UK PM pledges 'relentless' action on small boat crossings, cites Spanish returns from Ceuta

Andy Burnham has pledged to be “relentless” in tackling small boat crossings after tens of thousands of migrants entered the Spanish territory of Ceuta, and he said “safe routes” for refugees were necessary to tackle trafficking gangs.

Speaking during a visit to Dover, the prime minister said he had been assured by the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, that approximately 98% of the estimated 50,000 people who entered Spain’s north African territory of Ceuta last week had now been returned to Morocco.

But while that dealt “substantially” with the immediate issue, “of course there’s a broader issue about the Schengen area and our relationship with it”, he said, adding: “I would want to be in regular dialogue with the EU on those issues”.

Asked if he wanted to change the tone of the debate on the issue by stressing the need for safe routes, he said the UK had to “deal with the issue rather than play politics with the issue” and make changes that would reassure the public.

“The public don’t like the idea that the border looks like it’s not controlled. We need to bring back that control, but also we need to offer support for people who genuinely need it,” he said. “It’s about changing the whole approach, and slowly but surely we are putting in place those building blocks of a very different approach to this issue.”

Last Wednesday was the busiest day for small boat crossings across the Channel so far this year, with 752 people arriving in the UK. Official provisional figures suggest 14,526 have entered the UK so far this year. This is 43% lower than the number recorded by this time last year (25,436) and down 14% on the same period in 2024 (16,903).

“Progress is being made but we’re not complacent,” Burnham said. He said the number of National Crime Agency officers tackling organised immigration crime had more than doubled since the start of 2025, from 376 to almost 800.

On Sunday the latest figures showed that more than 2,000 people had crossed the Channel in small boats since Burnham became prime minister. Home Office numbers showed 326 people arrived on Saturday in four boats, bringing the number up to 2,057 since he took over from Keir Starmer on 20 July. There were 1,962 crossings in the same period last year.

On a separate visit to the National Crime Agency headquarters in Stratford, Shabana Mahmood said the government’s work to tackle small boat crossings were beginning to “bear fruit”.

The home secretary has faced fierce opposition within the ranks of the Labour party over proposed immigration measures including doubling the time it takes to qualify for indefinite leave to remain from five to 10 years. But she said reform was needed “to address the pull factors that draw people into boats in the Channel”, adding: “I want to change the calculus. I want them to change their mind about whether they get on the boat in the first place.”

She rejected calls to copy Spain’s response to the influx into Ceuta, in which tens of thousands of people have been returned to Morocco without processing any asylum claims. That was possible because Morocco and Spain share a land border and have an agreement in place. Mahmood said people smuggling and the shared waters of the Channel made things “tricker in many ways”.

At least 72 people died trying to reach Ceuta, some of them drowning and others being crushed when attempting to climb the border fence.

Sánchez called the huge influx “a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity”. The surge of people, which took place over the course of just 24 hours from Thursday, overwhelmed the city of 85,000 people, triggered a political crisis for Madrid and led to an angry reaction from some EU countries, including calls for Spain to be suspended from the Schengen free-movement zone.

On Saturday, Spanish police installed a 500-metre (1,640ft) floating barrier off its border ‌with Morocco to prevent others from making their way around the border. But Spain’s leftwing government has continued to come under pressure from right and centre-right governments already angry at its plan to regularise about 500,000 immigrants living in Spain.