LONDON: At least 20,000 people have illegally crossed the English Channel in small boats this year, almost double the amount that had made the crossing last year at this point, government figures showed on Sunday.

Another 607 people were detected crossing the busy shipping lane between the UK and continental Europe on Saturday, taking the provisional total for 2022 to 20,017.

There were 28,526 crossings detected in the whole of 2021, and around 11,300 detected by this point last year.

The number of crossing has increased steadily each year, from 299 in 2018.

The illegal crossing are a hot political topic in the UK, with both candidates to become the new prime minister promising to clamp down.

But the government’s plans to send some of those arriving in the UK on small boats to Rwanda to claim asylum have so far been stymied by the courts.

Published in Dawn, August 15th, 2022