Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp has called Andy Burnham “absolutely disgraceful” for suggesting that illegal migrants will have to be housed in all areas of the country.

He told GB News: “It’s absolutely disgraceful that Andy Burnham seems to think the solution to this is to spread the illegal immigrants around the country, so everybody suffers with these mostly young men living in their neighbourhood. That is not the solution. That is Andy Burnham’s job as Prime Minister, to protect our borders.

“He should be insisting that the French stop these embarkations, which we’re paying them to do. And any migrants who do arrive in the UK should be immediately deported back to their country of origin with no legal aid, no court process, no asylum claim, no messing around, no nothing.

“Now, to do that, we will need to leave the ECHR, the European Convention on Human Rights. That is the Conservative policy. And if Andy Burnham was serious, he would adopt that policy, not tell the British public that every community in the country has to accept young male illegal immigrants who don’t speak English, mostly are often very aggressive, many of whom have also gone on to commit serious criminal offences, including murder and many, many rapes.

“No community should have to put up with that. These illegal immigrants should be deported. It’s Andy Burnham’s job to do that, but he’s failing to do it. He’s failing even to recognise that it’s his job, which is even worse.”

On the early release of prisoners to free up spaces, he said: “That letter from the 50 chief constables, every chief constable in the country, should be a wake-up call to Andy Burnham. They’ve said that Labour’s approach, Andy Burnham’s approach to early prisoner release, is putting the public at risk, which is not acceptable.

“So we’re saying they should immediately suspend the law that Labour passed earlier this year. It should not come into force as planned on September the second, and we do need emergency legislation which we’d support. But actually, there’s a more fundamental underlying problem, which is a lack of prison spaces.

“We should be renting places in prisons overseas. Sweden, for example, has just done that, renting some places in Estonia. We should be kicking out a lot of foreign criminals who are in our prisons, either to serve the rest of their prison sentence in a prison in their home country, or if they’re near the end of their sentence, just to be deported, those are the kind of solutions that would work.

“We need to change the planning system so that prisons can be built much faster, and in the short term, we need prefabricated cells to be put up inside the perimeter of existing prisons. Solutions are there. The public rightly expect criminals to serve their prison sentence.

“I want to see these disgusting criminals, like the men who killed PC Andrew Harper, serve their sentence in prison. And it’s not just them; it’s people who have committed domestic abuse, the indecent assault of children. Labour initially tried to release rapists early, as well.

“These people all belong in prison. Andy Burnham has not got a grip of this. His policy seems to change from one day to the next, and frankly, through his incompetence and his weakness, Andy Burnham is betraying victims, and as the chief constables said, making the public less safe as well.”