Britain and France should strike an immigration deal that creates safe routes and sets up return arrangements, according to a French National Rally (RN) MP from the Calais region, speaking after 12 people drowned trying to cross the English Channel illegally this week.

Christine Engrand, whose constituency includes part of the coastline where people smugglers have been ferrying migrants in speed-boats across the Channel, said she welcomed Sir Keir Starmer’s plans to reset the immigration debate by focusing on working with France to smash the criminal boat gangs, create a new Border Security Command and negotiate returns agreements with the European Union and individual states.

“Any proposal is worth looking at,” Mrs Engrand told i. “This issue has been going on for 30 years. It’s high time that France and Britain – and others too, like Italy, who are concerned by immigration – start talking seriously about it.”

Mrs Engrand, who is one of the ten far-right RN MPs in the 12-member Pas-de-Calais region, warned that the issue was complicated and that governments had long failed to address it properly.

“The announcements that have been made go in the right direction. But now he needs to go beyond words and into action,” she said. “Will they be enough? I doubt he’ll be able to change much.”

She said one of the priorities for both sides would be to revise the 2003 Le Touquet Treaty that set up reciprocal border controls of French and British officials in each other’s countries.

“Britain currently pays France a lot of money so that the border is now in Calais. To that, we must add all the money we spend across the country, including on housing,” she said. “We need to do this better, which means reviewing the money Britain sends and the money we use.”

Before the July election, Labour said it would negotiate returns agreements to create a mechanism for those in Britain unlawfully to be removed. Mrs Engrand said this would need to be combined with simpler legal routes for those who are entitled to migrate.

“If we can set better legal means for people to cross the Channel, that would help and would go back to the principles of Le Touquet. That way, the British would be faced with the facts that we have to deal with. Since Brexit, of course, the British don’t have the direct responsibility of sending people back to their country of origin.”

Migration has also been a hot political topic in the European Union. After years of fierce debate, the European Parliament in April finally voted on an asylum and migration pact that aims to manage it by speeding up the rejection of invalid applications and by sharing the burden of processing asylum requests more evenly among member states. The EU is also resorting to paying countries on its periphery, like Turkey, Egypt and Libya, billions in grants and loans to seal their borders more effectively.

Mrs Engrand said that any deal with the UK had to take account of the wider situation. “I would like a consensus. In France, we don’t just have to deal with the Channel, but with other borders,” she said while adding that France was also capable of negotiating directly with the UK Prime Minister.

“France is a sovereign country and it needs to find its own method and do it directly with Britain. Belgium and the Netherlands, etc are much less concerned by this. Now, if you try to imagine the 27 EU member states trying to agree this, it could take for ever. And while this latest incident is a tragedy, next week the EU will be occupied with something completely different. So France should take its responsibilities with Britain.”

Mrs Engrand added that an agreement between France and Britain would prove that the two could still work together despite the turmoil of Brexit years. “We know that immigration is one of the reasons that led Britain to leave the EU,” she said. “But it would be wonderful if our two countries could be allies on this. And it would show that despite Brexit, Britain could continue to work with the rest of Europe.”

France’s interior minister Gérald Darmanin called for a return to a “traditional migration relationship” following the disaster on Tuesday.

The European Union should seek to “re-establish a traditional migration relationship with our British friends and neighbours”, he said, adding that British payments to France to prevent irregular migration covered only “a third of what we are spending” to stop illegal migration, according to comments in French media.

“A lot to go to Great Britain because they know that they are probably not deportable from British territory,” he said in reference to illegal migration.

NGOs say that Brexit has exacerbated the situation as the UK no longer has a process for returning asylum seekers to the EU under the bloc’s so-called Dublin Regulation, which obliges the first EU country that asylum seekers enter to take responsibility for managing their claim.

“Yes, people always want to go to England. Maybe because they have a family, a community waiting for them, or because English is an easy language. But Brexit made Britain even more attractive because it is no longer in the EU’s Dublin system,” said Xavier Crombé, head of the France mission for Médecins Sans Frontières, in reaction to the shipwreck off Boulogne-sur-Mer earlier this week.

Read Next

He blames both the British and French governments for creating an increasingly deadly environment. “This year is a record for deaths in the Channel, 37 people. I’m upset and angry,” he said.

“We are in an absurd situation where France is supposed to have an agreement with the UK to stop people from crossing but does nothing to try to keep them in France. The conditions here are indecent. People are living outside, under the tents, moved by the police every 24 or 48 hours. They have no place to stay. People try once, twice, three times, four times, five times to cross the Channel and they put themselves in more and more danger.”

Mr Crombé said that cranking up enforcement was not the answer as it was focused more on controlling borders rather than saving lives. “And it just makes asylum seekers more likely to get into a boat with people traffickers, who don’t care about the safety of their vessels,” he said.

Mr Crombé said authorities in Britain, France and the EU need a multi-faceted approach to address dangerous Channel crossings. “We need open safe and legal migration routes, between the United Kingdom and France, as well as at the other external borders of Europe and we need to deal with human traffickers.”