Facebook, TikTok and X, formerly known as Twitter, will team up with UK law enforcement to crack down on posts by people smugglers encouraging migrants to cross the English Channel, the government says.

Rishi Sunak, who has made cutting the number of small boats arriving on UK shores one of his “five pledges”, said the new partnerships with various social media companies will tackle attempts to “lure” people into paying to make the perilous journey.

Group discounts, free spaces for children and offers of false documents are among the posts the prime minister wants removed to help achieve his promise to “stop the boats”.

In a thread on X, Downing Street posted a series of examples of the material it wanted to stop.

In one, an account on TikTok offers illegal journeys for Albanian families with “max 30 other people”.

In another, people are offered two nights in a hotel in addition to the Channel crossing, at a price of £4,000.

It comes as Home Secretary Suella Braverman accused the Labour Party of trying to “sabotage” its plan to stop Channel crossings with its links to charities and lawyers who oppose the scheme to send asylum seekers to Rwanda – a policy that is currently held up in the courts.

She told the Sunday Express that Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was “secretly delighted at his web of cronies’ schemes to block our plans to stop the boats”.

“He’s in this for political point scoring and doesn’t care about what’s good for the country or the British people,” she said.

Writing in The Sun On Sunday, immigration minister Robert Jenrick also accused Labour of using “every trick and tactic to delay and prevent us from removing people with no right to remain in the UK”.

“And as they do so, they put two fingers up to the law-abiding majority who suffer from illegal migration,” he said.

In response, Labour claimed the Conservatives have been unable to remove failed asylum seekers from the UK and that it would take until 2036 just to clear the existing backlog.

Nearly 15,000 people have made the dangerous trip across the Dover Strait in small boats so far this year, according to official data compiled and analysed by Sky News.

This is about 15% less than the same time last year, the data suggests.

The voluntary partnership between social media firms and the National Crime Agency will seek to redirect people away from such content in the same way as is used to tackle content promoting extremism or eating disorders.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, as well as TikTok and X, have all signed up to the plans, Downing Street said.

It comes as controversy over plans to house asylum seekers on the Bibby Stockholm barge continues.

Mr Sunak said: “To stop the boats, we have to tackle the business model of vile people smugglers at source.

“That means clamping down on their attempts to lure people into making these illegal crossings and profit from putting lives at risk.

“This new commitment from tech firms will see us redouble our efforts to fight back against these criminals, working together to shut down their vile trade.”

Read more:
Lords back down over government plans to stop small boats
Nearly 300 children have died or disappeared in Mediterranean crossings

Labour said the action was “too little, too late” and the Liberal Democrats said it amounted to “tinkering around the edges”.

Beginning a “small boats week” of linked announcements, Number 10 said the “legacy” backlog of asylum applications made before the end of June 2022 has been reduced by a third since December.

But Labour claimed nearly 40,000 people are still awaiting removal in the latest figures.

Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said it was “just deluded” for the Conservatives to “boast about progress on tackling the Tories’ asylum chaos”.

“The Conservatives have totally lost any grip on the asylum system,” she said. “Suella Braverman is disastrously failing to even get the basics right.

“All she ever does is ramp up the rhetoric and make more and more empty promises, while failing to deliver. The Tories have completely broken the asylum system – failing to take decisions and failing to return people who have no right to be here.”