Question to the Home Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what is their estimate of the number of people who are in the UK who crossed the Channel into Britain illegally during the last ten years, and applied for and were refused asylum.

The Home Office publishes statistics on detected small boat arrivals to the UK in the ‘Irregular migration to the UK’ statistics release on gov.uk. Data on asylum applications from small boat arrivals and initial decisions on these applications (including refusals) is published in tables Irr_D02 and Irr_D03 respectively of the ‘Irregular migration to the UK detailed datasets’. The latest data covers January 2018 to June 2024.