Home Office and Border Force officials should not receive pay rises as they have thoroughly failed to take control of the ever-growing illegal migrant crisis in the English Channel, Brexit leader Nigel Farage has said.
Senior immigration figures at the Home Office and Border Force have seen their salaries rise by as much as £10,000.
In an unheralded report from The Times of London last week, it was disclosed that the director-general for policy and strategy in the border, immigration and citizenship system, Glyn Williams, received a £10,000 raise, taking his annual salary to £140,000-£145,000. The head of immigration enforcement for the Home Office, Tyson Hepple, saw his salary jump from £115,000-£120,000 to £125,000-£130,000.
The head of the Border Force, Paul Lincoln, also saw his salary jump by £10,000, from £130,000-£135,000 per year to between £135,000 and £140,000.
Responding to the report on Tuesday evening, Nigel Farage said on his new primetime TV show on GB News: “I’ve always been a great believer that people should get paid according to performance. If they do well you pay them more; you certainly don’t pay them more if they fail at what they’re there to do.
“It is an absolutely catastrophic failure of policy, a failure not just from the home office but from a Border Force who repeatedly tell us they are going to get this under control.”
“They’ve completely and utterly failed in doing what they said they would do and helping with [Home Secretary] Priti Patel to stop the migrant crisis, and I have to say that drives me mad because people should be paid on results,” Farage reiterated.
So far this year, over 9,300 illegal migrants have crossed the English Channel, often being brought ashore in Britain by the Border Force and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI). The record numbers have already surpassed the total for last year, when around 8,410 made the journey.
While Home Secretary Priti Patel has repeatedly promised to get tough on illegal migration — calling for increased jail time for illegal migrants as a deterrent and possibly holding asylum seekers in a third country to process their refugee claims — the government has rejected taking the simple decision to just send the boats back to France unilaterally.
On Wednesday morning, Mr Farage reported that an additional 284 migrants reached the United Kingdom by boat on Tuesday, adding: “As I speak, every Border Force vessel is out and once again the RNLI have been called out because they can’t cope. Today will be another huge number and the Government does nothing.”
The RNLI has been in a public feud with the Brexit leader over his comments comparing the lifeboat charity to a “taxi service” for migrants. The charity has in turn claimed that their work in ferrying the migrants ashore in Britain is “humanitarian work of the highest order”.
This week, however, it was claimed by a lifeboat expert that the RNLI has on several occasions been unable to carry out rescue missions because they were busy with boatloads of illegal immigrants.
Responding to the report, Brexit leader Nigel Farage told Breitbart London: “At last the truth is coming out, the RNLI are so overwhelmed with routine work for Border Force that they are struggling to fulfil their main purpose as a charity.”
On his primetime show on Tuesday, Farage added that while he has been a strident supporter of the mission of the RNLI to save lives, he is increasingly concerned that its leadershup have become “woke and out of touch with its original aims”.
“The RNLI should not routinely be used by Border Force. If there’s an emergency, fine, you scramble the lifeboats, but they’re being used routinely and the whole system has become little more than a taxi service for mass illegal immigration into this country,” he said.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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