Sir Keir Starmer has promised that migrants arriving in the UK on small boats will be “detained and sent back” as the number crossing the English Channel remains at a record high.
The prime minister is facing mounting pressure to show results on tackling Channel crossings and ending the use of asylum hotels, with small-scale protests outside the hotels continuing.
Sir Keir said on X: “I am clear: we will not reward illegal entry. If you cross the Channel unlawfully, you will be detained and sent back.”
The UK and France are trialling a scheme to send migrants arriving on small boats back to France in exchange for an asylum seeker being brought to the UK on a legal route.
But the numbers involved in this scheme are likely to represent only a small fraction of those who arrive. So far in 2025, 29,003 migrants crossed the Channel in small boats, a record number for this point in a year.
Sir Keir’s promise comes as the government won a Court of Appeal challenge against a temporary injunction, allowing migrants to continue being housed at the Bell Hotel in Epping.
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Ministers are bracing for further legal challenges and ongoing protests over the use of hotels around the country.
Labour’s former lord chancellor, Lord Falconer, said while the government was right to take the Epping case to the Court of Appeal, Labour have “obviously got to move forward in relation to closing the hotels and also stopping the crossings”.
Labour had promised to close asylum hotels by the time of the next general election.
“The country wants some action in relation to it,” Lord Falconer told BBC Radio 4’s Today show.
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Lord Falconer, who served under former prime minister Sir Tony Blair, warned his party that if the government could not show results on tackling Channel crossings, support for Reform would continue to grow, “because they don’t have the burden of having to be practical”.
Nigel Farage’s party has consistently led in opinion polls since the spring, and the latest BMG poll for The i Paper puts them at 35%, 15 points ahead of Labour.
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If the Epping injunction had not been overturned on Friday, about 130 asylum seekers would have had to move out on 12 September, and the case could have had wider ramifications for the more than 200 other hotels housing asylum seekers – not all of whom will have arrived on small boats – around the country.
Epping Forest District Council is set to decide on Monday whether it will take its legal challenge regarding the Bell Hotel housing migrants to the Supreme Court, council leader Chris Whitbread said on Friday.
