of it, and that is the right and sensible approach. The principle underpinning the agreement is the right one: we should return people who have paid money to criminal gangs in order to come on this dangerous journey in small boats—which puts other people’s lives at risk, as well as their own, and undermines our border security—in exchange for taking people who apply legally, who are more likely to be genuine refugees and who have been through security checks, and prioritising people who have a connection to the UK. It is also a way to help undermine the business model of the criminal gangs, who tell people that there is no way to be returned to France or any other country if they get into one of these dangerous small boats. They use that as part of their advertising, which we should seek to undermine. The hon. Lady is right to say that we also need stronger law enforcement. We have already been building stronger co-operation, including by setting up the new prosecution and investigation unit in Dunkirk, which will work with our National Crime Agency and our Border Security Command, and we are significantly speeding up asylum decision making to bring the backlog down. We also need action to speed up the appeals process, because there are delays as a result of the broken system that we inherited.