Downing Street says 45 extra police officers are being deployed to French beaches in a “surge team” to tackle larger dinghies with more people packed onto them.
Earlier on Tuesday, Home Office Minister Anna Turley said the officers were “just part of the armoury” of more than 1,000 officers on northern French beaches who are now doing “actual intervention” in the water.
She told Radio 4’s Today programme that videos in recent weeks “show them going to the boats, slashing them, pushing people back, being bombarded with stones and bricks and coming under a lot of challenge to do that, so they are intervening”.
In a post on X, external, in which he said he was “do[ing] politics differently”, Burnham laid out the latest small boat, returns and asylum hotel figures, describing smuggling gangs as a “shared European challenge”.
Asked about the extra police on French beaches, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch told the she welcomed European collaboration “but the boats aren’t stopping”.
“We have spent hundreds of millions, if not billions, paying the French to man the borders,” she said.