Latest news with #Channelcrossings
The Independent
10 hours ago
- General
- The Independent
New French patrol boats to address migrant crossings across English Channel
France has agreed to develop a plan to stop small boats at sea by the summer, following criticism of French authorities for allegedly allowing people smugglers to operate like a 'taxi' service. The French government is reportedly expanding its Navy with new patrol boats to intercept migrant boats before they reach the UK, aiming to have the strategy ready before President Macron's visit to London on July 8. The decision follows a surge in crossings, with over 1,000 people crossing the English Channel on Saturday, and reports of French police observing migrants boarding boats. Defence Secretary John Healey criticised France's inaction, stating Britain has 'lost control of its borders,' while Home Secretary Yvette Cooper urged France to intercept migrant boats at sea immediately. A French interior ministry source indicated a desire to change intervention protocols to allow operations in shallow waters, up to 300 metres from the coast, to intercept 'taxi boats,' with the goal of having 'shared guidelines' ready for the July summit; the UK has a £480m deal with France to prevent Channel crossings.
BBC News
a day ago
- Business
- BBC News
Government accused of blaming record crossings on the weather
Good weather and the willingness of people smugglers to cram more people onto small boats have been highlighted by the government as factors driving the level of migrant Channel Home Office has released figures showing that the number of "red days" - when conditions are considered favourable for small boat crossings - peaked in figures also show a rise in "severely overcrowded boats" in the same Conservatives and Reform have accused the government of "blaming the weather" for the record crossings so far this year. The government has said it is working to fix "a broken asylum system" left by the Tories. Rising numbers The Home Office figures reveal there were 190 red days in the 12 months to April 2025 - an 80% increase on the previous year and the highest number since records days are defined as days which the Met Office has assessed as "likely" or "highly likely" to see small boat crossings, based on things like the height of waves, wind speed and rainfall. By publishing the red day figures, the first official release of this kind, the government is suggesting a link between good weather conditions and the level of migrant far this year, 14,812 people have arrived in small boats - up about 40% on the same period last year. Almost 1,200 people arrived on Saturday alone. BBC Verify asked Peter Walsh from the Migration Observatory, based at the University of Oxford, exactly what impact the weather has on Channel said it was a factor but other issues, such as the effectiveness of smuggling gangs and the number of people wanting to reach the UK are likely to be more important."A migrant's decision to come to the UK by small boat is important and life-changing for them: will they casually drop their plans and decide not to migrate because of a few consecutive days of bad weather? Or will they just wait until the next safe-weather day," he told BBC acknowledging that gangs have exploited periods of good weather to increase crossings, a Home Office spokesperson insisted the government is "restoring grip to the broken asylum system it inherited"."That's why we are giving counter-terror style powers to law enforcement, launching an unprecedented international crackdown on immigration crime and have prevented 9,000 crossings from the French coastline this year alone", the spokesperson said. Responding to the red day figures, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp, said:"Blaming the weather for the highest ever crossing numbers so far this year is the border security equivalent of a lazy student claiming 'the dog ate my homework'."Reform MP Lee Anderson said: "This Labour government blaming small boat crossings on the weather is like blaming the housing crisis on homebuilders - it's pathetic." More people per boat The figures also show a rise in what the Home Office has called "severely overcrowded small boats".In the year to April 2025, there were 33 boats which carried 80 or more people on year before, there were only 11 boats with 80 or more people and there was just one of these boats recorded in the year to April 2023. While the number of people per boat has increased, the total number of boats has fallen from 1,116 in 2021–22 to 738 last year a record number of people died attempting to cross the channel in small boats, something which the Home Office attributes to "more people [being] crammed into flimsy and dangerous boats" by people smugglers. What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?
Sky News
2 days ago
- Climate
- Sky News
Government draws link between good weather and small boat crossings - but they are rising during bad conditions too
Good weather in the first half of the year may help to explain an increase in small boat arrivals to the UK, according to the government. But our analysis shows that there has also been a big rise in crossings on days when the weather has been poor. A record 11,074 people arrived in small boats before May this year, a rise of almost 50% compared with the same period last year. According to the Home Office figures, 60 of those days this year were classed as "red days" - where Channel crossings are more likely because of good weather - compared with just 27 last year. In a new report, the Home Office says that the doubling of red days from January to April 2025, compared with the same period in 2024, "coincides with small boat arrivals being 46% higher" over that period. Our analysis, using similar criteria to the Home Office, but not attempting to directly replicate their methodology, agrees that there have been an unusually high number of days this year when the weather makes for good sailing conditions. But it also shows that there are significantly more people making the crossing when the weather is not ideal - a rise of 30% on last year, and more than double compared with the year before. We've classified the weather as being favourable on a day when, for several consecutive hours early in the morning, wave height, wind speed, rain and atmospheric pressure were all at levels the Met Office says typically contribute to good conditions for sailing. There's more detail on our methodology lower down this page. There is a clear link between better weather and more people arriving in the UK on small boats. An average of 190 people per day have arrived so far this year when the weather has been fair, compared with 60 on days with less consistently good conditions. But if we look just at the days when the weather is not so good, we can also see a clear and consistent rise in the numbers over time. That average of 60 arrivals per "low viability" day is a rise of more than 30% on last year, and more than double the 24 that arrived on each similar day in 2023. 2:22 There are a range of reasons why more people could be crossing on bad weather days. Smuggler tactics are changing, and Home Office data shows severely overcrowded boats are becoming more common. In the year to April 2022, just 2% of boats had 60 or more people on board, compared with 47% in the year to April 2025. In other words, in the space of three years, the number of boats with more than 60 on board has gone from 1 in 50 to every second boat. Dr Peter Walsh, senior researcher at the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, told Sky News that a rise in demand due to geopolitical issues, like the situation in Afghanistan, may be a factor, but that it is interesting that illegal entries to the EU are down while they have risen in the UK. What is the Home Office doing? The current government has placed a major emphasis on disrupting the smuggler gang supply chains to restrict the number of boats and engines making it to the French coast. Part of the problem is that French authorities are unable to intercept boats once they are already in the water, which is believed to have been exacerbated by good weather. The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, has confirmed the French government is reviewing its policies after she pressed for a law change that would allow police in France to apprehend migrants in shallow waters. The Home Office released figures on Thursday that revealed France is intercepting fewer Channel migrants than ever before, despite signing a £480m deal with the UK to stop the crossings. 19:32 How are we defining good and bad days? The Home Office says that its assessments of the likelihood of small boat crossings are passed to it by the Met Office. "A Red, Amber, Green (RAG) daily crossing assessment is produced of the likelihood of small boat crossing activity based on the forecasted wave height and other environmental and non-environmental factors; such as rates of precipitation, surf conditions on beaches, wind speed and direction, open-source forecasts, and recent trends." We've not tried to replicate that methodology directly. But we've looked at Met Office categorisations for wave height, wind speed, atmospheric pressure and rain, four factors that each contribute to fair conditions for sailing in a small boat. They say a wind speed of 5m/s is a "gentle breeze". They classify precipitation as at least 0.1mm of rain per hour. If the "significant wave height" - the height of the highest one third of waves - is below 0.5m, they say that's "smooth". Standard pressure at sea level is 1,013hPa, and high pressure "tends to lead to settled weather conditions" . We've set the minimum pressure at 1,015hPa, on the high side of standard, and used the thresholds listed above for the other metrics. We've categorised a "high viability" day as one in which all four of those conditions were met in the Dover Strait for at least four consecutive hours, between 2am and 6am UK time. A "low viability" day is where there is no more than one hour during which all those conditions were met. And "medium" is when the conditions are met for 2-3 hours.
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Climate
- Telegraph
Why Britain faces its worst ever summer for migrant crossings
Good summer weather could lead to record Channel migrant crossings this year, Home Office data is expected to show. The number of 'red days' – when Border Force expects a surge in small boats due to calm seas – have been 'unusually high' in 2024-25, according to official figures due to be published on Tuesday. Preliminary data up until the end of March this year showed that there were 182 red days in 2024-25 compared with 108 in 2023-24, 159 in 2022-23 and 164 in 2021-22. Ministers will claim that the figures go some way to explain why the first five months of this year have seen a record 14,812 crossings, up 42 per cent on the same period in 2024. The rising number of 'red days' is also combined with a steady increase in the number of migrants being packed onto the dinghies, from 28 per boat in 2021 to 56 in 2025, up until the end of March. In 2024/25, there were more than 100 boats with more than 80 migrants on board, up from 31 in the previous year and just two in 2021/22. Meanwhile, the Met Office's three-month forecast suggests the UK is heading for a heatwave over the summer with a 45 per cent chance it will be hotter than normal. Rain and wind speeds are predicted to be close to normal over the same period. If the clear weather continues, independent modelling suggests that crossings by migrants are on course to hit a yearly record-equalling total of between 45,000 and 50,000, unless measures planned or already introduced by UK and French Governments can reverse the trend. Based on current weather patterns, the statistical modelling by researcher Dr Richard Wood forecasts that arrivals will hit nearly 46,000 this year – on a par with 2022's record and 20 per cent higher than last year's total. His research shows the weather is so critical that the odds of an unviable day, when there will be no crossings, increase by 11 per cent for every centimetre of wave height, reduce by six per cent for every degree of sea temperature and rise by 10 per cent for each hour of eight to 12 knot westerly winds. It means that migrant arrivals on 'viable' or 'red' days are two per cent lower for every centimetre of wave height, three per cent higher for every degree of sea temperature and four per cent higher for every hour in the day when a medium southerly wind blows the small boats towards the UK coast. The Government does not publish its criteria for determining when it will declare a 'red day,' which acts as an alert to Border Force, coastguards and RNLI to prepare for a surge in crossings. The Telegraph conducted its own analysis based on wind speeds, visibility, rainfall, wave height and sea surface temperature, which showed a lower number of red days than those projected by the Home Office. However, it still suggested Sir Keir Starmer had a higher number of red days in the four months to the end of April this year – at 27 – and a higher average rate of crossings per red day at 141.7. This compared to 24 red days with a rate of 121.6 for Rishi Sunak. Asked if the Government's decision to publish data on the number of red days for the first time was a ploy to blame the weather for crossings, Sir Keir's spokesman said: 'As the Home Secretary has said before, we have to get to a position where the level of crossings is not reliant on the weather. 'That means breaking the hold that these criminal gangs have established over this trade and breaking the link between crossings and the weather, such that we're stopping people from making these dangerous journeys, whatever the weather.'
Times
2 days ago
- General
- Times
UK calls for French crackdown on shallow-water migrant crossings
Britain is pressing France to 'swiftly' close a legal loophole that prevents police from apprehending migrant boats in shallow waters amid growing frustration in government at French inaction. The home secretary told MPs it was 'disgraceful and unacceptable' that more than 1,195 migrants had been able to cross the Channel in 18 boats on Saturday, marking a new daily record high for crossings this year. The French authorities only prevented 184 migrants from making the crossing on Saturday, despite agreeing in February to amend laws to allow police to intercept boats in shallow waters. Yvette Cooper said that she had been in touch with the French interior minister urging him to speed up the change in approach, saying there needed to be 'stronger action' to prevent crossings. 'The gangs are increasingly operating a model where boats are launched from further along the coast and people climb in from the water, exploiting French rules that have stopped their police taking any action in the sea,' she said. 'This is completely unacceptable. The previous government raised this with France for years, but to no avail, and I have raised it with the French government since the summer. 'The French interior minister and the French cabinet have now agreed their rules need to change. A French maritime review is looking at what new operational tactics they will use, and we are urging France to complete this review and implement the changes as swiftly as possible.' British law enforcement agencies are concerned that criminal gangs exploited the fact that French police were focused on the Champions League final in Paris on Saturday. There was widespread disorder in the French capital. French police guidelines currently prevent officers from intervening offshore unless it is to rescue passengers in distress. In practice, the guidelines mean that officers can stop boats leaving the beach by puncturing them but may do nothing once they are in the water unless migrants call for help. In recent years, traffickers have exploited the rules by asking migrants to wade waist-high into the Channel, where they are picked up by dinghies launched from further afield, often from inland canals. The dinghies are piloted by smuggling gang operatives who haul migrants on board with police watching on from the beach. In February, Bruno Retailleau, the French interior minister, indicated that he wanted a change in police doctrine to enable officers to intervene in the water up to 300 metres from the coast. 'We have to review our organisation so that we can board these boats … arriving to pick up migrants,' he said. Le Figaro, the French newspaper, said ministry officials were still working on what are being termed the 'feet in the water' guidelines to implement the policy. However, Le Marin, the French maritime daily, said the proposed change of doctrine had met with fierce opposition, including from local police officers. Among the concerns are logistical issues such as whether officers are safe wearing body armour in the water and how to protect their weapons in the water. Sir Keir Starmer said that the public had 'every right to be angry about small boat crossings'. He claimed that hundreds of boats and engines had been 'seized', raids on illegal working were up and 'almost 30,000 people' had been returned. 'We are ramping up our efforts to smash the people smuggling gangs at source,' he said. However Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, described Starmer's words as 'rubbish', while Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said this year had been the 'worst in history' for illegal immigrants crossing the Channel. 'The government's laughable claims to 'smash the gangs' lies in tatters. They're not smashing gangs, they're smashing records,' he said.
