Key events
Sunak says the government has made more progress on this issue “than anyone has made in a very long time”.
Sunak says government has acquired two new barges to house asylum seekers
Q: Where are the new barges for asylum seekers going?
Sunak says that will be announced in due course. But it is important to him to reduce the number of people staying in hotels, he says.
He says it is reasonable and fair to expect asylum seekers to share rooms if they are in hotels.
Q: Will communities get enough notice of where barges are going?
Sunak says the government does engage with local communities. They get funding to help them with costs, and 24-hour security is in place.
A barge is being installed in Portland. Two more barges are going to be used, he says.
Sunak says number of Albanians crossing Channel in small boats down 90% since he struck returns agreement
Q: Is there any evidence that your policies are responsible for crossings going down by 20%?
Sunak says in the rest of Europe illegal migration arrivals are still going up. That is significant, he says.
And he says last year Albania accounted for a third of small boat arrivals, despite it being a safe country. He says the government struck a deal with Albania, and now the number of Albanians crossing the Channel is down 90%.
Sunak is now taking questions.
Q: Is it credible to say you will stop all the boats?
Sunak says he wants to give people the message that his plan is working. Crossings are down by a fifth. That shows the measures are working.
He says they are obviously “not there yet”. But people should have confidence, he says.
Sunak summarises what he has done over the past six months to make a difference.
The UK has worked on this issue with other countries, he says. As a result of the deal with Albania, 1,800 Albanians have been returned to that country, he says.
He ays he has doubled funding for the National Crime Agency to tackle people smuggling.
He says the refusal rate for people claiming to be victims of modern slavery has tripled since requirements were made stricter.
Sunak claims his small boats plan ‘is starting to work’, saying crossings down by 20%
Sunak says his message is “our plan is starting to work”.
He says that when he announced his plan, at the end of last year, the number of people entering the UK illegally via small boats had quadrupled over the past two years.
But now crossings are down 20% compared to last year, he says.
And he says this has happened even though the number of migrants entering the rest of Europe illegally has gone up 30% over the same period.
Rishi Sunak’s speech and Q&A on stopping small boats
Rishi Sunak is about to give his speech in Kent. He will be talking about what he has achieved in the last six months in relation to stopping small boats and reducing illegal immigration. He will also be taking questions from journalists.
There is a live feeed at the top of the blog.
Starmer claims small boats ‘an ever-growing problem’ because government policies failing
Keir Starmer has described the speech Rishi Sunak is due to give later on tackling illegal immigration as “like Groundhog Day”. Speaking on a visit to the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in Somerset, Starmer said:
I think everybody wants to make sure that we stop the boats, we don’t want people making that dangerous journey.
All we’ve really had from the government though is the announcement of a policy that doesn’t work and then the reannouncement of the same policy, essentially.
It often feels, I think, like Groundhog Day and meanwhile that’s costing a fortune for the taxpayer and there’s this growing sense of frustration.
Starmer also claimed that illegal immigration was “an ever-growing problem” because the government did not have enough returns agreements with other countries, because it was not doing enough to tackle the criminal gangs and because it was not processing asylum claims quickly enough. He said:
A deal with Albania is, of course, progress but we need many more returns agreements. Because at the moment the government has baked in a problem, which is because they haven’t got returns agreements with other countries, because they’re not tackling this upstream with cross-border criminal activity being absolutely dealt with and because they are not processing the claims quickly enough, they are building an ever-growing problem.
The Daily Telegraph has today splashed on what seems like a remarkable story. It quotes research claiming that the lockdown measures imposed during the first wave of Covid in 2020 may have saved just 1,700 lives in England and Wales. The report says:
Lockdown saved as few as 1,700 lives in England and Wales in spring 2020, according to a landmark study which concludes the benefits of the policy were “a drop in the bucket compared to the staggering collateral costs” imposed.
Scientists from Johns Hopkins University and Lund University examined almost 20,000 studies on measures taken to protect populations against Covid across the world.
It is the reference to Johns Hopkins University that makes this sound particularly authoritative. The School of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University is world-renowned, and during the pandemic its Coronavirus Resource Centre was one of the best sources of information about the pandemic.
But the report has not actually been produced by the School of Medicine. It has been published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, the libertarian thinktank best known in the UK for inspiring Liz Truss and some of the ideas in her disastrous mini-budget. The report has been written by three people, one of whom, Steve Hanke, is an academic at Johns Hopkins University. But he is an economics professor, not a public health specialist, and he described in the IEA report as well-known currency and commodity trader.
When Boris Johnson was prime minister, he regularly attacked Labour for its failure to build new nuclear power stations when it was in office. He claimed this was part of the reason for the country’s problem with energy security.
On his visit to Hinkley Point C in Somerset this morning, the new nuclear power station that is still not operational, Keir Starmer will claim that it is the Conservative government that is to blame. He will point out that Labour announced outline plans for 10 nuclear reactors in 2009, and that none of them are operational.
Here is a Labour list saying what happened to the 10 projects.
And here is Ben Quinn and Kiran Stacey’s story about Starmer’s visit.
Covid WhatsApps used for coffee orders not big decisions, says ex-health minister
Government WhatsApp groups were never used to make important decisions during Covid and instead relayed information and discussed coffee orders, James Bethell, a former health minister, has argued. Peter Walker has the story here.
Sunak to claim he is tackling illegal migration as former Tory leader says more should be done
Good morning. Rishi Sunak is giving a speech in Kent this morning and taking questions from journalists. According to No 10, he will be “deliver an update on his plan to stop the boats and the progress we have made over the last six months” (since he made his statement to MPs in December about his plans to “stop the boats”). But the reporters will have lots of other topics to ask him about, such as his government’s legal action against the Covid inquiry.
According to the Daily Telegraph, Sunak will this morning claim that a sharp fall in the number of Albanians coming to the UK to claim asylum shows his plans are working. In their story, Charles Hymas, Daniel Martin and Amy Gibbons report:
The prime minister will cite a sharp decline in the number of Albanians arriving as evidence that a tough stance on deportations will deter illegal migrants.
The numbers are down from around 30 per cent of Channel arrivals last year to one or two per cent in the first four months of this year.
It is understood that thousands of Albanians are being tracked down and targeted by Home Office immigration enforcement officers for deportation, although immigration minister Robert Jenrick admitted on Sunday that the Government had so far only returned hundreds of Albanians who arrived in small boats.
A 400-strong team of case workers have also been set up to fast-track a backlog of 16,683 asylum applications by Albanians, and immigration and enforcement officials are pursuing thousands more, many of whom have absconded.
But Sunak may find that even people who support what he is trying to do on illegal immigration are not impressed by his progress update. In its story the Daily Mail said the update is likely to be “underwhelming”, and it quotes Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, asking why so few Albanians (“hundreds”, the immigration minister Robert Jenrick said yesterday) have been removed. Duncan Smith said:
Is the civil service simply failing to do what it is supposed to have done? We need to have a real reason as to why with a full agreement that people are lauding we haven’t got into priority mode and literally kicked these people out.
There needs to be a full explanation from the Home Office as to why this hasn’t happened.
And in the Daily Express, which is the Tory paper normally most reluctant to criticise the government, Martyn Brown, the paper’s deputy political editor, says in an analysis that “none of the new measures [announced by Sunak to deal with illegal immigration] have seemingly made a real impact”.
Here is the agenda for the day.
Morning: Keir Starmer is visiting the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in Somerset.
11am: Rishi Sunak holds a press conference in Kent, where he will outline what he views as the progress made in the last six months on tackling illegal migration.
12.15pm: Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s first minister, gives a speech to business leaders.
2.30pm: Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
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