Home Office to spend £36 million a year on private vessels to patrol the English Channel for migrant crossings

The Home Office is set to spend £36million a year on private vessels to patrol the English Channel for small boats carrying migrants.

The Government has published a document revealing it wants to contract a company to ‘charter of vessel(s) to support small boats operations in the Dover Straits’.

According to the ‘procurement pipeline’ document, the contract is due to run from April 1, 2024 to March 31, 2025, with the service provider listed as ‘not set’.

It comes amid a further delay in upgrades to the Border Force fleet, after it was claimed plans to replace ageing cutters owned by the agency are now four years behind schedule.

As Chancellor in 2021, Rishi Sunak unveiled plans to replace Border Force vessels with new cutters to improve the safety of Britain’s borders.

He said at the time that the current fleet, which is 20 years old, would be retired and 11 new vessels would come into service to help tackle organised crime and illegal migration.

But the Home Office has been forced to pay for boats from the private sector as its plans to replace ageing Border Force cutters faces another two-year setback, the Times reported.

The document names the start date for ‘replacement of existing cutter and CPV (coastal patrol vessels) fleet’ as March 2026 – four years later than initially planned.

The ongoing delays in procuring new vessels could damage Border Force’s ability to monitor the Channel and bring ashore migrants crossing from France in small boats.

A Home Office spokesperson said: ‘All commercial contracts are in line with government procurement rules which are designed to ensure the best value for taxpayers.

‘We closely monitor contractor performance, including financial results.’

So far this year a total of 621 migrants have made the perilous crossing in small boats which have been intercepted by Border Force vessels.

It comes as Rishi Sunak warned the House of Lords to respect the ‘will of the people’ and drop threats to block the Rwanda bill.

Insisting the plan to deport Channel migrants to Africa was an urgent national priority, he called on Labour and the Lords to ‘do the right thing’ and get behind it.

The Prime Minister said he was ‘not messing around’ in his efforts to get the scheme going after almost two years of delays in the courts and was ‘fed up with the legal merry-go-round’.

The Safety of Rwanda Bill, which is designed to remove all remaining legal hurdles, cleared the Commons on Wednesday night after Tory rebels abandoned attempts to toughen it up.

Some peers are now gearing up for a constitutional clash by delaying – or even blocking – the new law. A cry of ‘shame’ rang out in the Lords yesterday when the Bill was introduced and one peer even claimed the legislation was a ‘step towards totalitarianism’.

The first battle will be on January 29 when peers are expected to debate the legislation. It could clear the Lords by the middle of March but if they dig their heels in they could delay it for months.

At a Downing Street press conference Mr Sunak said: ‘There is now only one question. Will the opposition in the appointed House of Lords try and frustrate the will of the people as expressed by the elected House? Or will they get on board and do the right thing?’ 

With peers threatening further delay the PM declined to repeat a commitment to get flights going by the spring.

He would not even guarantee that the first migrants will be deported before a general election expected at the end of the year. Another 358 asylum seekers landed on Britain’s shores on Wednesday.

Mr Sunak said he wanted flights to leave as soon as possible, but added: ‘The question really is for the House of Lords.’

Peers hit back, however, with crossbencher Lord Carlile describing the PM’s intervention as ‘vacuous and banal’.

By convention, the Lords does not normally block legislation passed by the elected Commons; its role is to scrutinise and suggest amendments. 

But Lord Carlile, a former Lib Dem MP and government terrorism adviser, said the Rwanda legislation was ‘exceptionally malign’ and suggested peers had a duty to rewrite and, if necessary, ‘kill it’.

He said that by banning legal appeals against the principle of the scheme, the legislation was seeking to put the Government ‘above the law’. 

‘This is a step towards totalitarianism,’ he told Radio 4’s Today programme.

‘We really need to stop this appalling Bill, it is not a manifesto commitment and convention allows the Lords to reject it.

‘If the Prime Minister wants to claim the Rwanda Bill is the will of the people then please hold a general election.’

Labour and the Liberal Democrats have already opposed the legislation in the Commons, with Keir Starmer vowing to repeal it if he becomes PM, even if the Rwanda scheme deters Channel migrants.

Church of England bishops have also indicated they will oppose the measures in the Lords, where the Government does not have a majority. The Archbishop of Canterbury has described the Rwanda scheme as ‘immoral and cruel’.

When the title of the Bill was read out in the Lords on Thursday, a female peer called out ‘shame’.

The Prime Minister said the plan to send Channel migrants to Rwanda would provide the ‘clear and effective deterrent’ needed to smash people-smuggling gangs.

The proposal was blocked by the Supreme Court in November after judges accepted claims from campaigners that the country was not safe because asylum seekers could theoretically be returned from there to their homelands to face torture.

The new legislation declares in law that the African nation is a safe country and prevents the courts examining the principle of the scheme.

It also gives ministers the power to overrule injunctions from the European Court of Human Rights, which blocked the last attempt to send migrants to Rwanda in June 2022. 

Mr Sunak yesterday insisted that he was willing to use the power, despite government legal advice that doing so could breach international law.