Member

I know the Minister will want to draw attention to discussions the Government are having with the French on this issue, but before he does I remind him that nearly four times as many small boat migrants made it to Britain, in one recent week, than the French managed to stop. On a wider scale, the numbers are simply awful: they are 48% higher than the figure for the first six months of 2024, and 75% higher than 2023’s equivalent figure of 11,433. It is crystal clear that the removal of the deterrent has done exactly what we expected—it has encouraged more and more people to make the journey to the United Kingdom—because they have done so in increasingly significant numbers.