
More than 900 people arrived in small boats on Friday
This is 42% higher than the same point last year and 79% up on the same date in 2023, according to PA news agency analysis.
A group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover (Gareth Fuller/PA)
It is not the highest daily number so far this year, which came on May 31, when 1,195 people arrived.
People thought to be migrants were pictured being brought into Dover on an RNLI lifeboat on Friday, while others were brought ashore by the Border Force.
Rachel Reeves announced earlier this week that the Government will end the use of hotels to house asylum seekers by the end of this parliament.
Unveiling her spending review on Wednesday, the Chancellor set out how funding will be provided to cut the asylum backlog.
She told MPs: 'I can confirm today that led by the work of the Home Secretary, we will be ending the costly use of hotels to house asylum seekers in this parliament.
'Funding that I have provided today, including from the transformation fund, will cut the asylum backlog, hear more appeal cases and return people who have no right to be here, saving the taxpayer £1 billion a year.'
Rachel Reeves (Carl Court/PA)
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, and we will stop at nothing to dismantle their business models and bring them to justice.
'That is why this Government has put together a serious plan to take down these networks at every stage, and why we are investing up to an additional £280 million per year by 2028-29 in the Border Security Command.
'Through international intelligence-sharing under our Border Security Command, enhanced enforcement operations in northern France and tougher legislation in the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, we are strengthening international partnerships and boosting our ability to identify, disrupt and dismantle criminal gangs whilst strengthening the security of our borders.'
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Scottish Sun
41 minutes ago
- Scottish Sun
Terrified Gemma Collins calls cops & beefs up security after man sends ‘nasty and menacing' letter to her home
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Wales Online
2 hours ago
- Wales Online
DWP offers payment worth £812 but warns you must repay it by cut-off date
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Times
3 hours ago
- Times
Fix our woeful rollout of EV charging to rescue our car industry
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So what's the answer? How about a return to lavish incentives to jumpstart demand, as the likes of Ford and Nissan have advocated? The government has resisted thus far — and rightly so. There has been much debate over the decision to outlaw the sale of most new petrol or diesel-powered cars at the end of the decade. Boris Johnson introduced the 2030 ban; Rishi Sunak pushed it back to 2035; Sir Keir Starmer has dragged it forward to 2030 again. But the time for flip-flopping is over. Britain has charted its course for EVs. Now we must stick to it. Achieving this goal — five years ahead of the EU, we should remember — rightly requires carrots and sticks. In terms of carrots, the primary incentive is that workers buying a company car benefit from tax incentives through a salary-sacrifice scheme that is so generous, it accounts for the lion's share of new EV registrations. As for sticks, supply is being forced up by the government's controversial Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate. 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The No 1 barrier to purchasing an EV is that they are more expensive than petrol or diesel-powered alternatives, according to polling by YouGov from last August. Crucially, though, we may not be so far from parity. An EV was 51 per cent costlier than a petrol or diesel equivalent in 2018; this fell to 18 per cent in 2024, according to analysis by JATO Dynamics. That gap could soon disappear as a tidal wave of cheaper Chinese EVs floods the UK market. We will need to park the geopolitics of this, but it's hard to see how this isn't good for consumers from a purely financial perspective. Which brings us to what we should be concentrating on: charging points. That same YouGov poll — in which, by the way, 49 per cent of respondents said they would never buy an EV — revealed that the second-biggest barrier to going electric was a 'lack of charging infrastructure'. Yes, there are roughly 80,000 EV chargers in the UK, but the pace at which they are being installed is slowing. The compound growth rate between 2021 and 2024 was 37.5 per cent; in the first five months of this year, the number has increased by only 10 per cent. The slowdown counted its first casualty last week. Pod Point, which listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2021 at a £350 million valuation, was rescued by French energy firm EDF in a deal worth little more than £10 million. The £400 million that Reeves has set aside in the Comprehensive Spending Review for charging is an important first step. But money alone is not the answer. State aid might be best reserved for funding chargers in locations where the operation is wholly uneconomic. Yet talk to those in the EV charging industry and they will tell you that receiving timely planning permission and access to the electricity grid capacity are as important, if not more important than taxpayer handouts. One senior executive recently recounted the tale of a company behind a prospective charging site near Gatwick airport, which was told by officials that it would not be hooked up to the grid until 2037. 'We don't want grants — we want certainty,' said another. Then there is the inverse relationship between wealth and the cost of running an EV. An estimated 40 per cent of Britons live in a home without off-street parking, forcing them to charge their car at public chargers, which attract VAT at a rate of 20 per cent. Those with off-street parking, likely to be better off, can charge using their home supply, upon which VAT is levied at 5 per cent. For a Labour government seeking to champion 'working people', this discrepancy seems bonkers — but the Treasury may not see it that way. Crucial to driving the car industry out of its current malaise is a renewed focus on charging. Otherwise, the danger is that drivers will be running out of power left, right and centre. Which might anger them more than cyclists. Oliver Shah is away