Sunak hits half Johnson’s total for small boat arrivals in less than a year

Sunak hits half Johnson’s total for small boat arrivals in less than a year

New Home Office figures have revealed that 472 migrants arrived by small boat on Tuesday (2 October), taking the total for the year past 25,000, and increasing the number that have arrived under Rishi Sunak’s premiership to 32,956.

It means that Rishi Sunak has now reached half the entire total of migrants that arrived by small boat under Boris Johnson, despite being Prime Minister less than a third of the time that his predecessor was in charge.

Yesterday’s figures also mean that a total of 1,037 people have arrived by small boat since the start of the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester.

Stephen Kinnock, Labour’s Shadow Immigration Minister, said: 

“Rishi Sunak promised the British people that he would stop the small boats. Yet, within his first year as Prime Minister Sunak has already overseen more than half the Channel crossings that Boris Johnson oversaw during his entire three-year premiership. That is a dismal record of failure.

“The 1,000 arrivals since the start of Tory conference also demonstrate once again that nothing Rishi Sunak or Suella Braverman have done has made the slightest difference and it remains the case that the number of arrivals on any given day is entirely dictated by weather conditions in the Channel.

“Only Labour has a serious plan to clear the Tory asylum backlog, end the use of emergency asylum hotels, smash the criminal smuggler gangs, and restore security to our borders. Everything that Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman do just makes every problem worse. It’s time for them to call a General Election so that our country can finally have the government that it needs and deserves.”

Ends

Notes:

Boris Johnson was Prime Minister from 24th July 2019 to 6th September 2022, giving him a total of 1,141 days in charge, both of those dates inclusive. Within that time, a total of 65,786 migrants arrived by small boat. By comparison, yesterday’s arrivals figures take the total under Rishi Sunak to 32,956, more than half the Johnson total, in just 343 days as Prime Minister. All the above figures – collated from official Home Office and Ministry of Defence data – are available in one place here: https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/channel-crossings-tracker

The start of Conservative Party Conference on Saturday 30th September saw a total of 537 migrants arriving on small boats, followed by 28 on Sunday, and 472 on Monday 2nd October, making a total of 1,037 since the Tory gathering began, and taking the total for 2023 as a whole to 25,330.