Priti Patel hires Australia’s migrant guru in bid to help solve Channel crisis 

A former minister who played a key role in Australia’s controversial asylum seeker ‘pushback’ policy has been hired to shake up Britain’s border measures.

Priti Patel will announce today that Alexander Downer, ex-minister for foreign affairs Down Under, will carry out a thorough review of the UK Border Force.

His remit will include looking at the influence of unions over the agency’s effectiveness.

It comes after the union that represents the majority of Border Force staff joined forces with a migrant charity to launch a legal challenge against Miss Patel’s plans to turn Channel boats back to France.

It is understood that Mr Downer will cover all of Border Force’s work – including immigration checks at ports and airports, counter-smuggling operations as well as dealing with asylum claims.

His report will be due within months, and is expected to influence ministers’ decisions on the next stages of immigration reform. It opens the possibility of a complete overhaul of Border Force.

Proposals could include a merger with a separate Home Office agency – Immigration Enforcement – which deals with foreign criminals, visa-breakers and organised crime gangs.

The Home Secretary’s appointment of Mr Downer will be controversial because he has been a leading advocate of Australia’s long-standing policy of blocking asylum seekers’ boats off its coastline. 

Introduced in 2001, it sees boats from Indonesia and other Pacific islands stopped at sea, refuelled and redirected away from Australian shores.

Last September Mr Downer, writing in the Daily Mail, said: ‘Priti Patel has been widely ridiculed on both sides of the Channel for suggesting that boats carrying migrants be physically ‘pushed back’ towards the French coast. 

Mr Downer (pictured), who played a key role in Australia’s controversial asylum seeker ‘pushback’ policy, will look at the influence of unions over the agency’s effectiveness

‘Yet, from my experience as Australia’s former minister for foreign affairs, I know that a ‘pushback’ policy can work.’

He set out how Australia took ‘direct action’ during its own migrant crisis, intercepting vessels and deploying naval forces to turn them away.

‘As word spread around Indonesia that we were determined to stamp out the trafficking, it soon stemmed the numbers,’ he wrote. 

‘I see no reason why this cannot be done in the Channel.

‘My advice to Miss Patel would be to introduce the ‘pushback’ policy without fanfare, and to keep the French informed on a need-to-know basis only.’

Australia has conducted its turn-back policy for most of the last two decades.

Initially called the Pacific Solution, it was dropped by the country’s Labour government in 2008 but later re-introduced after a series of migrant boat disasters. 

Since 2013 it has been codenamed Operation Sovereign Borders.

His report will be due within months and is expected to influence ministers’ decisions on immigration reform. Pictured: Migrants land in RNLI lifeboat in Dungeness, Kent, last year

Mr Downer, 70, was the Liberal Party’s minister for foreign affairs – Australia’s equivalent of the Foreign Secretary – under Australian prime minister John Howard from 1996 to 2007.

He was also Australia’s High Commissioner to the UK from 2014 to 2018.

Concern over trade union opposition to Miss Patel’s immigration plans came to a head last month when the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) joined forces with migrant charity Care4Calais to launch a judicial review of her Channel pushback proposals.

The PCS described the powers, which are currently going through Parliament, as ‘morally reprehensible’. 

Its general secretary Mark Serwotka said at the time that his organisation ‘strongly opposes this policy, on moral and humanitarian grounds, and we will not rule out industrial action to prevent it being carried out’.

The legal challenge is yet to be heard. Last year more than 28,300 migrants reached Britain from northern France – triple the total in 2020.