On a calm Friday, one boat carrying 70 people made it across the English Channel. That single crossing took the Home Office’s running total of small-boat arrivals to 200,013 since records began in 2018, the BBC reported.
Governments of both major parties have promised to bring the numbers down and break up the smuggling gangs behind the trips. Arrivals have more than doubled over the last three years. Ministers declared the Channel route a “major incident” in 2018.
Who is crossing
Roughly 128,000 of the crossings happened under Conservative governments between 2018 and 2024. Rishi Sunak pledged in 2022 to “stop the boats.” Labour promised to “smash” the smuggling gangs when Sir Keir Starmer took office in 2024, and more than 72,000 people have arrived since.
The annual figure peaked in 2022 at more than 45,000, fell by several thousand the next year, and has since climbed back to similar levels. The latest count shows more than 7,380 arrivals since January, which is 36% fewer than the same stretch of last year.
Home Office figures show most small-boat migrants from 2018 to 2025 came from Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea and Albania. That has begun to change. Arrivals from Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia nearly tripled to 13,000 against 2024, and those from Sudan rose about 60%. Nearly nine in ten arrivals between 2018 and 2025 were men and boys, and almost everyone was under 40.
Deaths and asylum
At least eight migrants have died trying to cross this year, according to the UN’s International Organization for Migration and French authorities. Twenty-three deaths were confirmed last year.
About 95% of those who arrived in the eight years to 2025 claimed asylum, and they made up around a third of all asylum claims in the period. By December, more than 108,000 of those claims had been processed and about three in five applicants were granted asylum. Rates vary widely. More than 90% of applications from Yemen, Sudan and Eritrea were approved. For Afghans, the grant rate was 96% in 2022 after the Taliban returned to power, and 33% in 2025 after Home Office guidance changed.
Some 7,600 people who arrived by small boat have been returned since 2018, and figures to December 2025 suggest 70% of them were Albanian. Returns to Afghanistan are paused because there is no diplomatic mission in the UK.
Government and critics
A Home Office spokesperson said the government is “bearing down on small boat crossings.” The home secretary has signed a new deal with France to step up enforcement on beaches, the spokesperson said, adding that joint work has stopped over 42,000 attempted crossings since the election and that almost 60,000 people here illegally have been removed or deported.
Migration Watch UK, which tracks the crossings and argues for tighter immigration controls, calls the Channel the main route of illegal entry into Britain. It says 41,472 people crossed in 2025 and points to a National Audit Office report from May 2025 suggesting the asylum system could cost more than £15 billion over ten years. It also cites a 2023 Policy Exchange estimate that the small boats problem costs roughly £3.5 billion a year. The group says repeated pledges to “stop the boats,” including the Nationality and Borders Act, the Illegal Migration Act and the abandoned Rwanda scheme, have not ended the crossings.
Sources
- English Channel migrant small boat crossings reach 200,000 since 2018
- Channel Crossing Tracker | Migration Watch UK
