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Shabana Mahmood defended French police over their Channel migrant failures – insisting they are “doing their bit”. The Home Secretary said the water’s edge is the “last point at which anything can be done” to prevent departures. And Ms Mahmood revealed France has started removing migrants under the £660m funding deal bankrolled by British taxpayers.

Footage of migrants waltzing past French gendarmes has sparked anger, with Emmanuel Macron’s Government repeatedly facing accusations of aiding the crossings. But Ms Mahmood said: “If you only look at activity that’s happening at the water’s edge, actually that’s the last point at which anything can be done because at that point you’ve got an operational risk of people being in the water, and then obviously French officials have to make a decision based on operational risk to life.”

Ms Mahmood said: “If you just go a few 100 yards up from water’s edge, you will see a lot of disruption activity. There is a huge amount of work happening with French law enforcement that is literally stopping people from actually getting to water’s edge in the first place.”

She added the French were “doing their bit”.

Under Labour’s £660m deal with Paris, Britain will pay France to detain and deport migrants trying to cross the Channel in small boats.

The deal will see officers targeting and detaining small boat migrants on French beaches. They will then be taken to a new removal centre in Dunkirk.

While the site is under construction, officials will use a removal centre in Coquelles.

Home Office sources said that if it doesn’t lead to a reduction in crossings, the payments will be cancelled.

And Ms Mahmood revealed deportations have already started. She said: “They have actually done some deportations already, so some have begun.”

However, the Home Secretary refused to confirm the Dunkirk detention centre will be operational by the end of the year.

She warned Britain would stop funding parts of the French crackdown if they failed to deliver, saying: “If actually, you know, later this year, in the next year, we’re thinking some sort of bits are not working, we won’t fund them anymore.

“We’re going to fund the things that work.”

Ms Mahmood vowed to go “further and faster” against Channel crossings, declaring: “We’re going to bear down on small boats relentlessly.”

And as smugglers turn to “mega-dinghies” carrying hundreds of migrants at once, she warned: “Rest assured, the very fact of them changing their tactics is because they’re finding it more difficult to operate, and now they’re thinking of new ways of getting around the changes that we’re making with the French.

“We will find ways to stop them.”

Labour faced fresh ridicule over new Home Office figures which showed the Government has only removed 6,100 small boat migrants since they came into office.

But Ms Mahmood confirmed ministers still want to send failed asylum seekers to return hubs.

She told The Sun: “We are also looking at third-country hubs, returns hubs models.

“These are live conversations that are happening across Europe, but in other parts of the world as well.”

“The most important thing I think in any deal that we strike now or in the future is about its effectiveness.

“Is it actually going to be able to do the thing that it says it’s going to do? Can it do so in a way that is compliant legally as well?

“That is the test hurdle. Those are the same challenges that other countries in Europe are grappling with. There’s no easy answers here, but I’m confident that whatever decisions we make, the main test will be: is it going to work, and can it be effective?”

Prime Minister Andy Burnham said last week the country “cannot have a situation where it’s only the poorest communities in the country” housing asylum seekers.

Ms Mahmood said she is targeting a mixed model of accommodation utilising military sites, former student apartments, bedsits and homes of multiple occupancy.

She told The Times: “You’ve got to get a fair spread and what we are doing with the new model of asylum accommodation and the future of asylum accommodation is think carefully about how you have a fair spread that doesn’t end up being in one community or one type of community.

“In a way it doesn’t really matter whether you’re in an affluent part of the country or in a more deprived constituency like mine.

“A change in the population, the demographic and in the housing in which asylum seekers are often housed and the transient nature of that population does have an impact on communities.”

The Home Secretary said she understood the concerns of people living near asylum accommodation, with experience in her Birmingham Ladywood constituency.

“I get it, I understand that these are things that worry people and I get where they’re coming from,” she said.

“The people in better off parts of the country, really the issues aren’t that different to people who I represent in my patch.”