The Home Office has long collected statistics on irregular migration to the UK, but it has never published them officially until now. The statistics, first published in February 2022, are on detected instances of people entering the UK without immigration permission, such as on small boats, stowing away in vehicles or containers, or using false documents.
The decision to start regularly publishing this data as part of quarterly immigration statistics is welcome. The issue is of strong public interest, yet previously, data on irregular entries appeared in the public domain mainly via freedom of information requests.
After the home secretary declared the rise in channel crossings a “major incident” in 2018, the Home Office gave some news outlets daily counts of small boat arrivals, until January 2022. But these updates lacked information about the quality of the data and its limitations, such as what counts as a “small boat” and when there may be risks of double counting. The new quarterly figures change that, and what they lack in timeliness, they make up for in clarity and accessibility.
