A former counterterrorism chief is the frontrunner to oversee Labour’s attempts to stop migrants crossing the Channel.
Neil Basu, the former head of the UK’s counterterrorism policing network, is the leading candidate to head the home secretary’s new border security command, The Times has been told.
Yvette Cooper is establishing the new unit which aims to tackle the people-smuggling gangs behind small boat crossings.
Basu is understood to be a frontrunner because of his counterterrorism credentials. He ran the national command when the threat from Islamic State was high, with six terror attacks including the Manchester Arena bombing. He was credited for his leadership in disrupting scores more plots and also improving the Prevent strategy to reduce the overall threat.
He has previously said that the small boats issue must be approached in the same way that the authorities tackle terrorism, with a joined-up strategy between departments.
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He said that there was no evidence the Rwanda scheme would work as it was a “grossly expensive project, costing over £500 million, that will lead to the removal of only a fraction of asylum seekers who are in the UK”.
Instead, Basu wrote, the answer lay in a new border security command with regular ministerial oversight, hundreds more investigators and input from all the relevant law enforcement and government agencies.
“I led counterterrorism policing for over six years. It’s a model of close partnership with intelligence agencies, government and multiple partners, all of whom have clear lines of responsibility and accountability for their single mission: to protect lives. It needed to be studied as a model response to this crisis,” he wrote in The Daily Telegraph.
Sir Keir Starmer insisted that the plan to send migrants to Rwanda was “dead and buried” in one of his first acts as prime minister. Labour has said that tens of thousands of people who were effectively being held in limbo would now be able to make asylum claims.
The prime minister’s official spokesman confirmed on Monday that those arriving in the UK on small boats would now have the right to claim asylum.
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He said: “We need to ensure that people who arrive here are processed so that people are not sitting in the system, housed in expensive taxpayer-funded hotels as they have been under previous administrations.
“And ultimately, we need to act upstream to secure our borders and smash the gangs and that is why the home secretary set out immediate action already this weekend to launch the recruitment process for the new border security commander and stand up the new Border Security Command.
“As well as, as I say resource up a new returns and enforcement unit that will bring together both its Foreign Office expertise and 1,000 additional staff to ensure that failed asylum seekers and others with no right to be here are removed.”
The first migrants to cross the Channel since Labour’s election victory have arrived in the UK.
Crossings resumed on Monday after a six-day hiatus amid poor weather conditions at sea.
Pictures showed groups of people wearing life jackets, and some wrapped in blankets, being escorted off a Border Force boat in Dover, Kent, with children among those seen being carried ashore.
So far this year 13,574 migrants have arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel, according to the latest available Home Office figures. This was a record for the first six months of a calendar year.
