Rishi Sunak has responded to French President Emmanuel Macron's claim that the Rwanda plan is a "betrayal of values."

Macron said the plans would prove "totally ineffective" and that using another country to handle asylum seekers created a "geopolitics of cynicism."

The French president made the comments during a speech on the future of Europe at Sorbonne University in Paris.

He also warned the EU was in "mortal" danger from rising nationalism and fragmentation.

Macron said: "I also do not believe in this model that some people want to put in place which means that you go and look for a third country, for example in Africa, and take people who arrived illegally on our soil there who don’t come from that country.

"This will create a geopolitics of cynicism that is a betrayal of our values. It will create new dependencies and will prove totally ineffective."

Rishi Sunak’s spokeswoman rejected the criticism and said: "We don’t agree. We think that our approach is the right one. In terms of breaking the business model of the criminal gangs, we’ll need a strong deterrent.

"We need to make clear that if you come here on a small boat you won’t be able to stay. That is how we will break that business model. And indeed, we’ve seen other partners and other countries around the world explore similar options."

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Home Secretary James Cleverly added that third-party agreements to tackle migration were "not anything new" and were recognised as international solutions to the illegal migration crisis.

He said: "We always rely on third countries. That’s not anything new. That was why I went to Italy. We work with the French. We rely in large part on the French, that’s a third country, we rely on the French. They work with us, we work closely.

"The point is, we do rely on other countries. That will always be the case because migration, by definition, is international and the solutions will by definition, be international."

When asked at if it was central to his plan to tackle illegal migration, he said: "No, it’s not." Asked again whether the political rhetoric put it at the centre of his plan, he said: "Not mine."

It comes after the bill was given Royal Assent yesterday, Thursday, April 25.

Earlier this week, Home Office figures showed that the number of migrants arriving by small boats across the Channel had increased by 24 per cent to 6,265 in the first four months of this year, compared with 5,049 last year.

In his speech, Macron said the EU had to punch its geopolitical weight in the world and prove “that it’s never going to be the lapdog of the United States and know how to speak with all of the other regions of the world."