More than 50,000 migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats since Labour came to power is "unacceptable", a minister has admitted.
Baroness Smith of Malvern, a former home secretary under Gordon Brown, said the record numbers of people making the dangerous journey showed how embedded criminal gangs became under the previous Conservative government.
Official figures from Monday suggest 50,271 migrants have crossed in small boats from northern France since the general election in July last year.
Home Office figures show 474 people made the journey on Tuesday, pushing the number over the 50,000 milestone.
Between January and June this year, there were around 20,000 small boat crossings – the highest ever number for the period and 48% more than in the same months in 2024, according to the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.
Lady Smith told the BBC: "It is an unacceptable number of people. It sort of demonstrates the way over the last six or seven years that the criminal gangs have got an absolute foothold in the tragic trafficking of people across the Channel."
The education minister later told Times Radio: "We have taken a lot of important action already, but what we're facing is a criminal endeavour which has got long roots into the ground, I'm afraid, because it hasn't been tackled by the last government over recent years.
"That's why we need the action we've already taken to increase the speed with which we make asylum decisions, to remove more people from this country, the groundbreaking deal that we now have with the French and we've already detained people who've come to the country."
Lady Smith also insisted that Reform is wrong to single out small boat migrants as a threat to women's safety, after the party's only female MP said those arriving on boats had "medieval views".
She agreed with Nigel Farage's party that action needed to be taken over violence against women and girls, as Labour has pledged to halve it in a decade.
However, she disagreed with Reform MP for Runcorn and Helsby Sarah Pochin, who told a press conference on Monday women are at risk of sexual assault and rape from small boats migrants.
Lady Smith told LBC: "No I don't think they're right to single those people out. They're a problem for all the reasons that we've talked about. But I think that there are unfortunately, there are too many largely men who are responsible for violence against women, of all types.
"That's why we need to take the sort of action that this Government is taking, and that's why I hope Reform will change their position and support us in the tough legislation that we're bringing forward to tackle that violence.”
