Albanian migrants will be fast-tracked home in a crackdown on small boat crossings, the Prime Minister announced on Tuesday.
In a statement in the House of Commons, Rishi Sunak set out a five point plan he said would deal with illegal migration and help speed up the assessment of claims from countries deemed “safe”.
It included “significantly” raising the threshold someone has to meet before being considered trafficked as a slave and processing claims from Albanian nationals in “weeks instead of months”.
Case workers will be required to have evidence of modern slavery when considering a claim.
As a result, the vast majority of applications from Albanians could be declared "clearly unfounded" and "thousands" would be returned home in the coming months,” the PM said.
New guidance will be issued to make it “crystal clear that Albania is a safe country” and Border Force officers will be embedded in Tirana Airport to help “disrupt organised crime and stop people coming here illegally”.
Theresa May warned Mr Sunak against watering down modern slavery legislation, saying we “must do nothing to diminish our world-leading protections for the victims of this terrible horrific crime”.
The former Prime Minister added that the onus must be on the Home Office to improve processing of applications.
Mr Sunak said extra resources from Government will free up immigration officers to go back to enforcement, which would allow the UK to “increase raids on illegal working by 50 per cent”.
Asylum seekers will be housed in disused holiday parks, former student halls and military sites in a bid to cut hotel bills costing the Government millions of pounds.
Other steps included addressing policing of the Channel, which Mr Sunak said “has been too fragmented”.
The Government is under pressure to tackle the number of people making the perilous journey from France, with numbers believed to have exceeded 43,000 in 2022.
Mr Sunak told MPs the Government would “establish a new permanent unified small boats operational command”, bringing together “military and civilian capability and the National Crime Agency”.
In the first six months of the year, Albanian nationals made up 18 per cent of people arriving in the UK on small boats, according to Government figures. Around 18 per cent of people came from Afghanistan and 15 per cent from Iran over the same period.
However, since May 2022 there has been a significant increase in the number of Albanians crossing. Some 11,102 made the journey between May and September 2022, accounting for 42 per cent of small boat passengers.
Mr Sunak recently held his first talks with Albanian prime minister Edi Rama, during which they agreed to close “loopholes” preventing the rapid return of failed asylum seekers.
Last month Home Secretary Suella Braverman admitted the Government has “failed to control our borders” as she came under pressure over the number of crossings and the conditions asylum seekers were facing after arriving in the UK.
The Government spends around £5.5million a day housing migrants in hotels. The PM said this was “unfair and appalling” .
He added: “We must end this. We will shortly bring forward a range of alternative sites such as disused holiday parks, former student halls and surplus military sites.
“We have already identified locations that could accommodate 10,000 people and are active discussion to secure these and more.”
Home Office figures from September showed there were more than 143,000 asylum seekers waiting for a decision on their claims, while nearly 100,000 had been waiting more than six months.
The overall figure was more than three times higher than it was over the same period in 2019, when 26,125 had been waiting for more than half a year.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said: “Channel crossings are a serious problem, requiring serious solutions.
“We need leadership at home and abroad. We need a Home Office that functions effectively. And we need to defeat the criminal gangs operating on the coast.
“But time and time again this Government has refused to treat a serious problem seriously. And he has sat around the cabinet table the whole time.
“Where there should have been solutions, we have had gimmicks.”
