The number of people arriving in Britain in small boats is expected to rise again this year after a lull caused by bad weather, according to the union representing Border Force officials.
Migrant arrivals across the Channel have fallen year on year for the first time since current records began, government figures show. But Lucy Moreton of the Immigration Services Union warned the latest slowdown was probably a “glitch” due to extremely poor weather in recent months.
The last crossing of the year was on 16 December, when 55 people arrived from France in one boat. No further crossings were recorded for the remainder of the year, during heavy rain and high winds, making it the longest consecutive period with no arrivals.
Rishi Sunak has promised to “stop the boats” and claimed his controversial Rwanda scheme would help achieve this. The prime minister has previously boasted when numbers were down that his policies were working – but the rate of people making perilous Channel crossings is heavily affected by the weather.
Moreton told Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday: “The planning assumption for 2024 is that 2023 has been unusually low.
“There have been other confounding factors – we have had particularly high winds, we have had a larger number of days where it is less likely that we are going to get migrants in boats. But we have also had much larger boats, much more seaworthy boats, so the planning assumption is that this is a glitch.”
The total arrivals in 2023 were down more than a third on 2022, according to government figures. Moreton said Border Force and the wider country “needs to continue to resource itself to deal with higher numbers”, adding: “Will we see the peak that we saw in 2022? Maybe not, but certainly more than we have seen in the last year.”
The provisional annual total for the last year is almost 30,000 crossings, more than a third lower than the record 45,774 crossings for 2022.
The decrease has coincided with a growing humanitarian situation in northern France, where large numbers of asylum seekers are homeless in unsanitary conditions while they wait for the weather to be calm enough to cross.
Organisations working with asylum seekers in northern France warned in November of a “catastrophic situation” as dire living conditions had not been ameliorated by the French authorities providing enough basic shelter to protect lone children, pregnant women and families.
Axel Gaudinat of the migrant support charity Utopia 56 warned then that asylum seekers in Calais and Dunkirk could die in France before they even made the crossing if more was not done. “We are lucky nobody has died yet during the storms and bad weather when living conditions have been particularly bad,” he said.
Last month Sunak said there was no “firm date” for meeting his pledge to “stop the boats” when facing questions from MPs.
Michael Tomlinson, the minister for illegal migration, said: “Illegal migration is an international challenge that we are tackling on all fronts – including clamping down on criminal gangs with stepped-up enforcement and working with the French to prevent more crossings.
“Over 25,000 of these dangerous, illegal, and unnecessary crossing attempts have been prevented in 2023, and the number of small boats arriving in the UK is down by 45%.
“Stopping the boats will continue to be our priority in the new year as we target people smugglers and break their business model.”
