Conservative MP Natalie Elphicke told TalkTV on Monday the small boat crossings were “out of control.”
But environment minister Mark Spencer told the BBC: “It is a huge challenge. We are getting on with it, but there is no silver bullet, that’s the problem.”
Last week Dan O’Mahoney, the Home Office’s Clandestine Channel Threat Commander, told the Home Affairs Committee 38,000 people had crossed the channel in 936 small boats this year, a figure he described as “unacceptable.”
Kent County Councillor Nigel Collor told the BBC almost 1,000 people crossed the Channel in small boats on Saturday alone.
Collor said he was “horrified” by Sunday’s incident at the Western Jetfoil processing centre in Dover.
Reuters photographer Peter Nicholls was taking generic pictures of the centre when he suddenly heard a bang and he said he thought it was a bird-scaring device.
But then he saw a middle-aged man get out of a white Seat Tarraco and throw incendiary devices at the immigrant processing centre.
Nicholls said, “He was running around with his arms in the air and shouting.”
Other eyewitnesses said the man, who has been identified as a 66-year-old man from High Wycombe, was laughing as he threw the firebombs.
Photographer: ‘From Calm, to Chaos, to the Completion’
“From calm, to chaos, to the completion with his death, it was less than five minutes,” Nicholls told Reuters.
Elphicke said: “I’ve had many conversations with the Home Secretary [Suella Braverman] about this issue, as you would expect, and I don’t think anyone doubts her passion and determination to tackle this issue. As we’ve seen before it is a case of actually translating that into actions that will be put into effect and make a difference on the ground.”
She said: “In the most immediate term that does mean stopping the boats leaving France. There are obviously a whole range of other measures, but at the moment a number of those are held up in the courts, a number of those are subject to more legal changes to go through Parliament, so all efforts have to go on stopping those boats and tackling the issue head on.”
Last week O'Mahoney told MPs 28,000 illegal immigrants had been stopped from crossing by the French authorities, which had also destroyed 1,072 boats.
MP Says ‘What’s Been Happening Is Simply Not Working’
On Monday, Elphicke said: “The small boats crisis is clearly out of control and an entirely fresh approach is now needed. What’s been happening is simply not working, because every single attempt to get on top of this is delayed or thwarted by a rag bag of people who seem to want open borders and don’t seem to want us to get a grip on this particular situation.”Kevin Saunders, a former chief immigration officer for the UK Border Force, said the system was “broken” and he told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme: “I would put a cruise liner in the middle of the Channel and put all asylum seekers on that, put it in international waters so they can’t claim asylum, because it’s not the UK. This has been mooted before but was kicked into the long grass, but I think it’s worth revisiting.”
After Sunday’s incident around 700 people, including children, who were being processed in the Western Jetfoil facility were immediately transferred to Manston, a former army base in Kent.
Last week O'Mahoney admitted Manston was housing around 3,000 migrants and he confirmed there had been an outbreak of diphtheria there.
David Neal, the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, told the same committee he had visited Manston last Monday and had been left “speechless” when he discovered 2,500 immigrants at the former army base were being guarded by untrained custody staff, who he described as a mixture of immigration enforcement officers and security guards.
He said he wrote to the then-Home Secretary Grant Shapps on Monday to “alert” him to the situation.
Shapps was replaced by Braverman in last Tuesday’s Cabinet reshuffle.
On Monday the Conservative MP Sir Roger Gale said the situation at Manston was “wholly unacceptable.”
Gale told the “Today” programme, “There are simply far too many people and this situation should never have been allowed to develop, and I’m not sure that it hasn’t almost been developed deliberately.”
He said either Braverman or her predecessor Priti Patel had decided against moving more of the immigrants to hotels.
Last week the home affairs committee was told the daily cost to the Home Office of housing asylum seekers in England and Wales was almost £7 million ($8 million).
Gale said he had tabled an urgent question about Manston in Parliament, which he expected to be answered by Braverman or immigration minister Robert Jenrick.
