Tory deputy chair Lee Anderson ‘very angry’ small boat arrivals numbers may have passed 100,000 – UK politics live

• The arrival of more people in the UK following a rescue in the Channel may take the official number of people recorded as coming to the UK on small boats above 100,000. (See 12.17pm.) The revelation has led Lee Anderson, the Conservative party deputy chairman, to say that if Rishi Sunak’s small boats strategy does not work, the Tories may have to take “drastic action” such as withdrawing from the European convention on human rights. (See 1.11pm.)

The British government is considering tightening rules on investment in China after the US president, Joe Biden, announced new measures aimed at limiting the dollars and expertise flowing into sensitive technologies in the country, Anna Isaac reports.

Here is a request from a reader, prompted by the figure about 100,000 people arriving in the UK via small boats since 2018 being in the headline.

Please could we have some context for the number of small boat arrivals v the overall immigration numbers? I think I saw a suggestion that most immigrants are on business visas, specific country schemes or students, and that boat arrivals are actually negligible in comparison. Is this so?

The reader is right. The people who arrive in the UK in small boats are only a tiny proportion of the overall number of immigrants coming to the UK every year.

The small boat arrivals don’t even make up a majority of the people who apply for asylum. As the Home Office says in this report:

The majority of small boat arrivals claim asylum. In 2022, 90% (40,302 of 44,666 arrivals) claimed asylum or were recorded as a dependant on an asylum application. However, small boat arrivals account for less than half (45%) of the total number of people claiming asylum in the UK in 2022.

There was more information about the asylum seekers who do not arrive by boat in this Times story last week.

And asylum seekers as a whole – the ones who arrive by small boat, and those who arrive by other means – are still only a small fraction of the total annual immigration cohort. This report from the Migration Observatory provides a good overview. It includes this graph.

The exact proportion of immigrants who are refugees varies considerably from year to year, and the figure also depends on whether you just count refugees who claim asylum, or whether you include other types of refugees admitted to the UK on humanitarian grounds (such as Ukrainians). This House of Commons library briefing, published in March, has more detail. Here is an extract.

Asylum seekers made up around 6% of immigrants to the UK in 2019.

In 2020, when overall immigration was lower than usual due to the pandemic, asylum seekers might have made up around 12% of immigrants.

In the year ending June 2022, the latest period for which we have estimates, asylum seekers and refugees made up approximately 18% of immigrants to the UK. This includes arrivals under the Ukraine schemes, the Afghan relocation and resettlement schemes, arrivals in small boats, other resettled persons and arrivals on family reunion visas (around 190,000 individuals in total). If including the British National (Overseas) scheme in the category of humanitarian routes [the scheme for people from Hong Kong], up to 25% of immigration in that year would fall into that category.

Here is a question from a reader about the NHS waiting list figures.

Is the 7.6 million number of people or the number of operations? I am on the list for 4 completely separate ones only one of which I have a date for.

The 7.6 million figure relates to waits, not people. Technically it refers to what the NHS calls “referral to treatment (RTT) pathways” – cases where someone is waiting for treatment (which does not necessarily involve an operation).

That means that, if there are people like the reader who posed this question waiting for more than one treatment, they get counted more than once.

Arguably this makes the headline figure misleading, because the number of individuals waiting for treatment will be lower than the overall total quoted in the statistics. But the NHS does not have an equivalent figure for individuals, not cases, and the headline figure is easily understood, and does represent real people. Arguably if one person is waiting for four treatments, that is just as bad as four people waiting for a single treatment each.

This is what NHS England says on this point in the notes to its news release.

Each pathway relates to an individual referral rather than an individual patient so if a patient was waiting for multiple treatments they may be included in the figures more than once. Where we refer to the number of ‘patients’ waiting or starting treatment, technically, we are considering the number or percentage of ‘pathways’.

Yesterday Downing Street said Rishi Sunak believed he couuld stop the small boat crossings, and implement the plan to send people to Rwanda, without the UK having to leave the European convention on human rights.

Asked about this in his GB News interview, Lee Anderson, the Conservative party deputy chair, indicated that he accepted the government’s position.

But he said that, personally, he was in favour of withdrawal from the ECHR, and that if Sunak’s plan did not work, “drastic measures” would be needed. He said:

You only have to Google my name and put ECHR in and you’ll see where I stand on the matter and I’ve spoken about it in the chamber as well.

I’ve always been an advocate of leaving, but you know, we’re a team. And if things don’t work, if things don’t go to plan, then we’ve got to take drastic measures and I would fully support the government in doing that.

Lee Anderson, the Conservative party deputy chairman, has said he is “very angry” about the PA Media report saying that the small boat arrivals picked up in the Channel today may take the total number of people who have come to the UK via this route above 100,000 for the first time. (See 12.17pm.) The official numbers will be out tomorrow.

The Home Office data goes back to 2018, which is when small boats arrivals were first logged as a problem. The official database won’t include any people coming to the UK irregularly on small boats before then, and any migrants who arrived without being recorded.

In an interview with GB News, Anderson said:

I’m very angry about the number. Again, very angry, as you know, every single day when I see these illegal migrants.

Anderson also repeated his claim that people arriving on small boats are not genuine asylum seekers – even though Home Office data suggests that a majority of them are. Last year 90% of people who arrived this way claimed asylum. Most of these claims have not yet been processed, but of all the claims that have been processed since 2018, 61% have been accepted.

Anderson told GB News that the situation was “infuriating”, but that the Conservatives were the only party that could sort the situation out.

The number of people crossing the Channel on small boats in the last five and a half years could have passed 100,000 following fresh arrivals of migrants on lifeboats on Thursday, PA Media reports. PA says:

PA news agency analysis of government figures since current records began on 1 January 2018 showed that, as of Tuesday, 99,960 people had arrived in the UK after making the journey.

And RNLI lifeboats were spotted bringing dozens to shore this morning, meaning it is likely the milestone has been reached.

A witness said there appeared to be more than 40 people brought ashore onboard two lifeboats, which had attended a dinghy out in the Channel.

Data on the number of people detected crossing the Channel in small boats to enter the UK each day is published by the Home Office and Border Force.

The figures are published the day after and the latest update shows that on Wednesday zero people were detected.

Since the beginning of January 2023 to 9 August, figures show 15,071 people crossed the Channel.

George Eustice, the former environment secretary, was interviewed this morning on the Today programme. He was primarily there to talk about his opposition to the government’s plans on the installation of new oil boilers in off-grid homes from 2026.

Instead of encouraging people to install heat pumps, it would be better for the government to get them to convert their boilers to run on renewable fuels (like hydrotreated vegetable oil made from waste cooking oil), he said.

But Eustice also argued that this issue showed why the government should not be too prescriptive yet about how it will achieve net zero. He said:

We remain committed to net zero but where I absolutely agree with the prime minister at the moment is we’ve got to get there in the right way. And the reason we are aiming for net zero by 2050 is to create a strong pull towards new technologies, new innovations that will help us get there.

And the real problem we’ve got is groups like the Climate Change Committee, endlessly harrying the government to lock down prematurely the wrong kind of policy mix now which actually would jeopardise getting to net zero.

So we’ve got to keep the space for new technology and new innovations to come forward. And the failure at the moment is everybody’s on the government’s back asking them to lock down prematurely to quite possibly the wrong technologies.

Eustice said the government should achieve net zero “in a cost-effective way”. He went on: “And I think that’s why the current prime minister is right to push back against some of these things.”