Alan Travis Home affairs editor Thursday 30 July 2015
With more migrants expected to attempt to enter the Channel tunnel each night, Theresa May urges Eurotunnel to accelerate installation of £7m security fencing
Migrants step over the fence onto the train tracks at the Eurotunnel terminal in Calais-Frethun Photograph: Yoan Valat/EPA
Ministers are battling to control the Calais migrant crisis after police and travel operators warned that the chaos on both sides of the Channel would last until the weekend at least.
Dozens of French gendarmerie vans carrying more than 120 officers were sent to Calais on Wednesday afternoon to reinforce the official effort to prevent a renewed overnight attempt by migrants to enter the Channel tunnel to get to Britain.
After an emergency Cobra meeting of ministers in Whitehall, the home secretary, Theresa May, put strong political pressure on the Eurotunnel travel company to accelerate its installation of new £7m UK-funded security fencing around the approaches to the rail terminal at Coquelles.
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Eurotunnel said the railhead had become the target for migrants trying to cross to Britain in recent days as new security measures, including a temporary secure zone for lorries approaching the ferry port, had left the rail tunnel as the weakest link.
The company said 2,000 attempts by hundreds of migrants had been intercepted on Monday. This was followed by a further 1,500 attempts on Tuesday night when a Sudanese man, aged between 25 and 30, became the ninth person to die trying to access the tunnel since June.
Ministers are now braced for nightly scenes of migrants breaching fencing, raising fears of a repeat of the 2002 Sangatte crisis which was only resolved by Britain handing out four-year work permits to 1,200 Iraqis and Afghans and by moving the UK border control from Dover to Calais..
The home secretary, who also held crisis talks with her French opposite number, Bernard Cazeneuve, on Monday, said after the Cobra meeting: “The key thing is to make sure that we have got the security right at Coquelles. We are putting extra security fencing in at the railhead. There have been migrants particularly trying to get into the Eurotunnel and onto the trains before that security fencing is going up. We are pressing to get it up as soon as possible.”
May said the Cobra meeting had also agreed that the Department for Transport and Kent county council would urgently find options to reduce the disruption caused by redeployment of Operation Stack under which the M20 is closed outside Dover to turn it into a giant lorry park for vehicles waiting to cross the Channel by ferry.
However her hopes of early relief for Kent residents and for tourists trying to travel to France were dashed when Kent police announced that Operation Stack would remain in place at least into the weekend.
Keith Vaz, the chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee, who was in Dover on Tuesday, said an extra 120 French police officers would not solve the problem: “I went to Kent yesterday and I saw 148 of them who had made the journey and who were delighted because they had been successful in coming here, having evaded all this security, they actually managed to come here, so unless you do two things we are not going to solve this crisis.”
Vaz said migrants need to be returned to their country of origin once they have no right to stay in France, adding the EU has a responsibility to help Greece and Italy by stopping people crossing the Mediterranean from north Africa.
Lorries queued as part of Operation Stack along the M20 in Ashford, Kent. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA
The acting Labour leader, Harriet Harman, blamed the government for the fact that people trying to go on holiday were now stuck in traffic jams.
“What the government should be doing is getting the French to process the 3,500 to 4,000 people who are massed at Calais and need to be documented. Either they are genuine asylum seekers who should be given asylum or they should be deported.
“The government should have got on to this months earlier.”
The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants agreed that the extra £7m announced on Monday by the government would be better invested in processing asylum applications rather than building higher fences. But they pointed to a Human Rights Watch report that showed Calais migrants were reluctant to claim asylum in France because of the lack of accommodation, lengthy processing times, reported police abuse and hostility from some sections of the local population.
May, however, said that the Anglo-French meeting, which had agreed a new repatriation scheme for the Calais migrants, particularly those from west Africa, was an important step forward.
In a joint communiqué published on Wednesday both countries agreed to work together on a returns programme and to step up their communication campaigns to inform migrants about their right to claim asylum in France and the realities of life for illegal migrants in Britain. Officials hinted at the possibility of joint Anglo-French removal flights to west Africa.
May said: “Ultimately, actually, the answer to this problem is to ensure we are reducing the number of migrants who are trying to come from Africa across into Europe, that we break the link between making that dangerous journey, as it often is for people, and coming to settle in Europe.”
