Small boat crossings are down – so what’s behind the drop?

It’s summer, parliament is in recess and small boats are back at the top of the news agenda.

Same old debates again?

Not quite. There’s an unusual flavour to the bickering this year, as the number of people arriving in the UK to claim asylum after taking a small boat over the English Channel has gone down this year.

Wait, the number can go down?

Yes, and not just a little bit. Arrivals are down about 45% compared to the same period last year.

So instead of arguing about how to get small boat crossings to come down, politicians are arguing about what’s making them come down.

On Monday, shadow home secretary and scourge of pistol-wielding French warship captains Chris Philp said the drop was down to the weather, not his opposite number Shabana Mahmood.

Citing the skipper of a fishing boat, he told BBC Breakfast: ‘The reason the numbers are down is because of the increased wave height in the Channel, it’s not because of the action the government has taken.’

Andy Burnham suggested otherwise, saying moves including the seizure of engines and arrest of smugglers meant ‘progress is being made’ although his government is ‘not complacent’.

Nigel Farage, meanwhile, argued that it didn’t matter how low the numbers were going because ‘it only takes one or two Iranian terrorists to come into Britain and commit a mass atrocity for this to be a disaster’.

Do we know what’s really behind the fall?

To find out, I spoke to the skipper of a fishing boat – not really. I spoke to Dr Mihnea Cuibus, a senior researcher at Oxford University’s Migration Observatory who specialises in unauthorised migration to the UK.

You may be surprised to hear that it’s a bit more complex than the height of waves in the Channel.

In fact, Dr Mihnea said: ‘We’re never going to be able to point to an exact reason, simply because essentially we have one set of numbers and we have a very large set of factors that all operate at the same time.’

In other words, each of the 14,531 people who have arrived on small boats this year will have different reasons why they left their homes in the first place; why they got the opportunity to get a place on a dinghy; and why their journey was not ended earlier.

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Government policy could play a role – for example, cooperation with European police forces to disrupt smuggling gangs and prevent launches from the beaches of France.

But equally, developments in countries like Syria could mean fewer people setting out for the treacherous journey across the continent. And a series of agreements struck by the EU with its neighbours to control the flow of migrants has driven down numbers entering Europe too.

Dr Mihnea said: ‘It’s essentially always going to be quite impossible to say, OK, this change has happened due to this reason as opposed to the others.’

Are there any clues?

One hint might come from the size of the vessels involved.

In the early days of the small boats crisis in 2018 and 2019, the average number of people on a boat was 20 to 30. More recently, boats with 80 or 90 people are becoming common and on Tuesday a dinghy capsized with 157 people on board.

This could indicate smugglers are ‘struggling to secure enough boats and enough equipment’, Dr Mihnea said – though that’s also not 100% certain.

Is there anything we know for sure?

The one thing flagged by the Migration Observatory as ‘unlikely to have had a significant impact’ on numbers is the weather. Sorry, Chris Philp.

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