The UK government says smugglers profit off human desperation in the English Channel. But we, a team of researchers, believe they’re not the only ones. Our work has found that private companies have received more than £3.5bn of public money in an economy connected to border management over the past seven years. This includes contracts specifically related to the regulation of people moving across the English Channel in small boats, and for the provision of indirect services in the economy.
The government makes it difficult for people to access this information – there is no publicly available database of all such contracts it holds with private firms. Some contracts have not been made public at all, and even in those that have, some figures have been redacted. All of this means that the real amount spent is likely far higher than our research was able to uncover.
Amid this state-level secrecy, we have put together a report of findings as well as a spreadsheet to help the public better understand the UK’s border-industrial complex. It details 217 contracts between the government and private firms for border security and the management of the Channel: including search and rescue operations, the processing of asylum seekers arriving in the UK on small boats, and border surveillance and technologies that likely apply to the Channel and the port of Dover as part of broader border security.
