The wall is due to be completed by the end of this year.
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The BBC understands it will not replace any existing fences. We are telling our drivers not to stop within 150 miles of Calais so they are not targeted by migrants.
The camp is home to some 9,000 migrants living in squalid tents and makeshift shelters.
The wall is expected to be four metres (13 ft) high and to be built along both sides of a 1-km (0.6 mile) stretch of road.
The jungle has swelled to 10,000 people in the previous year and includes up to 700 children who attend language classes and a makeshift school.
“We are going to start building this big, new wall as part of the £17m package we are doing with the French. Now we’re doing a wall”, British Immigration Minister Robert Goodwill announced at a government hearing on Tuesday.
The estimated $4 million project is one of a spate of new walls to be thrown up around Europe as the continent struggles with an influx of new arrivals. On Monday, French authorities brought dozens of riot police, after being threatened by activists on Friday when they first tried to partially tear down the site. Scottish National Party lawmaker Angus Robertson said Prime Minister Theresa May should be “totally ashamed” of a proposal that echoed presidential candidate Donald Trump’s call for a vast wall along the U.S. -Mexico border. I suppose it has something to do with Trump’s rhetoric and the perceived disrespecting of Mexicans.
“We don’t like him”.
“More and more of us want to sell our licences. We reject his message”.
The Calais “Jungle” has regularly hit the headlines despite playing just a tiny role in the current European migrant crisis.
“It would not be a negotiating objective of the United Kingdom to remove people working and living here, making a contribution to our health service, to our agriculture, to all the other areas that they do”.
Despite current security measures – including a fence – Goodwill acknowledged that some people were still managing to get through to the UK.
But industry bodies have said the wall is a “waste of money” and will simply push the problem further down the road. “It could make it more risky for people, it will push up tariffs for people smugglers and people will end up taking more risks”.
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French shopkeepers, police, unionists and farmers will today join hauliers in calling for the northern section of the migrant camp at Calais to be demolished.
