Channel Crossing Tracker
The English Channel has become the primary method of illegal entry to the United Kingdom.
Since 2018, over 160,000 illegal immigrants (many of whom make a claim for asylum) have been attempting to enter the United Kingdom by crossing the English Channel in small boats, often using inflatable dinghies.
How many people are illegally crossing the Channel?
This has become a major, and costly, problem. In 2025, the 10,000 mark of illegal migrants crossing the Channel was reached before the end of April, more than a month earlier than the year before.
At the beginning of 2023, the Home Office forecast that crossings could reach 85,000. 2025 looks to be heading for another record number. 85,000 crossings would be roughly equivalent to the total arrivals by small boat from 2018 to the end of 2022. Added to the current total, this upper forecast would equate all small boat arrivals to the population of the City of Oxford.
Since then, thanks to a sharp reduction in the arrivals of Albanian migrants (due to a returns deal negotiated under Rishi Sunak) and occasionally poor weather, overall arrivals fell by the end of 2023.
But while this was a notable reduction from 2022, and still unacceptably high, this was exceeded again in 2024 and is likely to do so be again in 2025.
What’s the cost?
The Channel Crossing Crisis has placed an enormous burden on the asylum system. In May 2025, the National Audit Office produced a report suggesting that the asylum system is likely to cost over £15bn over ten years.
Asylum seekers are often having to be accommodated in hotels because local authorities do not have housing capacity to spare. Since 2019, the government has contracted three companies for ten years to help house asylum seekers - Serco, Clearsprings, and Mear - to the tune of £4bn.
In 2022, it emerged that the cost of housing asylum seekers in hotels has risen to £5.6 million a day (plus a further £1.2 million for Afghan evacuees). This is equivalent to the cost of 73,000 basic visits to an Accident and Emergency unit. In January 2025, speaking in the House of Lords, Lord Davies of Gower said, “According to the Home Office figures, housing asylum seekers in hotels costs taxpayers over £8 million a day (nearly £3bn a year). This figure may be lower now because some migrants have been moved out of hotels.
In 2023, the think tank Policy Exchange released a report detailing the public cost of the crisis, estimating that the annual cost of the small boats crisis was “in the region of £3.5bn”.
When is the peak crossing season?
Typically, the Channel crossings begin in earnest around May. Before this point, variable weather conditions make it difficult to gauge how high crossings are in a particular year.
However, late summer when calmer weather prevails has usually brought a major influx of arrivals: in 2022, the warmer and calmer weather saw 8,641 people cross the Channel in a single month. On several days in both 2021 and 2022, crossings exceeded 1,000. The all-time high so far was 1,295 on the 22nd of August 2022. Consistent crossings at half that level for just four months would equal as many as 77,000.
What happens when they arrive?
As people attempt to cross the Channel, they are often escorted through French waters by French border patrol vessels before being intercepted by Border Force or RNLI vessels. It is common for the small boats to lack sufficient fuel to reach the UK, making rescue by other ships necessary.
Uncontrolled landings, wherein a small boat makes it to the UK without being intercepted are rare due to increased observation efforts, but there is ample anecdotal evidence that some do. In one example, an illegal Albanian immigrant ran into a woman’s house and demanded to use her phone.
How successful have attempts to ‘stop the boats’ been?
'Since a ‘major incident’ was declared in late 2018, there have been repeated pledges and promises aimed at stopping the Channel crossings. These have ranged from various joint plans and statements by the British and French governments that they were ‘determined to stop’ Channel crossings, that they would roll out ‘cutting-edge surveillance’, ‘build on their existing cooperation’ and ‘undertake significant and innovative action’ to ‘eliminate the small boats phenomenon’ and make the route ‘unviable’. Such plans have included planes, drones, jet-skis, beach buggies and even small warships.
What’s more, in 2022 the UK enacted the Nationality and Borders Act, and in 2023 the Illegal Migration Act, and of course the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024. The latter legislation has been abandoned by the Labour government and the Rwanda scheme ditched immediately after the 4 July 2024 election with air Keir Starmer’s Government committing to “smashing the gangs”. This policy too has still to bear fruit and the boats have continued unabated. As of May 2025, the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill 2025 is still making its way through Parliament, while Border Force staff announced on 13th May 2025 that they are to go on strike.
In May 2025, the Labour Government published a White Paper, ‘Restoring control over the immigration system’. There is little mention of illegal immigration in the paper, which is primarily intended for legal migration. The situation continues to deteriorate, with no end in sight.
How does claiming asylum work?
The vast majority of small boats crossers claim asylum.
- In 2022, 90% of the 45,755 small boat arrivals claimed asylum.
- In 2023, 95% of the 29,437 small boat arrivals claimed asylum.
- In 2024, 95% of the 36,816 small boat arrivals claimed asylum.
Arrivals tend to be served papers for their entry, are mostly to Manston, a former RAF base near Dover, for initial processing then moved to longer term accommodation, often a hotel, to await the outcome of any asylum claim they have made (the vast majority do.) The time at Manston is normally 24 hours but can stretch to a few days when large numbers arrive in quick succession. The accommodation they are moved to pending a decision is tax-payer funded and if not in a hotel may be in a community, social housing or a hotel. The weekly amount provided is £49.18 for each person in the household. Additional weekly payments are made for pregnant mothers (£5.25), babies under 1 (£9.50) and children aged 1 to 3 (£5.25).. Mobile phones and other amenities are also provided.
This happens despite people not being capable of being identified or vetted properly for security reasons, due to having usually deliberately destroyed their documentation. Despite laws in place to penalise this, the government almost never uses them.
Overall, asylum-related removals (meaning those whose claims were rejected or whose application was deemed fit to be processed in another country) plummeted from 18,000 in 2005 to just over 1,100 in the year to June 2021. These figures include all asylum claimants, not just those who entered the UK after traveling here in boats. The Labour government has recently increased the number of removals but very few of these are of those who have crossed the Channel illegally. Many of the removals since mid-2024 have been voluntary with migrants (including babies) given £3,000 each for volunteering.
Where do they come from?
The people undertaking Channel crossings come from a wide range of countries, and has proved to be a changing image as time has gone on.
Overall, Iranians have made crossings most consistently, and made up a majority of those crossing the Channel in 2018 and 2019, supplemented by large contingents of Iraqis. In 2022, the number of Albanians entering by small boat increased by 1409% on the previous year resulting in a rapid increase in crossings and government action to deter them in future.
By 2023, the number of Albanians had fallen significantly, but has to a degree been made up for by large numbers of Indians, who in previous years had rarely entered the UK by small boat. You can read about why here.
As of 2024, there were significant numbers of crossings made by Afghanistanis, Syrians, Iranians, Vietnamese, and Eritreans, with large numbers coming from Sudan, Iraq and Turkey.
What kind of people are crossing the channel?
Predominantly, young and middle aged men are crossing the channel, by a significant majority; as of 2024, as many as 101,506 men aged 18-40 have crossed the channel.
How many get returned to their home country or elsewhere?
The asylum backlog exceeding at the end 2024 was 90,000 cases, many of those to arrive by boat have yet to receive a conclusion to their asylum claim. However, of the 20,605 people who were identified for consideration as inadmissible, just 21 were actually removed from the country. The concept of inadmissibility was introduced by Priti Patel when Home Secretary in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and is no longer in use.
The charts and table in this revamped tracker will automatically update every day around noon. If you would like to view the old, and no longer updated, Channel Tracker (of particular use for daily crossings data prior to April 2022), click here. If you encounter any problems while using this page, please email admin@migrationwatchuk.org.
To access the old Channel Tracker, which is no longer updated, click here. The above charts and table are using official government data. To view the most recent data, click here. To view past data published by the Ministry of Defence, click here. To view overall irregular migration statistics, click here. Preliminary nationalities data for 2023 can be viewed here.