The 'Jungle' camp in Calais is to be jettisoned gradually, the French interior minister has announced.
Refugees reaching the camp over the summer have pushed the total number to an all-time high of 10,000, according to estimates from aid agencies. French officials put the number at 7,000.
The camp is used by large numbers of Afghans, Somalis, Sudanese and Kurds, among other asylum seekers, who reportedly want to go to the UK rather than claim asylum in France.
People there are sleeping rough, in tattered tents or in makeshift lean-tos where sanitary conditions are desperate.
Now Bernard Cazeneuve has said the site will be dismantled in stages and the wasteland cleared.
“To unblock Calais”, the minister has pledged to create accommodation for thousands elsewhere in France.
Places for 8,000 asylum seekers will be created this year and thousands more in 2017, as part of France’s effort to get the refugees in Calais to leave voluntarily, said Cazeneuve.
Since last October the authorities believe that some 5,000 refugees have left Calais and gone to one of the 161 special centres set up around France.
In April this year, the southern part of the “Jungle” was cleared of shelters in an attempt to move migrants on to other accommodation. But the numbers since have grown and been concentrated into one patch of wasteland in Calais.
The migrants are gathered there to try to smuggle themselves aboard lorries that cross the Channel to Britain either through the Channel Tunnel or on ferries. A rise in the number of violent attacks on lorry drivers has been reported, despite some 2,000 French police operating in Calais.
Minister Cazeneuve will visit Calais on Friday afternoon, as French lorry drivers, shopkeepers and farmers plan to stage a blockade of the port on Monday to demand the camp is demolished.
The Socialist president, François Hollande, who has until now avoided visiting Calais, is to visit the city later this month.
