The Telegraph, 10th September 2025
The taxpayer is paying the price for the Manston disaster
On my first visit to the processing centre, the problems were clear to see: overcrowding, disorder and a demoralised workforce
Now that the small boats crisis has become a fixture of national life, we can trace its rhythm with unnerving predictability. Each winter, the flow slackens – cold seas, rough winds, and freezing Channel waters making the crossing perilous. Yet even then, the traffic never falls to zero. A determined few, shivering in sub-zero waters, still attempt it. Tragically, too many have died trying. Spring brings the first uptick, but from May onwards the pattern is unmistakable: summer delivers scenes that look less like desperate individuals seeking sanctuary and more like a steady, open-air transfer of populations. Over a thousand in a single day, repeated day after day. The postcard views of blue skies and white cliffs mask the reality: Britain’s borders are, in effect, broken.
On arrival, the choreography is depressingly familiar. Border Force escorts the dinghies from the Median Line into Dover, carrying hundreds of young men packed onto rubber rafts, their buoyancy dependent on cheap polystyrene vests. These are not images of security or order. They are images of a system overwhelmed.
When I entered the Home Office in September 2022, the crisis had tipped into full-blown disorder. The Manston processing centre, designed as a short-term holding facility, had become a symbol of this failure. Biometric checks, dry clothes, and basic sustenance were provided as required by international convention. But that year the summer surge had been high and there had been insufficient anticipation of the extreme demand for beds to accommodate such high numbers of arrivals. By September the sheer numbers – thousands arriving against a backdrop of only 1,600 beds – ensured immediate breakdown. Some migrants arrived without papers, their identities, ages, and even nationalities impossible to verify and most likely fabricated.
On my visit to Manston at the time, the problems were clear to see: overcrowding, disorder and a demoralised workforce. Officers reported being attacked. They saw the system gamed daily and felt abandoned. The Rwanda plan, trumpeted as a deterrent, had been blocked in Strasbourg. My advice was to place new arrivals in secure detention and expedite removals. The advice I was given in return was chilling: bail them instead. Release undocumented men, in their thousands, into Kent’s towns and villages. I refused, repeatedly. Instead, we scrambled to erect marquees, convert disused buildings, and find new accommodation – an exercise that was costly and exhausting.
It’s important to remember that the Home Office is fighting a losing battle. Even before leaving Calais, many migrants are armed with legal strategies – claims of asylum, modern slavery, or persecution – helpfully drafted and packaged by NGOs. The UK border, in practice, was not defended but managed as a bureaucratic intake process. I asked why we were not prosecuting for illegal entry – after all, it had been made a criminal offence by the Nationality and Borders Act of 2021. The answer revealed the hollowness of our system. The CPS, knowing each migrant could lodge an asylum claim that trumped criminal charges under the Refugee Convention (included in s31 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999), quietly deprioritised enforcement. Border Force and police saw little point in pursuing charges destined to collapse in court. The law, though passed with fanfare, was a dead letter and no minister could go behind “operational independence”.
The solution, of course, was to rip up the pernicious legal frameworks of the ECHR and Refugee Convention and deport all illegal arrivals to Rwanda immediately. But we all know how that story ended – the PM was simply unwilling to take this necessary step, much to my frustration. My hands were tied.
Now we learn that compensation – millions of pounds – is being paid to those very migrants because the conditions in Manston fell short of some legal “standard” imposed by judges. This is not justice. It is mockery. At what point did the human rights of those who entered illegally outweigh the rights of the British people – the homeless, the elderly, the vulnerable? The inversion of justice here is profound.
The tragedy is not simply that the boats keep coming. It is that, for all the rhetoric, ministers know they will be thwarted by the same constraining conventions, the same courts, and the same legal sleight-of-hand that has already crippled enforcement. The British public is told that the new Home Secretary is “tough” on borders. The reality is a bureaucracy that has surrendered the principle of control. The boats keep coming because everyone involved knows the truth: once you make it to Dover, Britain will take you in.
Suella
