Why there isn’t really a ‘surge’ in asylum seekers reaching the UK from northern France

The rise in asylum seekers reaching British shores on small boats in recent months has prompted considerable reaction. Media outlets have reported a “record number of migrants reaching Britain”, while the UK government has made a request to the royal navy – in what has been criticised as an “appalling display of heavy-handedness”.

The increase in boat crossings is no doubt stark. More than 677 asylum seekers reached the UK between Thursday and Sunday alone, adding to a total of more than 4,000 who have crossed the dangerous Dover Strait in small boats so far in 2020. This compares with 2,758 in the whole of 2019, and around 500 for the whole of 2018.

However, the claim that this translates into an overall surge in asylum seekers entering the UK via unauthorised routes is false. The reality is that migrants have been arriving “illegally” from northern France for many years – but there has been a shift in method.

Historically, the most common method has been to stow away in lorries. However, alongside the rise in small boat crossings this year, experts say there has been a significant reduction in people crossing from France to the UK in freight vehicles. There are no published figures on unauthorised migrants arriving as stowaways, but according to Kent County Council, the number of unaccompanied asylum seeking children found in lorries at Dover port has reduced from several dozen per month to zero since the start of the coronavirus lockdown.

“We haven’t seen anyone come on a lorry for months,” said Roger Gough, leader of council, which is responsible for taking in any unaccompanied asylum seeking children who arrive at the port or on the Kent coastline. He said this was in part due to a downturn in the numbers of freight vehicles entering Britain from France during the coronavirus lockdown, while social distancing rules also made drivers more likely to remain in their lorries, making it harder for migrants to enter the vehicles.

Nonetheless, the number of child asylum seekers arriving in Kent has increased considerably, almost doubling from around 37 in March to 70 in July. All arrivals in the last three to four months have come on small boats, rather than in lorries – which had been the most common route for so long.

Mr Gough described this as a “very sharp switchover”, adding that the rise Kent County Council is seeing may not be representative of an overall rise in asylum seekers across the country. “We are at the moment, given our position vis-a-vis the shore, the receiving place for unaccompanied young people coming in to claim asylum, whereas not all children arriving in the back of lorries would get off here,” he said.

Changes in freight movement due to the pandemic isn’t the only reason displaced people in northern France have turned from stowing away in lorries to attempting to sail across in small vessels. The British and French governments have injected £164m worth of funding into fortifying security at and around the Calais port, since 2014 which experts say has resulted in fewer migrants mounting lorries – but isn’t proving to bring overall numbers down.

Andy Hewett, head of advocacy at the Refugee Council, said: “There’s been a shift from people hiding in the back of lorries, which was largely invisible, to a much more visible phenomena of people arriving in small boats, because the lorry route was shut down. There has been no alarming net rise in numbers, just a change in the pattern of how people are arriving.

“The French and UK governments have put a lot of money into increasing security around the lorry port, and there have been mass evictions from some of the camps in Calais. This response of tightening security and clamping down has just shifting the way that people operate, but they’re still coming. Everything they’ve done so far has pushed people further into the hands of people smugglers.”

His comments were echoed by Bridget Chapman, of the Kent Refugee Action Network, who warned that continuing to increase security at the border could prove to be fatal. “This issue isn’t going to go away,” she said. “Everything the government has done hasn’t worked. They’ve spent millions of pounds of UK money fortifying the port of Calais to make it more difficult to come through, which explains the drop in numbers coming in by lorry and finding other routes.

“It will carry on and it will become more dangerous. It’s terrifying. There will be deaths unless we find a way to give people the safe and legal option to make this journey.”

Charities on the ground in northern France warn that displaced people were also being pushed to make dangerous crossings due to increasingly challenging living conditions. Josh Hallam, field manager at Help Refugees, said that since home secretary Priti Patel visited Calais to discuss how to tackle the boat crossings with her French counterpart on 11 July, the number of evictions carried out on makeshift encampments by French policy had increased, and access to food and water had been reduced.

“It’s creating a hostile environment,” he said. “There are so many police and fences around the area people used to sleep in. Food that was provided by the French authorities has stopped with no explanation. We have a conversation about the crisis twice a year or so. Real solutions would be based on safe and legal routes, and giving people the ability to safely access asylum.”

Mr Hallam added that the number of displaced people in Calais and the surrounding area had remained fairly steady since 2018, at between 1,000 and 1,200, putting the concept that there has been a “surge” in migrants passing through to enter the UK into question.

Frances Timberlake, coordinator at the Refugee Women’s Centre, which provides support to displaced families in northern France hoping to reach the UK, said there had been a notable rise in the number of people feeling that their only way out was to embark on a small boat crossing.

“People who were saying a couple of months ago they couldn’t believe people were crossing the water and said they would never try that are now suddenly saying they’ve got no choice but to try by water and put their kids onto a small rubber dinghy,” she said.

“The families we work with are no longer able to cross by lorry. As increasing security has been put up and extra security funds invested by the UK around the port, that option is not possible anymore, so they’ve been pushed into increasingly dangerous migration routes.”