As many as 9,000 people could be moved from the Calais refugee camp to reception centres across France in the coming weeks, François Hollande has said.

On a visit to one of France’s 164 such centres in the town of Tours on Saturday, the president reiterated his pledge to shut down the Calais camp, where thousands of people are sleeping rough in the hope of moving on to Britain. He said conditions there were not acceptable, especially for people fleeing war.

The reception centres would hold 40 to 50 people each for up to four months while their cases were examined, Hollande said. Migrants who did not seek asylum would be sent home. Many local conservative politicians have opposed the centres.

Hollande, who has avoided visiting the Calais camp, is scheduled to visit the city on Monday. Authorities have made repeated attempts to shut the camp down, including by demolishing a large southern section of it. This month the interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said he would press ahead with the closure of the camp “with the greatest determination”.

Despite his pledge, the number of people in the camp reached an all-time high of 10,000 this month, according to aid organisations’ estimates. Authorities have said that over the past year more than 5,000 have left the camp for reception centres.

French children’s services are struggling to cope with a surge in the number of unaccompanied young refugees who have abandoned plans to travel to the UK, according to local charity workers. In the past three months, staff employed by the main French charity working with refugee children in Calais have had to turn away between 15 and 35 unaccompanied minors a day because they have no beds for them in the emergency shelter.

This week the UK’s anti-slavery commissioner warned that the slow pace of British efforts to fulfil promises help child refugees was exposing them to the risk of slavery and exploitation.



Kevin Hyland, who visited Calais this summer, wrote to the home secretary, Amber Rudd, highlighting Theresa May’s personal commitment to tackling slavery and complaining that not enough was being done to protect children in the camp.

He said young women, particularly from the Horn of Africa, were being forced into prostitution in the camp’s “nightclubs” to pay people smugglers for the next leg of their journey.

Hyland also cited evidence that boys from Afghanistan were being made to perform “bacha bazi”, which involves dancing and sexual exploitation, and that young people were being coerced into criminal activity.