This week, I joined a cross-party delegation to Calais to deepen our cooperation with French authorities and to gain a better understanding of their work to tackle small boat crossings in the English Channel. These crossings not only endanger countless lives at sea, but they also fuel a growing and costly wave of asylum admissions in the UK—particularly affecting London boroughs like Hillingdon.
Hillingdon is housing approximately 3,000 asylum seekers in Home Office-provided hotels— the most per capita of any local authority and enough to create a £5 million annual shortfall in Hillingdon alone. This exceeds the council’s entire libraries and culture budget. With over 13,000 asylum seekers in hotels across the capital—accounting for over a third of all those in such housing—this pressure is clearly not confined to one borough. Councils face difficult trade-offs: raising council tax, cutting services, or even considering legal action to secure fair funding from the Government.
By seeing the situation on the ground firsthand, our visit aimed to better understand the challenges French authorities face in preventing small boat crossings—and to explore how we can deepen cooperation to tackle the issue more effectively. In Calais, we engaged directly with high-level French border and security officials to explore how joint coastal surveillance systems—like the UK-funded TERMINUS camera network and BELVEDERE video system under the Sandhurst set-up—help detect and deter crossings at source. We also visited frontline teams on Hemmes-de-Marck beach and learned about how France’s OLTIM anti-smuggling units operate in close partnership with their UK counterparts.
By disrupting smuggling networks, enhancing real-time intelligence-sharing, and scaling up joint coastal security, we can prevent these dangerous crossings, save taxpayers’ money, and protect essential local services.
