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news
Cyclists fined over migrant in bike rack (credit: Adrian Fenton/BBC)Cyclists returning from French road trip fined £1,500 after migrant found inside bike rack on the back of their motorhome
An Essex couple who returned from a holiday in France to discover a migrant hiding in the bike rack on the back of their motorhome have been fined £1,500 by the Home Office for failing to "check that no clandestine entrant was concealed".
Adrian and Joanne Fenton told the BBC they were returning to the UK following a holiday in France when they caught the ferry from Calais and drove back to their home in Essex, arriving at 10:15pm on the 15th October 2024.
However, when unzipping the bike rack that was on the rear of their vehicle they discovered that a Sudanese migrant, who told police he was 16, had climbed into the bicycle storage unit and clung to their vehicle for the duration of the six-hour journey.
They reported it to the police who removed the man from the bike rack, the couple shocked when, while they were travelling in Australia in December, they were told by the Home Office that they would be fined £1,500 for failure to "check that no clandestine entrant was concealed".
The fine is now being appealed, the Home Office claiming that the penalty is "designed to target negligence rather than criminality". Mr Fenton has argued that it will "only encourage travellers in this position not to call the police but to let the stowaway abscond".
"At no point did I believe I would be fined by taking correct and moral action," he responded to the fine. Speaking to BBC Radio, Mrs Fenton explained that the bike rack and cover had not been inspected by border officials in Calais or on arrival in the UK.
After a six-hour journey, Mrs Fenton recalled her husband unzipping the cover to the rack and noticing two trainers.
"He's gone 'Jo, you need to phone the police. We've got a stowaway," she told the JVS Show on BBC Three Counties Radio, before explaining how she offered the man water and he replied, "Thank you."
Video footage shows police assisting the man from the rear bike rack before sitting him down on the floor of the Fentons' garage. The couple are challenging the fine on the basis that he technically was clinging to the outside of the vehicle and was not aboard the motorhome, the Home Office charge accusing them of failing to "check that no clandestine entrant was concealed in the vehicle".
A Home Office email also stated that the "entrant" was discovered by an authorised search officer, that despite the police having been called by the couple, alerting the authorities to the situation.
Conservative MP Sir John Whittingdale, the couple's local member of Parliament, has written to the Minister for Border Security and Asylum Dame Angela Eagle to raise their concerns.
Dan is the road.cc news editor and joined in 2020 having previously written about nearly every other sport under the sun for the Express, and the weird and wonderful world of non-league football for The Non-League Paper. Dan has been at road.cc for four years and mainly writes news and tech articles as well as the occasional feature. He has hopefully kept you entertained on the live blog too.
Never fast enough to take things on the bike too seriously, when he's not working you'll find him exploring the south of England by two wheels at a leisurely weekend pace, or enjoying his favourite Scottish roads when visiting family. Sometimes he'll even load up the bags and ride up the whole way, he's a bit strange like that.
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So is Border Farce going to fine themselves £1500 pound for every illegal they let in on the little boats? If they were, they'd soon do their job properly!!!!!
They are not 'illegal'. It is not illegal to seek refuge. Once you do seek asylum, if and when your claim is rejected at that point you become illegal. But it is not illegal to get on a boat and seek asylum. The vast majority of people who do seek asylum in the UK are granted asylum. So at no point are they 'illegal'.
When we returning through Dover on our bikes last summer, we got stuck behind a Dutch couple and their two young kids, one on a tag-a-long and one in a seat on the back of dad's bike. It made me proud that the Glorious Men and Women of boarder farce made them empty their entire luggage, then confiscated the tiny knife they'd been using to slice up bits of fruit for the kids' snacks. They then tried to confiscate 2 cannisters of camping gas from us, coming INTO the country, on the basis the we were "only allowed one". Eventually, when confronted by my lazer-like interrogation along the lines of "how the F does that work when there are 6 of us booked on 3 different tickets?" we got one of those grudging"we'll make an exception on this occasion" bits of bull-crap. I said at the time "do they have nothing better to do?". Well, seems they actually have, but aren't doing it...
Bloody immigrants stowing away and smuggling themselves across borders again!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgq979yw54xo
It doesn't seem right.
The BBC article has the Fentons also pointing out that the border officers in France and in the UK somehow failed to notice this kid too.
The joke of this, is John Whittingdale our local useless, extremist, Brexit supporting, tory MP will have supported the Home Office policies that brought in this punitive fine. As we know in this country we hit the less wealthy with fixed penalty fines, for genuine errors, that are out of all proportion to the offence. £1,500 represents three weeks earning at the level of the living wage or 6 x Bottles of Cristal Champagne for a Tory, fundraising garden party.
Just imagine for one moment if that was your child - your 16 year old daughter or son and that the situation in your home land was so desperate that you child was prepared to travel 1000 of miles unaccompanied and exposed to all sorts of risk and danger. I hope the young person has a safe and peaceful life ahead of him.
Agreed. And I wouldn't appreciate people and media referring to my child as an adult.
This is a common problem for people of brown, black or oriental backgrounds, in our society, adultification bias is a real issue and results in a plethora of abuses by society and the state. Mind you the way we treat all children in our society is a disgrace, criminalising them at an extremely young age, excluding them from schooling on a whim and denying them an appropriate education if they have learning disabilities. Let's not forget a tax system that punishes lower paid parents, forcing their children in to poverty, while the 3% are on the gravy train, being supported by benficial tax regime, that allows them to avoid making a fair contribution to society.
How many migrants have the RNLI brought in? £1,500 for each one must have depleted their coffers somewhat.
Or is there a separate law covering deliberately bringing illegal immigrants in?
None.
For starters, RNLI only provides the lifeboat services. Direction and decision-making sits with the Coastguard.
Secondly, they only rescue people in British waters, so by the time they come in to contact with them they are already 'in'. In fact there have have been cases where the Coastguard have been criticised for not assisting people who were clearly in trouble because they were just outside British waters.
yeah them & the National Trust - bloody traitors & saboteurs eh?
I mean, going round saving lives at sea, what a bunch of "woke" nonsense right?
Rights and responsibilities - you have the right to fall in, but then it's your responsibility not to drown - why should it be my responsibility to (pay for someone to) fish you out?
Quite frankly this decoupling of cause and effect - this nannying of the population - will enfeeble us within a generation.
What happened to "I am just going out and may be some time"? Now it seems we're not only molly-coddling our own, we're providing succour to any Tom, Dick or Harry with a sob-story!
Yours, Herbert Gusset (Cpl, ret'd)
I hope that, if you ever need rescuing from a life-threatening situation, then someone asks for your passport, proof of immigration status, and two other forms of photo ID before they save your life. It's only reasonable.
That's magnanamous of you; I'd let this particular ****er drown and do the checks afterwards!
You're an idiot. And a callous one at that. I suggest that you look up SOLAS before you make an even bigger tit of yourself.
£1500, if it were levied, would seem a fair price to pay for saving desperate men, women and children from appalling death by drowning, to most people who aren't vindictive, petty nationalists anyway.
Last time I checked, the RNLI's job was to pick up people out of the sea. I don't think they check their passports. Oh, and under INTERNATIONAL MARITIME LAW, you are supposed to help someone in distress.
Take a good look at yourself, it's not nice from where I am.
You are Ben Habib and I claim my £5.
Hey FrankH (or are you Nigel in disguise). Take your shit-stirring and fuck off elsewhere.
https://rnli.org/footer/faqs/our-work-in-the-channel-faqs#:~:text=Why%20....
I for one like your contribution. I mean, it's good to know that Tory ex-Home Secretaries are busy spewing bile into their keyboards at home, not roaming the streets along with the normal people.
Similar incident happened to another couple that was in the news early last year, instead of it being a cycle rack this person concealed themselves inside a trailer. The owners and elderly couple spotted something wrong only when they got to french boarder control check. There authorities found a man aged 21-30 who admitted he had help off a friend to help him in the trailer and fasten it back up just not properly, this was done when the couple stopped off to refuel. The man admitted he and his friend were looking for UK registered vehicles.
I wouldn't mind betting this kid had help too if the rack had a zipped up bag over it, who zipped it back up?! Admittedly the zipper could have been made secure, I refuse to accept this kid could have got in there with no help. In other words in the wake of not being able to stop the people smugglers, instead punishing innocent citizens in place of warning all travelers and advising them on how to prevent it.
He's right: don't snitch
"Hey - did you see that migrant climbing out and running off?"
"No, I did not"
Truck drivers have been having this fine thrown at them for years when they've come back from the continent.
You have a sealed trailer - it's sealed so it can go through customs - and the migrants have been in there since it was loaded as they bribed the guy on the forklift; or the migrants have cut a hole in the roof.
Or you pick a container up from the docks ...
Short of breaking the seal - which you are not allowed to do - there is no way of knowing that there is someone inside that shouldn't be there.
Truck drivers have had legitimate reasons for appealing their fine... the vast majority have been rejected.
These guys ... well, they have no excuse for not checking.
I'd suggest they were lucky that it was only an migrant and not a couple of kilos of cocaine.
Exactly how frequently is one required to check one's bike rack for stow-aways? Admittedly I don't have a motor home, and it's been a long time since I've been through Calais, but I have never once suddenly decided to inspect my car for migrants.
It's your vehicle ... as the driver you are legally responsible for it.
If you go abroad with a vehicle that has obvious hiding places [like a bike rack that's covered by material] and you don't check before customs... then to be honest, you deserve everything you get.
The migrant situation is not unheard of; the closure of places like Songat [sic] only severed to spread the migrants out, and make them more cunning.
And if you think having a car makes you less of a target ... think again.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-57187052
Except, as I said earlier, the Fentons claim that the border officers in France and the UK also missed this kid. And they're professionals, trained to search for hardened foreign holidaymakers.
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