REFORM leader Nigel Farage’s mass deportations response to the small boats crisis will make the problem worse, Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell said today.

Mr Cottrell said the “isolationist, short-term kneejerk” policy offers no solution to the big issues driving people to risk their lives in the Channel.

Mr Farage has vowed to detain anyone arriving by small boat and deport up to 600,000 people from the country if he forms the next government.

The archbishop, the most senior prelate in the Church of England in the absence of an archbishop of Canterbury, told Sky News: “I’d say to them: you haven’t solved the problem.

“You’ve just put it somewhere else and you’ve done nothing to address the issue of what brings people to this country.

“And so if you think that’s the answer, you will discover in due course that all you have done is made the problem worse.”