‘Small boats week’ ignores wider context of irregular immigration in UK

Rishi Sunak’s “small boats week” has been marked by the government actioning its promise to house asylum seekers on a barge, then having to remove them; bad language; and, from the government’s perspective, bad numbers.

The official figures show the number of people arriving in the UK in small boats since 2018 has topped 100,000, an arbitrary figure but one that has caused much Conservative ire.

Chief among those critics was the party’s deputy chair, Lee Anderson. The MP for Leigh said the government was failing on immigration. He was “very angry about the number. Again, very angry, as you know, every single day when I see these illegal migrants,” he told GB News, repeating his claim that people arriving on small boats are not genuine asylum seekers.

In fact, the latest Home Office figures show a majority of people arriving on small boats have genuine cases. In the year to the end of March, 90% of small boat arrivals claimed asylum. Due to a large backlog at the Home Office, most of these have not been processed – but of those that have, 60% had their application granted.

The government’s tendency to focus almost exclusively on small boat arrivals means there has been a lack of wider context from the discussion about irregular immigration in the UK.

For example, despite the anger at breaching the 100,000 figure, the number of people crossing the Channel in small boats has fallen relative to this point in 2022. Official annual figures from the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office show 18,674 people had arrived by small boat as of 10 August last year. This year the figure is 15% lower.

There is also an international context: the UK is far from the only country that has to deal with irregular migration by sea. UN refugee agency figures show that Italy – a country with a comparable population to the UK – had had 90,484 people arrive in small boats as of 6 August – six times as many as the UK, and more than double last year’s figure.

Spain (with a population of 47 million compared with the UK’s 67 million) also received more unauthorised sea arrivals between January and July this year (16,573 – up 3.8% on 2022, and 1,841 more than the UK).

Greece managed to reduce the number of unauthorised sea arrivals from a peak of nearly 857,000 in 2015 during the EU refugee crisis to just over 4,300 in 2021 – but figures have risen since. At the end of July, 8,867 people had crossed to Greece by boat – up 137% from the same period last year.

This rise in small boat crossings to mainland Europe is also causing a rise in the number of people drowning. International Organization for Migration records show 2,062 migrants died or were missing in the Mediterranean between January and July this year – the highest number since 2017.

If the UK government wants to reduce its asylum caseload, tackling small boat crossings will only do so much. Home Office figures show that while most people who cross in small boats are genuine asylum seekers, most people seeking asylum generally have not arrived in a small boat.

Since 2020, 47% of applications have been from people in small boats, and while some periods have had higher figures, in the first three months of this year small boat arrivals made up just 28% of UK asylum applications.

This is neatly illustrated by the fact that most asylum seekers so far selected to be housed on the Bibby Stockholm barge are not actually small boat migrants (most used regular passenger planes to reach the UK) – which begs the question of how much the government’s “small boats week” is actually about small boats at all.