More people are crossing the English Channel in small boats on the weekend. Our data analysis shows last year 40% of the total number of arrivals happened on a Saturday or Sunday.
We have been looking into possible reasons why many more people are arriving in small boats on the weekend, and the explanation might not be quite what you expect.
Here are a few theories.
French staffing and resources
One suggestion is that French border force, police and coastguard are not working to a consistent level seven days a week.
“Gangs have realised there are lower or less engaged staffing on weekends on the French side,” a former senior Home Office official who worked closely on deals with French tells me.
A former immigration minister said they found it “frustrating” that “we were paying the French but weren’t able to specify operational deployments”.
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They said it would “not surprise me if the French had fewer people at the weekend and the people smugglers have come to realise that”.
Hundreds of millions have been given by the UK to France to police the Calais coast, most recently almost £500m in 2023.
Another former senior government official with responsibility for borders said the French would be able to demonstrate that “hundreds or thousands of officers are working there” but “strategically it suits France to have the gust with us”.
But when we put this to the French side there was a pushback.
Marc de Fleurian, the Calais MP from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, says “blaming the other side of the Channel” is the “easy answer”.
He said it’s “cowardly to say it’s the other side’s fault”.
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Pierre Henri Dumont, who was the Calais MP from 2017-2024, said: “The reality is you can have as many police officers as you want, but people will cross the Channel. If you have eight rather than 100 police officers that won’t change anything at all.”
A French coastguard source told Sky News there are the same staffing levels at the weekend, he says “any suggestion there is less staffing on the weekends is laughable and an easy thing to say”.
Smuggler planning
Smuggler supply chains might be linked to a specific day for a range of reasons, for example, as one former senior Home Office suggests, the fact “boat engines, or parts, might arrive on a Friday”.
Mr Dumont says smuggling networks rely on people to do small jobs, like transporting boats, who may also have day jobs in the week. He says the reasons behind the weekend uptick “are not necessarily predictable ones”.
Another factor may be that because French police tend not to intervene once a boat is in the water, many small boats set off from inland waterways. The canal-type waterways which come inland before the Channel are often full of fishing boats on weekdays, making it easier to launch from the waterways on weekends.
Another suggestion from a Home Office source is that while many migrants who cross the channel are based in the camps around Calais, many use public transport to arrive for a timed departure and are therefore reliant on transport timetables which may be more limited at different times of the week.
Weather coincidence
Leaked Home Office analysis shows that of the number of weekend days where small boat crossings were more likely because of good weather conditions was disproportionately high last year.
The figures show that 61 out of 197 days where the weather meant there was a realistic possibility, likely or highly likely there would be a channel crossing were weekend days. However, we only have figures for 2024, and it seems unlikely the weather alone could account for three years of higher crossings on weekend days.
