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Keir Starmer’s plan to use sanctions to help “smash the gangs” profiting from people-smuggling in the Channel seems “far-fetched” and any success may be difficult to evaluate, security and immigration experts have said.
David Lammy, the foreign secretary, announced plans on Tuesday to target corrupt police officers, fake passport dealers and firms supplying small boats for people-smuggling.
The first measures are due to be announced on Wednesday along with the names of individuals and companies, and are seen as central to government plans to tackle criminal networks.
But the plans have been met with scepticism from those who have previously examined the use of sanctions.
Tom Keatinge, the director of the Centre for Finance and Security at the Royal United Services Institute, said the government must guard against “overpromising”.
“I would caution against overpromising. Talk of freezing assets and using sanctions to ‘smash the gangs’ seems far-fetched and remains to be seen. History suggests that such assertions hold governments hostage to fortune,” he said.
Lammy said the sanctions regime was “the first of its kind anywhere on the planet” and a key step in ending “the status quo” in which criminal gangs preyed on “vulnerable people with impunity”.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he said: “We are leading; others will follow.”
But Dr Peter Walsh, a senior researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, said a similar scheme had been set up last year by the EU and there was still little evidence that such schemes worked.
He said: “There is a lack of high-quality evidence on the impact of sanctions of this specific kind. An EU scheme launched in January last year also used sanctions to target people smugglers, gangs, and other criminals.
“For now, there is insufficient operational detail to be able to evaluate these sanctions’ potential impact on cross-Channel smuggling.
“There are some difficult challenges in this area. For example, many smuggling networks operate outside the UK with minimal UK‑based assets or visibility, limiting the effectiveness of asset freezes. Moreover, smugglers often use informal money exchange mechanisms like the hawala system, which operates outside the formal financial system, making it difficult to trace and freeze funds. Worldwide, hawala has proven notoriously difficult to regulate.”
The names of about two dozen people accused of facilitating the trade or profiting from it are expected to be released on Wednesday. A leading member of the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), which advises the government on immigration, said the impact could be limited.
Dr Madeleine Sumption, the MAC’s deputy chair, said she would be “surprised” if the sanctions were a “gamechanger for the industry as a whole, and for the existence of the small boats route”.
“There are so many people involved in the industry that targeting people individually is probably only going to have an impact around the margins,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. She added: “The impact is dependent to an extent on the cooperation of other countries where smugglers are operating.”
Further sanctions packages are expected to include corrupt public officials and police officers, while the initial list published on Wednesday is intended to signal the type of targets the UK is pursuing as part of longer-term efforts.
The government is under growing pressure from opposition parties and its own backbenchers over irregular migration. Starmer made tackling illegal migration at source a key election pledge last year.
Refugee charities have maintained that the only way to stop people from travelling in small boats to the UK is to open alternative routes for people to apply for asylum.
Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, said sanctions may help disrupt some of the criminal networks but enforcement alone would not stop dangerous channel crossings.
“We know from our frontline services that the men, women and children risking their lives in small boats are often fleeing places like Sudan, where war has left them with nowhere else to turn. People do not cross the channel unless what lies behind them is more terrifying than what lies ahead,” he said.
