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More migrant arrivals as annual total tops 36,000

Getty Images A group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, by the RNLI Dungeness Lifeboat following a small boat incident in the Channel. They are wearing red life jackets and standing on the bow of the lifeboat.Getty Images
Migrants were brought ashore by the Dungeness lifeboat on Saturday

More than 300 migrants crossed the Channel in small boats on Friday, government figures show, bringing the total for 2024 to more than 36,000.

The Home Office said 305 people made the crossing, meaning that since Christmas Day the number of people arriving by small boats had reached 1,163.

It means the number of people arriving by small boats since the Home Office started to release figures on 3 November 2018 stands at 150,053, data compiled by BBC South East shows.

The Home Office said it would "stop at nothing" to dismantle the people smugglers' operations.

The total for 2024 now stands at 36,023 people, already surpassing 2023's total of 29,437.

The highest number of annual arrivals was in 2022, when the figure reached 45,730.

Getty Images A group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, by the RNLI Dungeness Lifeboat following a small boat incident in the Channel. They are pictured crossing the road at the Port of Dover.Getty Images
More than 150,000 people have crossed the Channel in small boats since 2018, according to BBC South East data

Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp blamed Labour's decision to scrap the Tories' Rwanda scheme, announced days after the general election in July.

The scheme aimed to deter small boats crossings in the Channel by sending some people who arrived in the UK illegally to the east African country.

Mr Philp said: "Another day, another awful statistic on small boats.

"Well over 20,000 have crossed under Labour, over 20% more than the same time last year.

"These rising numbers are the predictable outcome of Starmer scrapping many Conservative measures to tackle this issue, like scrapping the Rwanda deterrent before it even started.

"We know from the experience in Australia that a deterrent would have stopped the boats if it had been allowed to start as planned in late July."

A Home Office spokesperson said: "We all want to end dangerous small boat crossings, which threaten lives and undermine our border security.

"The people-smuggling gangs do not care if the vulnerable people they exploit live or die, as long as they pay. We will stop at nothing to dismantle their business models and bring them to justice."

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