'It's outrageous!' Home Office 'inability' to control Britain's borders torn apart by Henry Bolton

More than 70 migrants who crossed the Channel have been awarded around £500,000 in compensation after their phones were seized by UK authorities.

Judges in the High Court have ruled the blanket policy in 2020 was unlawful, and determined that confiscating their devices and downloading their personal data breached the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Some 32 asylum seekers have already received settlements totalling £210,800, working out at £6,587.50 per person, and 41 cases are still outstanding.

As host Tom Harwood argued that the compensation being handed to the illegal migrants is solely down to the "ECHR", Mr Bolton disagreed: "Not entirely, Tom. It's down to the Home Office really, and the history of our border architecture.

"I've long argued this since before the Border Agency was formed in 2008, when they were talking about that, I was saying you are designing a problem, and down the road, this is one of the consequences."

Arguing that the Border Force did not have the "lawful authority" to seize the phones in the first place, Mr Bolton explained: "First of all, the reason for this is not simply that phones have been seized, but they were seized without a lawful authority.

"Now there is something that police officers have which is called the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which is a broad legislation for the police.

"And so a police officer, a police constable, can seize a mobile phone if it may contain evidence of crime.

"Now this was the intention of the Home Office in issuing a broad policy to seize telephones. But people on the borders are not police officers."

He continued: "And go way back to the Border Agency when it was formed, the civil service unions wanted to retain the civil service status of all the personnel going into the Border Agency.

"And so they're not police officers, they're not police constables, they're civil servants, and so the Police and Criminal Evidence Act doesn't apply.

"So fast forward to this policy of seizing the phones, they're not law enforcement officers.

"We have got a Border Force and immigration officers who have very specific legal instruments, rather than a police officer who has a broad range of instruments available to enforce the law."

Pushing back on Mr Bolton's remarks, host Nana Akua then asked: "How difficult would it be, though, for that to be converted?

"If you are Border Force, which sounds like a patrolling force that are protecting our borders, you should have the power as a Border Force agent to confiscate the phones of those who arrive here illegally, because ultimately they have arrived illegally?"

Mr Bolton responded: "I entirely agree, Nana. I don't see how any nation can secure its borders if the people securing its borders don't have policing powers, and that's the situation we have on our borders.

"There's a lot of things to unpack here, but most people in the country would think that we police our borders.

"But in this country, inexplicably, our borders are considered as administrative of enforcement, not as general policing or law enforcement."

Interjecting Mr Bolton, Nana hit back: "I think this has to be the moment where the lights go on, where they go hold on a minute.

"And also the fact that they're using legal aid, we the taxpayer will pay for all of this court case for these people who have come here, broken into this country, and then they're able to then get half a million of our money, which is about seven grand each?"

Mr Bolton agreed with Nana, telling GB News: "It's outrageous, Nana. And all of this, the hotels and everything else, all of it is down to a fundamental inability of the Home Office and successive governments to understand the history and the depth and the complexity of this problem.

"Everybody wants a simple silver bullet. You designed this badly, you've got the architecture all wrong, you've got the legislation all over the place, it's chaos, incoherent legislation.

"You've got to go back to a blank piece of paper and redesign this, snd that's basically what I've been saying for 20 years, and it will take eight months to do it."

In a statement, a Home Office spokesman said: "This compensation is to be paid as a result of the previous Government’s policy, which now no longer exists.

"We have introduced tougher legislation in the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act which allows asylum seekers' mobile phones to be legally seized when they arrive in the UK.

"These game-changing criminal offences will mean organised criminals fuelling illegal migration can be intercepted faster than ever before."