An RAF Protector RG-1 that flew over the English Channel on 14 October was operating in support of defence aims and not in support of the Home Office, according to an answer given in Parliament.
Ben Obese-Jecty, the Conservative member for Huntingdon, had asked for what reason the aircraft was tasked to support the Home Office in the Channel on that date.
Louise Sandher-Jones, the Minister for the Armed Forces, said: “The Ministry of Defence regularly and routinely monitors our waters to protect UK interests, contribute to domestic maritime security, and act as a deterrent against potentially malign activities.
“The deployment the hon. Member refers to was conducted in support of Defence aims, not in support of the Home Office.”
Protector RG-1 is the RAF’s version of the General Atomics MQ-9B SkyGuardian, and the United Kingdom has ordered sixteen of them to replace the MQ-9A Reaper fleet that was retired after two decades of operations over Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The aircraft has a wingspan of around twenty four metres, an endurance of more than thirty hours and a maximum altitude above forty thousand feet, and carries Brimstone 3 missiles and Paveway IV bombs alongside its electro-optical and infrared sensors and a maritime search radar.
The aircraft is built to a NATO airworthiness standard and fitted with a detect and avoid system, lightning protection and de-icing, and that certification allows it to fly in unsegregated British airspace alongside civil traffic without a reserved block of sky being set aside for it. The Reaper it replaced could not, and needed segregated airspace or a danger area for every domestic sortie. The fleet is based at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire with 31 Squadron, and operations are flown from ground control stations on the station.
Surveillance of small boat crossings in the Channel has been contracted out by the Home Office to a commercial operator. The Portuguese company Tekever has operated its AR5 maritime surveillance aircraft over the Channel since 2020 under Home Office contracts, a framework worth up to £1 billion and renewed repeatedly since. The AR5 is a twin-engine fixed-wing aircraft that flies for more than twelve hours and carries maritime and synthetic aperture radars, day and night cameras and receivers for vessel identification and distress beacons.
Paul Webb, managing director of Tekever UK, has said of the work that “drones can identify humans in distress in a much faster way and help rescue teams.” The company has since sold the same system to the Portuguese government and has expanded into supplying uncrewed aircraft to Ukraine.
Wasted question me thinks.
i am not so sure i believe, i would not put it past them , they are concern migrants may make it to shore without the welcome pack or benefits.
That’s being a bit infantile, the point is so every boat is intercepted and we don’t get undocumented people just disappearing into the population.
Personally I want them all intercepted.
Sadly, there may already be a million undocumented here in the black economy from what I have read over the years, HMG lost control of migration from the 90s onwards. All too late now.
Yes that’s a lot of work to do, raiding black economy workplaces is the best way. But making sure everyone who comes over is documented is a way to plug that leak.
There’s a difference between migrants that cross the Channel, most of whom are intercepted, and those who are working in the black economy without government oversight, most of whom overstayed their permission or failed their asylum claims and never left. Obsessing over getting all cross-channel migrants is probably more effort than it’s worth given our inability to handle the larger stream. I don’t think they even publish overstay estimates any more.
Hi Jon to be honest I have less issues with those that overstay their visa etc as they have already been processed and reviewed so it’s just an enforcement issue.
Having lots of people sneaking in with no processing is a security and risk issue.
The biggest being public health as these individuals have not generally had vaccinations and screening in the same way as a western population and have a whole set of potential diseases we need to screen for.. I did the health risk assessment for an area that was getting evacuations from Afghanistan and you need to do a whole lot of rapid screening.
There is a reason the government does put a lot of health resources at illegal immigration and it’s not as the far right trump on about.. it’s actually about public health and bio security.
So for me it’s two different issues, one security and the other enforcement…
I take your point on health; not something I’d thought enough about. Post-COVID, I really should have so thanks for that.
We often forget what a western health system really gives us, many populations have some really nasty endemic diseases and as the idiots in this country have spread misinformation about vaccinations we also have potential weak spots even if we have essentially irradiated the disease from our population, so weaknesses like TB we created ourselves by stopping the vaccination programmes.
So just as an example when we got a group of Afghan refugees we in short notice had to created a vaccine programme for the kids and adults as well a screen and monitor for:
• Poliomyelitis (Polio):
• Malaria:
• Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever
• Tuberculosis (TB):
• Cholera .
• Viral Hepatitis: High
.Hepatitis A, B, C, and E,
• Typhoid Fever:
• Measles
• HIV/AIDS:
Especially as you are sticking these people in high density low quality accommodation with shared toilets, washing and eating facilities…
It’s honestly why it pisses me off so much when people bang on about the life boats and boarder forces being traitors for intercepting these boats and offloading and processing the boat people… in the end that’s all we can do unless 1) France allows us to land them directly back on french soil ( and if anyone thinks we can just land a government owned boat in a French port without permission to land they are not thinking it through) 2) sink their craft and allow them to drown.. and any sane individual knowns that not possible… so we are stuck with intercept and process in a way that protects all elements of national security and then tries to move them in a safe and humane way to a final agreed destination and politically find those final destinations ( and that’s a political question that’s hard unless we turn ourselves into a Neo Nazi state ).
AR5 is a much better platform for this role and it’s easily done by civilians. Protector at $30 million a go has priced itself out of most roles.
We should be using ours largely in the Atlantic supplementing the P8 fleet and with AESA radar bonds supplementing the E7 and crowsnest fleet.