The Home Secretary has been told by civil service officials that 65,000 migrants could cross the English Channel this year.
Officials have warned Priti Patel that numbers could reach a ‘worst case scenario’, which would be more than double the 28,300 number of people that crossed last year in 2021.
The Home Office mandarins are set to be drawing up measures that would see migrants claiming asylum flown to Ghana and Rwanda under plans to deter people from making the crossing.
Gareth Fuller
No country has agreed to this plan to take UK money in exchange for also taking the migrants in question.
A Whitehall source said: 'It is not an estimate or a forecast, it is a planning assumption.'
Speaking to The Telegraph, the insider added: 'In part, it demonstrates exactly why we are taking the measures that we are and looking at things like offshoring [the processing of Channel migrants] and outsourcing [operations in the Channel to the military.]'
The Prime Minister’s spokesman said: “This is a global challenge, it's right we talk to international partners about how we fix the broken asylum system but I'm not going to get into the detail of those discussions”.
The Royal Navy is set to take control of operations in the Channel within weeks, after the Prime Minister signed off the plans.
Royal Navy vessels will go on patrol in UK waters as part of a policy blitz dubbed 'Operation Red Meat' , this may be the first time the UK Border Force will be placed under a military chain of command in the fight against people traffickers.