Minister says France must ‘meet their obligations’ to tackle migrant crisis

In light of reports that 24,700 migrants had entered the UK this year after travelling by boat across the Channel, small business minister Paul Scully told Sky News this morning that the Home Secretary was doing an “incredibly difficult job”.

“We’ve made an agreement with France which, unfortunately, is not being enacted well enough at the moment, and that’s what we need to go back and do,” he went on: “The French need to meet their obligations to us.”

He explained that the UK government’s Nationalities bill would aim to reduce the pull factors of illegal immigration to the UK by creating a separate process for people who arrive illegally.

However he seemed to downplay the extent of this year’s crisis, saying that “migration has been a thorny issue for 20 years now.”