Small boat crossings have continued in the English Channel on Saturday despite the morning’s foggy conditions.
Pictures showed the Dungeness lifeboat bringing a number of people, thought to have been picked up from a small boat in the Channel, into the port at Dover.
Official Government figures show 305 people arrived in the UK via small boat on Friday, bringing the total for the week to 1,163.
The 407 arrivals on December 26 meant more than 150,000 people had made the crossing from France since records began on January 1 2018, prompting a political blame game over responsibility for the numbers.
After Saturday’s update to the figures, Mr Philp said the numbers represented “Labour’s appalling failure” and were “an insult to the British people”.
He said: “In 2023, Conservatives cut the numbers crossing the channel by a third. But now, it’s all moving the other way.
“These rising numbers are the predictable outcome of Starmer scrapping many Conservative measures to tackle this issue, like scrapping the Rwanda deterrent before it even started. We know from the experience in Australia that a deterrent would have stopped the boats if it had been allowed to start as planned in late July.
“The British people deserve better than a Government that can’t, or won’t, deal with illegal channel crossings.”
Some 22,629 people have arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel since Sir Keir became Prime Minister in July, up 25% on the same period in 2023 but down 31% on the record year of 2022.
So far this year, 36,204 migrants have arrived in the UK on small boats, provisional Home Office figures show.
This is up 23% on this time last year, but down 21% on 2022.
Prior to the election, crossings in 2024 were up 19% compared to the same period in 2023.
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. We will stop at nothing to dismantle their business models and bring them to justice.”
