How has Italy reduced small boat arrivals by more than 60% in a year – and what is the Albania scheme?

Sir Keir Starmer says he is looking to Italy for answers on how to reduce Channel crossings

Keir Starmer is meeting in Rome with Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni (AFP/Getty)

Sir Keir Starmer has claimed that Britain can learn lessons from Italy on how to reduce migration, after far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s administration saw small boat arrivals fall by more than 60 per cent this year.

Ahead of a visit to Rome, Sir Keir hailed Italy’s “dramatic” drop in unregulated migration and expressed interest in Ms Meloni’s proposed asylum processing scheme in Albania, just months after scrapping the Tories’ controversial Rwanda scheme.

Claiming that his talks with Ms Meloni had marked a return to “British pragmatism”, Sir Keir also praised Italy’s “upstream work” in north Africa, saying: “I have always made the argument that preventing people leaving their country in the first place is far better than trying to deal with those that have arrived.”

Reducing the number of perilous small-boat crossings across the Channel is a political priority for the Labour government, which has announced its intention to “smash” people-smuggling gangs but has stopped short of opening safe alternative routes for asylum seekers to travel to Britain to have their claims heard.

The prime minister is now looking to Italy’s example, where the country’s interior ministry reported a 62 per cent fall in migrant arrivals on Italian coasts over the first seven months of 2024. Frontex, the EU’s border force, has calculated a 64 per cent fall in the number of people arriving from north Africa to Italy and Malta.

More than 1,000 people arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel over the weekend, as eight people died trying to make the journey (PA)

Hardline immigration policies

Italy has long struck a hard line against migration, with deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini having tightened asylum seekers’ access to support and public services. He could now face six years in jail for preventing a boat carrying more than 100 people from docking in Italy in 2019.

But the country’s hardline policies and rhetoric had failed to prevent cross-Mediterranean migration to Italy from continuing to rise dramatically until the fall seen this year, which has been widely attributed to controversial deals struck with the north African nations from which most boats depart.

While Italy has strengthened ties with Libya and is training and equipping the Libyan coastguard, the EU last year pledged €105m (£88m) to Tunisia to stop migrant crossings from setting off. However, Tunisia later said it had handed back some €60m of EU budget support amid a row over the funding.

Human rights observers have since warned that EU funds are being used by countries including Tunisia to carry out “collective expulsions” of migrants, including people intercepted at sea en route to Italy, who are then put on buses and dumped in remote or desert areas.

Migrants are stopped by the Tunisian maritime national guard at sea during an attempt to get to Italy last year (AP)

And as part of the crackdown on crossings that has been funded by Europe, the UN’s International Organisation for Migration warned this year that it believed some 15,000 to 20,000 migrants had become stranded in rural areas near the central Tunisian coastline.

Human Rights Watch has also accused Italy and the EU of being “complicit” in crimes carried out against migrants intercepted at sea and returned to Libya, where the UN has warned they faced “murder, enforced disappearance, torture, enslavement, sexual violence, rape, and other inhumane acts”.

Italy’s supreme court ruled this year that it is unlawful for Italy to return intercepted ships to Libya as it is not a safe country. That ruling followed long-running attempts by Rome to make it more difficult for charities rescuing migrants at sea to operate, including handing them fines for refusing to cooperate with the Libyan authorities.

The fall in arrivals in Italy this year has also corresponded with a rise in arrivals via the shorter eastern Mediterranean route to Greece of nearly 57 per cent, according to the EU’s border agency Frontex. These crossings previously fell under an EU deal with Turkey in 2016.

Warning that Italy’s apparent fall in numbers must be put into context, Alberto-Horst Neidhardt, a migration specialist at the European Policy Centre think tank, noted that this year’s figures are in comparison with a significant surge seen in 2023, while the fact that overall arrivals to the EU have remained roughly static suggests that the flows of migration have merely shifted elsewhere.

Mr Neidhart told The Independent that the reduction in arrivals is due to a combination of factors, including the obstruction of Mediterranean rescue operations and more vigorous efforts by Tunisia to prevent departures and return migrants to their countries of origin.

But he warned that the deals such as those with Tunisia and Libya are “short-term patchy remedies that treat the symptoms and not the root causes of irregular migration”, and that they “serve the purpose of saving the face of European governments by keeping their most unacceptable side-effects, including violations of human rights, as far away as possible from European voters’ eyes”.

Mr Neidhart added: “There is also ample evidence that pouring money and resources into unstable countries governed by authoritarian regimes only makes the problem worse in the longer term, promoting elites’ economic interests, fuelling corruption, and undermining good governance.”

Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni with British prime minister Keir Starmer (AFP/Getty)

Italy’s Albania deal

In a further bid to cut migration to Italy, Ms Meloni has struck a deal with Albania to create an offshore asylum processing system, which is yet to come to fruition.

In an echo of the controversy around the UK’s costly and long-delayed Rwanda scheme, Human Rights Watch has described Italy’s scheme – initially intended to become operational in May – as a “model of mismanagement and a blueprint for abuse” costing hundreds of millions of euros.

But with Sir Keir now expressing interest in replicating the Albania deal, home secretary Yvette Cooper insisted on Monday that it is “very, very different” from the axed Rwanda plan.

Under the Tory scheme, asylum seekers would have been permanently deported to Rwanda. By contrast, Albania will accept asylum seekers on Italy’s behalf while their claims are processed. Failed asylum seekers from safe countries will then be returned to those countries, while those whose asylum claims are successful – expected to be a small minority – will be brought to Italy.

Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni during her joint press conference with Keir Starmer at Villa Doria Pamphili in Rome (PA)

Criticising the Albania scheme, Judith Sunderland of Human Rights Watch said in June: “Italy’s latest gambit to offshore its responsibilities is all but guaranteed to violate people’s rights.

“Following its abusive deal with Libya, Italy now wants to take people who have effectively reached the country outside of the EU, breaching fundamental tenets of rescue at sea and undermining asylum rights and freedom from arbitrary detention.”

Both Ms Sunderland and Mr Neidhart warned that the scheme was unlikely to deter people from making dangerous boat crossings, with the latter adding: “In fact, most of the persons processed in Albania will be transferred to Italy, after their procedure is over.

“The deal should be seen for what it is: a costly operation that moves the processing of claims outside the Italian territory, with questionable administrative benefits, ... intended to demonstrate to the Italian electorate that the government is acting on its pledge to crack down against irregular migration.

“It should also be seen as a deliberate and more concerted attempt to create a hostile environment for those arriving irregularly in Europe, at a time of growing social and political divisions and tensions.”