Border Force Dover spent £9,500 in one day on food, drink, & clothes for boat migrants

This is on top of the £2.2m per day that Border Force spends on operations and equipment

Montage © Facts4EU.Org 2021

Then there’s the £80m Priti Patel is donating to France to stop the flow

Figures uncovered by Facts4EU.Org give an indication of the extra cost of dealing with France’s unwanted migrants, currently heading across the Channel in ever greater numbers.

On one day in Dover in June this year, UK Border Force spent £6,812 on clothes for illegal migrants arriving from France. They spent a further £2,668 on food and drink for them. These expenses are dated 18 June 2021 and they do not even include any expenses where the transaction amount was less than £500.

During the month of June 2021, before the number of illegal crossings had reached crisis levels, an extra £9,815 was spent on furniture and equipment (eg improved ladders for migrants to climb up) and a further £1,794 had to be spent on cleaning and waste disposal.

These are only additional expenses, not the full cost the UK is bearing

It is important to note that the records we have obtained and analysed do not remotely cover the full cost of the marine and migrant processing operation which has been carried out on a daily basis for many years.

Photo right: Cutter HMC Protector

The figures above relate solely to expenses paid for using Border Force’s ‘procurement card’, and are for Dover only. The sum of £9,480 for clothes, food and drink relates only to one day in June – the 18th. We do not know how many days this covered, but neither do we know how many extra expenditures were being made daily which fell under the £500 per transaction cut-off, and which have therefore not been recorded.

All the ongoing overhead costs of the boats and their maintenance, all the 9,328 Border Force personnel, and all the costs on land in terms of processing centres, 4-star hotel accommodation, etc, are of course many times the amount for daily expenditures.

Brexit Facts4EU.Org Summary

The cost of UK Border Force, financial year 2020/21

Staff numbers: 9,328
Operational Budget: £ 692.1m
(Of which, staff costs: £486.5m)
Total capital budget: £ 124.7m
Total operations and capital spend: £816.8m in 2020/21
Cost per day: £2.2m daily

[Source: The UK Home Office]

In just eight months, UK Home Secretary agreed to donate €94m to the French government

On 20 July this year, UK Home Secretary Priti Patel agreed with French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin that the UK would donate a further €62.7 million euros (approx £54 million pounds) to pay for the French to double the numbers of French police and gendarmes along the coast. [Source: French government]

This follows a previous €31.4 million euro (approx £27m pounds) UK donation to France as recently as November last year. [Source: UK government] We will publish a report on the extraordinary story of all of this when we have the resources to do so.

Above: The online meeting between Priti Patel and the French Interior Minister on 20 July 2021. Credit: French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin

What is UK Border Force?

“Border Force (BF) is a professional law enforcement command within the Home Office. The average number of employees was 9,300 in 2020-21. BF operates together with a number of key partners at 140 ports. These include the Security & Intelligence Agencies, Police Forces, the National Crime Agency, HM Revenue & Customs, other government departments, port operators and an assortment of trade bodies. BF has primacy at 127 ports.”
- Home Office Annual Report, 08 July 2021

Observations

Countries have borders – this is normal

Firstly, concern about illegal immigration is not racist, nor xenophobic, nor ‘Little Englander’. It’s normal.

Sovereign, independent countries have borders and they control who can enter and who can’t. If a country does not have border control it is just an amorphous mass in the global ‘open borders’ fantasy.

The clickable map to the right comes from the EU itself, with country borders clearly delineated.

This open borders narrative is anathema to ordinary people but a small minority of wannabe ‘elites’ seem to think they know better. As Facts4EU.Org has reported before, the UN’s ‘International Organisation for Migration’ (IOM) is an open borders organisation. It has long been supported by the EU. It is worth noting the “FOR Migration” in its title. The opening sentence of its official Strategy states:

“The primary goal of IOM is to facilitate the orderly and humane management of international migration.”
- IOM website, 15 Nov 2021

The UN's International Organisation for Migration sees its role as to facilitate immigration, not to control it.

Can France control its borders or is it acting like Belarus?

Our report above gives some indication of the direct costs to the UK of France’s apparent inability to control its own borders.

On the Belarus border with Poland and its border with the Baltic countries right now, we are seeing what happens when illegal migrants are seemingly being encouraged to violate international law. In the case of Belarus it has clearly embarked on a deliberate policy of importing illegal migrants from Arabic and North African countries, in order to pressure the EU into taking them and to relax the sanctions imposed on it as a result of its unacceptable behaviours.

In France’s case, the EU’s inability to control its borders since Germany’s Angela Merkel unilaterally declared “all welcome here” in 2015 has resulted in a steady and high flow of illegal migrants through to its northern shores. These are people who have passed through many safe EU countries and cannot in any way be considered to be in need of asylum in the United Kingdom.

No-one is suggesting that France has encouraged these illegal migrants to enter France – far from it. Nevertheless, the EU’s relaxed border policies have allowed tens of thousands to cross internal borders, in order to make their way to the nearest point to leave the EU and enter the UK - France.

When will the UK ever stop paying the EU countries to do their job?

It is incumbent on all countries to control their borders. In recent decades while a member of the EU, the United Kingdom has had a poor record in this regard. Now that the UK is an independent country (except for Northern Ireland at present) it must step up.

In our next report on this subject we will look at what the French government promised Priti Patel in terms of what they would do in return for the UK’s donation at the end of November, and what it promised to do for the extra donation to France in July of this year – just four months ago.

If readers could donate towards this work and our next report, using the links below this report, we would be most grateful.

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[ Sources: UK Home Office | Border Force papers | French Interior Ministry | EU Commission ] Politicians and journalists can contact us for details, as ever.

Brexit Facts4EU.Org, Tues 16 Nov 2021

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Reader Comments 18

1. Deirdre, Belfast , Tuesday, November 16, 2021, 08:37:

This border issue from the EU (France in this case) seems almost as ridiculous as the made-up border issue over Northern Ireland. Rejoiners quote this sort of thing as a failure of Brexit but of course all it does is prove once again that the EU and certainly Macron want to make life as difficult as possible and blame everything on Brexit. We're obviously paying for their failures and I really wish the government would speak up.

2. John Storer , Tuesday, November 16, 2021, 09:58:

But yet our pensioners sit in poverty

3. Ashley Great Britain , Tuesday, November 16, 2021, 10:57:

It's absolutely insane.
Should be called border entry service.

4. Kevin Hagger , Tuesday, November 16, 2021, 12:27:

Border force can pay my bills then

5. One eyed king , Tuesday, November 16, 2021, 12:41:

Such disregard for our borders, and yet look how they send our elite troops to defend the eu colony in waiting.
Such disregard for everything that the populace cares for and stands for, odd that the human rights lawyer that appears to stand silent in the house when his opposition steams through the nurenburg laws. Austria has gone one step further.
They want to jab the under fives and all who let them are complicit. Understand where we are today and see your future, will you go meekly when the time comes? , many will, for me I will not go quietly and neither will millions of others

6. Mike Greatbatch , Tuesday, November 16, 2021, 13:00:

glad to see the government are spending OUR money wisely

7. kb , Tuesday, November 16, 2021, 14:54:

The French deny that any money has been received by them.
BTW, think of the opportunities for fraud when transactions below £500 are not recorded !

8. kb , Tuesday, November 16, 2021, 14:59:

John Storer (2)
One in three pensioners are millionaires.
Recently the median income of pensioner households (after housing cost) exceeded that of worker households for the first time in history.
Young people now have no truck with this poor pensioner argument. For the first time, younger people are poorer than their parents at the same age. It's all about inter-generational fairness now, which means taking assets from pensioners.

9. jon livesey , Tuesday, November 16, 2021, 19:08:

#8 kb. No, pensioners are not poor, but the claim that one in three are millionaires is overblown. When the claim was first published it was one in five, and even then it is counting household assets, not money in the Bank. With house prices at high levels, it's not hard for someone who has owned their house for long time to have household assets of a million, counting the house. But everyone has to live somewhere, so a pensioner can't just sell up and be "rich".
What this claim really tells you is that there is a huge advantage to buying a house when you are young, compared to renting all your life. In one case you end up owning a house and in the other you end p paying rent.

10. jon livesey , Tuesday, November 16, 2021, 19:17:

Any talk about migrants always bring out the grumblers and groaners. We used to be a country that solved problems, not just one that complained about them. Given that we have these migrants, and they are probably not going to go anywhere, what are we going to do with them?
They are mostly male between 18 and 25, so this could be a pool of people that we use for labour-intensive jobs that only require rudimentary English and other skills. There are plenty of jobs in agriculture, truck driving, security, warehouse, portering, hospital work and so on.
What we don't want is for these migrants to sit and do nothing until they re thirty five and very embittered and prime material for recruitment by criminal gangs and terror organizations. If we allow that, we will just be creating a serious problem for ourselves.

18 comments, page 1 of 2

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