Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to tackle criminal gangs involved in the smuggling of illegal immigrants into the UK.

Organised criminal groups (OCGs) continue to facilitate the majority of migrant journeys to the UK. The threat we are facing from organised immigration crime spans multiple countries, nationalities and criminal methodologies.

It is complex, and we are working to tackle the criminal groups who facilitate the travel from source countries to Europe and the United Kingdom.

The migrants making the dangerous journey to Europe include illegal migrants who have paid to travel, trafficked people, as well refugees and asylum seekers. Each of these groups of individuals has very different needs in terms of our response towards them. However, in all cases we are tackling the OCGs who make profit from them all.

The UK is playing a leading role in tackling organised immigration crime and protecting UK borders is just one element of that. We work with and support our European partners to detect and pursue these OCGs as well as raising awareness of the dangerous methods they use to move migrants and the exploitation that occurs in many cases.

Preventing organised immigration crime upstream is a core objective of Immigration Enforcement. Its network of staff based in embassies and consulates in over 30 key source and transit countries carries out the following key activities:

• Working with carriers around the world to reduce the threat of inadequately documented people (IDPs) reaching the UK by air, through training and a 24/7 advice service which is staffed both locally and in the UK;
• Developing intelligence packages related to the visa or air threat for subsequent criminal investigations and prosecutions overseas and in the UK;
• Targeted capacity building programmes to improve capability of local partners to tackle immigration crime; and
• Providing intelligence support to the visa operation.

Additionally, the UK has established the Organised Immigration Crime Taskforce, which brings together officers from Border Force, the National Crime Agency, Immigration Enforcement and the Crown Prosecution Service. The Taskforce takes a “whole of route” approach to identify and tackle the groups involved in organised immigration crime, seeking to use every opportunity to disrupt them in source countries, in Europe and in the other countries migrants travel through to reach the UK. It has successfully disrupted organised crime groups involved in immigration crime through participating in intelligence development and sharing, as well as arrests and prosecutions.