Sangatte camp will close down by next April

The Sangatte refugee camp near Calais will refuse all new entrants from mid-November and will close down by April, the French and British governments said yesterday.

When the camp closes, Britain will take half the refugees who are declared to be genuine asylum-seekers by the United Nations. France will take the other half.

The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, and his French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy, made the announcement after inspecting new security measures at the Channel Tunnel.

The tighter security, including a double ring of fencing around the railway freight yard near Calais, has cut the flow of illegal migrants to a trickle since the summer. However, this success and the decision by Paris to close the camp, first announced in July, have caused other problems.

The number of asylum-seekers inside the Red Cross camp has broken all records in recent days. Over 2,000 people, mostly young, including some unaccompanied children, are now living in the converted hangar close to the tunnel mouth, designed to take 900.

Their future remains unclear. The French interior minister, Mr Sarkozy, said yesterday that Paris would offer lump sums of €2,000 (£1,300) per adult to asylum seekers who chose to go home. Others would eventually be expelled.

Those who are judged to have a genuine case for asylum, after questioning by officials of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, will be divided between Britain and France. Mr Sarkozy said that he had no idea how many people would win the right to stay but it might only be a "few dozen".

The numbers of people reaching the camp seems to have been swollen by a belief – encouraged by smuggling gangs – that anyone in Sangatte when it closes will be allowed to go to the UK. The problem facing the two governments has been compounded by the fact that the largest single group of Sangatte residents, both new and longstanding, come from Iraq.

Many of them are Kurds. In the present political climate officials accept that it is not feasible to repatriate them. However, Mr Sarkozy said some of the Kurds were not from Iraq and would be repatriated.

French human rights groups protested yesterday that the measures were a cosmetic, short-term solution. Closure of the Sangatte camp would not, in itself, staunch the flow of asylum-seekers towards Britain, they said.

Mr Blunkett earlier inspected a new five mile long, nine feet high, double security fence which has been erected around the railway freight yard at Fréthun near Calais. In the early summer, up to 70 asylum-seekers a day were arriving in Folkestone after hopping aboard freight trains at Fréthun. Since the building of the fence, the number has been reduced to one a day.

Mr Blunkett said the rapid building of the fence was a gesture of "extreme good faith" by Mr Sarkozy. Standing on wasteland beside the two lines of fences, he promised to "fulfil my part of the bargain" and push through projected new legislation tightening rules for asylum seekers in the UK by November.

"We are sending the signal across the world that you cannot get through this way and you should use legitimate routes to Britain through economic migration," he said.

Mr Sarkozy said that French police had cracked down successfully on smuggling gangs in recent weeks.