Saturday marked the third time the total has topped 600 in a day since the start of 2022, with 607 people spotting the Channel crossing on 14 boats – the equivalent of around 43 people per boat. It brings the provisional total for the year to 20,017, a significant increase from last year. By this point in 2021, just over 11,300 crossings had taken place, for a total of 28,526 crossings identified by the end of the year. According to the Ministry of Defense, 3,618 crossings have been detected in August so far, with 1,694 last week. The highest daily total for 2022 to date was recorded on August 1, when 696 people made the crossing on 14 boats. The Guardian recently reported that smugglers had dropped their prices and crammed more people than ever before into already overloaded, underpowered boats. Last November, French police reported a price of around £5,000 being charged by smugglers for a person to cross the Channel, the Mirror reports. Now asylum seekers and NGOs say prices have fallen to between £500 and £1,000 for a place on a boat. Campaigners say the increased numbers arriving on overcrowded boats with cheaper crossing prices show that plans to forcibly remove some asylum seekers arriving in the UK on small boats are not working as a deterrent. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. It has been four months since Home Secretary Priti Patel unveiled plans to send refugees to Rwanda to try to stop people crossing the Channel. Under the agreement, Rwanda will accept asylum seekers deemed by the UK to have arrived “illegally” and are therefore inadmissible under new immigration rules. The first deportation flight in June was canceled after several asylum seekers, the Civil and Commercial Services union and the charities Care4Calais, Detention Action and Asylum Aid questioned the legality of the policy. Further hearings are expected to take place in September and October. Despite growing numbers, small boat arrivals in the UK are a fraction of the number of people going to Europe. Figures from the UN Refugee Agency show that at least 120,441 people arrived in Europe via the Mediterranean by land and sea in 2021. The Home Office was recently accused of avoiding scrutiny after publishing a damning report on the government’s response to the rise in Channel crossings on the last day of parliament. At Patel’s behest, he concluded that the resources needed to prevent illegal entry into the UK by small boats crossing the Channel were “unsustainable”. Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said: “Thousands of lives are being put at risk on these dangerous boats as the Tory approach is simply not working. We need action to crack down on the criminal gangs that organize and profit from it, but instead Tory ministers are making it harder to tackle the gangs and wasting time and millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on a Rwanda plan that is not working. “Labour’s plan will take this lost money and put it into a new cell in the National Crime Agency to crack down on the criminals responsible and prevent more lives being put at risk.”
