THE government’s plan to send migrants to return centres in Albania will not deter people from illegally entering the UK, Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride has said.

He told GB News: “I think this is going to be far less substantial than Labour is making out, I’m afraid. Look, at the core of any policy that’s going to work to stop illegal migrants coming across here has got to be significant deterrence.

“We had that in the form of Rwanda, which meant if you came here illegally, you would have been removed to Rwanda promptly. And we had flights ready to go, actually, at the end of July last year, just after the general election.

“What you’re looking at here, in the case of Albania, is something different. Those are asylum claims that have been processed and offshoring those people further on down the line.

“That’s very different from removing them promptly and taking them somewhere else to actually assess those claims, as we would have had with Rwanda.

“Labour chose to cancel that program. We know it would have worked. We already saw the effect that it was having just by the fact we had the flights lined up and illegal migrants going from Northern Ireland into the Republic of Ireland.

“We saw migrants stopping coming across the channel and waiting for a Labour government to scrap Rwanda before they came. Deterrence works, but I’m afraid what this government is doing does not amount to that.”

He added: “The reality is we’ve left the European Union, but the key to controlling migration along the illegal migration side, as I say, is to have a clear deterrent. Rwanda would have delivered that. Labour scrapped it.

“It wasted all the money and the effort that was put in to put that into place, and we’re now seeing record numbers, 12,000 illegal migrants coming across the channel this year.

“That’s a record this year under this government that said it was going to be reversing that and on net migration, we need to see the government go much further.

“We put in place this week some amendments to legislation that Labour voted down that would have given Parliament control of setting a clear cap on migration as an important part of controlling that aspect as well.”