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

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. So instead of arguing about how to get small boat crossings to come down, politicians are arguing about what’s making them come down. To find out, I spoke to the skipper of a fishing boat – not really. Andy Burnham has pledged to be ‘relentless’ in curbing the number of people arriving to the UK via small boat crossings in the Channel (Picture: Jack Taylor/Pool Photo via AP)Are there any clues? 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.