Home Secretary speech at the Organised Immigration Crime Summit
Source: gov.uk (2025-03-30)

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper delivered a speech on the first day of the Organised Immigration Crime Summit in London.

Thank you very much. Thank you Prime Minister, thank you to the Italian Prime Minister and good morning everyone.

Can I thank everyone for travelling here from all over the world. Interior ministers, senior law enforcement, delegations from over 40 countries and organisations, we are so pleased to welcome you to London and here to Lancaster House for this, the first summit of its kind on organised immigration crime and border security, and to have so many people come from across the world, shows the seriousness with which all our countries are taking these issues, but also, bluntly, how much more together we need to do.

Of course, we are not the first generation to grapple with international migration, the societal, economic security consequences that flow through the centuries.

Of course, people have travelled across borders to work, to study, join family, to flee war or persecution, to escape poverty, to seek a better life for a different future, to chase new resources, or to forge new nations.

But in recent years, we have seen new and serious patterns and scales of irregular and illegal migration causing major challenges for border security, for national security, for the rule of law, for countries and the economy across so many of our countries, in source, in transit and in destination, countries alike.

And 2 facts have accelerated and changed some of the challenges our countries face.

Firstly, technology. The physical distances between nations and continents may not have changed, but technology has made the world feel a lot smaller.

Organising journeys can be faster and easier than ever, and the details of a different future is suddenly right there on a smartphone in the palm of your hand.

And the second factor is the emergence of a vast and ruthless criminal industry that stretches across borders and across continents worth billions of pounds.

The criminal smuggler and trafficking gangs who profit from undermining our border security, our national security and the rule of law and from putting lives at risk, have grown and stretched across the globe.

And every country here will have different stories to tell and insights to share, but across all of our countries, we’ve seen that organised immigration crime posing a significant and growing global threat with far reaching consequences for us all - breaking our laws, undermining our security and our cohesion.

From the source countries where gangs prey on the vulnerable, to transit countries where people and equipment pass through towns and borders unchecked, to destination countries managing the financial, the social and the criminal fallout, no part of the journey is untouched.

And those gangs profiting from what is a vile trade in human beings are exploiting more people than ever before.

You have heard from our Prime Minister what that means for us here in the UK, and in just 6 years, we’ve seen a criminal industry organising the small boat crossings take hold along our borders.

Three hundred people crossed the channel on flimsy, dangerous small boats 6, 7 years ago, but 4 years later, that rose to over 30,000, an increase, a 100 fold increase, powered by smuggler and trafficking gangs.

The gangs who advertise on social media false promise of illegal jobs, gangs who organise the logistics, the fake papers, the illegal finance networks to take everyone’s money, have thousands of pounds, the supply chains, the flimsy rubber boats, the engines.

And perhaps for us, one of the most disturbing things of all, for us and for France, for the Calais Group, to see some of the fake life jackets, including fake life jackets for children that would not keep anyone afloat in the cold sea.

And then the organisation along the beaches of France, the violence, the increasing and outrageous violence, against law enforcement.

And to give you the example of how they run some of those organisations, we’ve seen the small boats, the flimsy rubber boats, take off as taxi boats and make people wait in the freezing water, in the freezing sea, so they then wait to be picked up, to climb onto the boats and then they overcrowd the boats with women and children put in the centre of the boat, the boat can then fold in. There’s the women and children who get crushed and then if the fuel in flimsy containers then leaks and mixes with salt water that can cause terrible, terrible burns.

And then we’ve seen children crushed to death, and yet the boat carries on and that shameful, disgraceful crime where people, criminal gangs have profited from those lives being lost.

And that’s why we cannot let that carry on.

All of your countries will have the different stories of the way in which the gangs are exploiting people into sexual exploitation, into slave labour, into crime.

The way in which the gangs are using new technology, not just the phones, the social media to organise, but even the drones to spot where the border patrols are, the operations along the land borders, across continents.

But it is governments, not gangs, who should be deciding who enters our country, and those gangs are operating and profiting across borders.

So we and our law enforcement need to co-operate across borders now to take them down.

That’s why, as you heard from our Prime Minister, we are strengthening our laws here in the UK, bringing in new counter-terror powers so we can seize phones, investigate preparatory acts, so we can crack down on the illegal working of modern slavery and establishing our new Border Security Command.

But we know that strengthening our border security means working with all the countries on the other sides of our borders, not just standing on our shoreline, shouting at the sea.

We know too that no country can do this alone, and that is why the partnerships and everyone gathering here is so important.

So today we will talk about what to do to tackle this vile trade in human beings.

How we choke off the supply chains, the false papers, how we go after the money, how we take down the advertising.

And how we disrupt, how we pursue, how we prosecute, how we pursue this global battle against a trade in people.

It is our determination to do this together, the alliances that we build across our borders can be stronger than the criminal gangs who seek to undermine us.

Thank you all for joining with us in this event today, this first summit. We have so much work to do during the course of the day, so many conversations to have, but thank you so much for being part of it, and I look forward to hearing everyone’s views during the conference today.

Thank you very much.