Europe to battle people smugglers

Immigration scams target UK ports

Crime fighters from across Europe will meet in The Hague on Monday to discuss ways of combating human trafficking.

Police from Belgium, Holland, France and Germany will be at the meeting, along with Bob Packham, deputy director general of the UK's National Crime Squad (NCS).

The only way we are going to combat what's happening is by pooling our intelligence

NCS spokeswoman

A spokeswoman for the NCS said the only way to tackle the rise in human trafficking across European borders is to pool resources.

She added that smashing the people smuggling rings was now the priority of the NCS, taking over from drugs.

"The only way we are going to combat what's happening is by pooling our intelligence, finding out where the gaps are and filling them," she said.

Priority

"We will thrash out how much we can take our partnership forward."

The UK government has already pledged to inject £2m into tackling the problem and announced that MI5 and MI6 will head a team to crack down on gangs who smuggle illegal immigrants.

The Home Office estimates up to a million people are smuggled world wide every year by an illegal industry worth up to £20bn.

The number of illegal immigrants detected trying to enter Britain has gone up from 61 in 1991 to 16,000 last year.

Lorry are searched daily for stowaways

On Sunday Home Secretary Jack Straw criticised Belgium for failing to enforce the policy on illegal immigrants in the Schengen Agreement on border controls within the EU.

Mr Straw told the BBC's Breakfast with Frost programme on Sunday that the Belgian authorities had not complied with the conditions of the agreement, which ends controls on internal borders in several continental countries.

His claim came after reports suggested a group of illegal Chinese immigrants - possibly those who died inside a Dutch lorry found at Dover last week - had been detained in Belgium and were only deported as far as the Belgian border.

"Schengen places a responsibility on the signatory countries to ensure that where they come across illegals they remove them from the whole of the Schengen area," Mr Straw said.

The UK has signed up to the agreement, although it has retained the right to control its borders.