The failure to stop migrants crossing the Channel in small boats is putting community cohesion at risk, Kemi Badenoch has claimed.
The Conservative leader also hit out at the deal the Government has struck with France to return migrants across the English Channel and insisted the Tories could not be held accountable for continued backlogs in the asylum system.
The “one-in, one out” agreement, which will begin operating on Wednesday, will see migrants ineligible to stay in the UK sent back to France, in exchange for taking those who have links to Britain.
As she visited a farm in her North West Essex constituency on Tuesday, Mrs Badenoch was asked whether she believed descriptions of the small boats crisis as creating a “tinderbox” were an appropriate part of the public debate around migration.
The Conservative leader told the PA news agency: “If you were to speak to the mothers who were protesting outside the hotel in Epping, they will tell you that a crime had been committed and that’s what they’re protesting.”
Ministers should not be clamping down on those “expressing legitimate concerns”, she suggested, adding: “We need to make sure that we address those concerns and what we’re not seeing from the Government is any kind of addressing of those concerns.
“We need to stop the boats. It is not affordable, it is not good for community cohesion, it is not good for crime, it is costing us a lot of money. We need to get a grip on this issue as quickly as possible.”
Asked whether the Conservatives were partly to blame for the immigration and asylum situation, Mrs Badenoch told reporters: “No I don’t accept that at all, because what Labour are doing is just rubber-stamping all of the applications and saying they’re processing.”
Labour scrapped “the only deterrent that this country had, which was the Rwanda plan”, she added.
The agreement with France is “not going to make any difference whatsoever”, Mrs Badenoch said, adding: “50, at best, migrants being swapped with France is not going to stop the boats.”
Earlier, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the deal with France will not stop the crossings on their own, but marked an important change of principle as migrants will be sent back across the Channel for the first time.
Speaking to BBC Breakfast, Ms Cooper said: “We never claimed that there is a single silver bullet on this. So, this goes alongside the 28% increase in returns of failed asylum seekers that we have brought in.
“It goes alongside the change to those French maritime rules that I referred to which means France taking action in French waters to prevent boat crossings in the first place, and the much stronger law enforcement that we announced earlier this week with the additional National Crime Agency investigators and police to be able to go after the criminal gangs. We have to do all of these things.”
Ms Cooper said the Government does not want to put a number on the amount of Channel migrants that will be returned to France as she believed it could aid criminal gangs.
It has been reported that about 50 a week could be sent to France. This would be a stark contrast to the more than 800 people every week who on average have arrived in the UK via small boat this year.
She added: “We will provide regular updates, people will be able to see how many people are being detained, how many people are being returned, and it is right that we should be transparent around that.”
Bruno Retailleau, France’s interior minister, said the agreement “establishes an experimental mechanism whose goal is clear: to smash the gangs”.
The initial agreement will be in place until June 2026.
Mr Retailleau added it marked the “first stage” of efforts by the whole of the European Union, sparked by the UK-EU summit in London in May.
