LONDON: UK Home Secretary Priti Patel’s plan to deploy the Royal Navy to halt migrant crossings in the English Channel “failed before it has started,” MPs have warned.
MPs on the UK’s Defense Committee said public disagreements between “two great offices of state” — the Ministry of Defense and the Home Office — over the role of the Navy was “deeply unedifying” and undermined trust in the government’s ability to solve the Channel migrant issue.
“If one of the objectives is to restore public confidence, then this disagreement has done the opposite and the operation has failed before it has even started,” said the MPs.
“We question whether announcing the policy before agreeing the detail was a wise move or rather one born of desperation. We hope that lessons will be learned from this experience.”
The UK has been grappling with a sharp increase in the number of people arriving in Britain via the English Channel in small boats in recent years.
In 2021, 28,400 refugees and migrants arrived via the Channel — more than three times the 8,400 that arrived in 2020.
Deploying naval vessels was one plan mooted to deal with the problem, but it soon became controversial after the Royal Navy rejected the idea of carrying out “pushbacks” of small boats — a tactic the home secretary had endorsed.
The defense committee said that the navy’s involvement in the Channel was an “ill-defined policy, prematurely announced” and added: “The best-case scenario for the Royal Navy is that it will leave with its reputation unharmed.”
Adding responsibility for managing Channel migrants without a budget increase would further burden an “already overstretched” defense ministry, the committee said.
It voiced serious concerns over the “lack of a clear end point for this operation,” and added: “The MoD has its own policy failings which it needs to remedy — it should not be made responsible for the failings of other Government departments as well.”
The committee called on the Home Office and MoD to agree “realistic indicators of success” and explain them to parliament.
“Furthermore, we recommend that an agreed date for the operation to be handed over to the Border Force is published, with the option of extension if so required,” the report said.
“This cannot be an open-ended deployment, occupying scarce Royal Navy vessels and personnel.”
