Home Office minister Seema Malhotra has hailed a joint operation with European Union partners, which has seized more than £66 million worth of cocaine, as the future for tackling organised drug gangs as well as people smugglers.
Border Force officers have been involved in the operation led by the Belgian authorities, which has targeted drug smugglers operating in the eastern Channel and southern North Sea as well as elsewhere in European waters.
Organised crime gangs smuggling large quantities of cocaine from South America and West Africa have been the focus of the international operation, which has involved sharing intelligence about suspicious vessels and carrying out co-ordinated sea patrols.
The UK’s Border Force vessels have worked alongside Belgian and Dutch ships – and Operation White Sea, which ran in September 2024 and June 2025, has led to the seizure of more 3,300 kg of cocaine and 13 arrests.
These drugs would have had a street value of approximately £66 million, according to the Home Office.
UK Border Force officers have also been deployed in Ireland to operate aboard Irish vessels covering the Celtic Sea, which has been highlighted as an area at “biggest risk”.
Speaking during a visit to Border Force operations in Portsmouth, Hampshire, the minister for immigration said that the “reset” of relations between the UK and EU since Labour came into power had enabled the sharing of intelligence and resources to tackle the international drug trade.
She told the PA news agency: “What we have seen since the project has been launched is the way we’re working together and part of that is the increased trust in our relationships and the increased intelligence sharing.
“The Border Force are working alongside Belgium and Dutch counterparts, making sure that we’re sharing that intelligence to disrupt the activity of these criminal gangs.
“It’s really important that we do that, because working across from the North Sea all the way to the Celtic Sea with Border Force officers also on Irish vessels, we’re making sure that we leave no stone unturned, leave nowhere for criminal gangs to hide.
“If we are to tackle this international criminal activity, we’ve got to do that by working together much more strongly.
“That’s why the reset of the relationship that we’ve got with the European Union is really important in the interests of all of our nations, to make sure that all of our nations, our citizens, are protected from these international criminal gangs.”
Ms Malhotra said that similar “increasing co-operation” with European countries and beyond such as France and Bulgaria and Iraq was helping to tackle people-smuggling gangs.
She said: “This is really important, because this, again, is an international problem, these are international gangs.
“They have been taking advantage of international gaps in our security and cooperation.
“That’s why the way we work together is about closing these gaps so that they can no longer be exploited by these international criminal gangs who are putting lives at risk and undermining our border security.”
The MP for Feltham and Heston added that closer ties in the future would have an impact on the smuggling of both drugs and people.
She said: “It’s important that we see this cooperation continue, and that’s what our reset in our relationship with the European Union is about.
“Because what people will see is that in rebuilding trust with our European partners, that trust is leading to greater intelligence sharing and greater intelligence sharing is leading to joint operations like Operation White Sea.
“What we’ve seen just in the last year is over 3,000kg of cocaine disrupted, that’s over £60 million worth of drugs that have been kept off our streets.”
“That is the real impact of this close cooperation, as well as the work we’re doing on disrupting those criminal gangs who are involved in people smuggling internationally.
“We cannot have the impact that we need without that close cooperation with our European partners.”
