Prime minister appears to water down his ambition to ‘stop the boats’ as he claims some successes

Rishi Sunak has said the situation with migrants crossing the Channel in small vessels to the UK is likely to get worse before it gets better as he appeared to water down his ambition to “stop the boats”.

The prime minister said on Tuesday that “crossings will increase over the summer”, when migrants tend to take advantage of more moderate weather to make the dangerous journey. But he insisted to journalists, while en route to the Nato summit in Vilnius, that the plan was “starting to work”.

In January, Sunak pledged to “stop the boats” crossing the Channel, making it one of his five key pledges ahead of the general election that is expected next year. However, he simultaneously cautioned that the challenge was not something that could be “fixed overnight”.

Asked whether he would consider his policy a failure if the number of crossings did not fall by the end of the year, Sunak said it was important to measure success against the “trajectory of increases taking place year over year”.

He added that the fact that the numbers making the journey were down for the first five months of the year was a “much better result than anyone was expecting”.

He was speaking after nearly 1,700 people made the journey on 31 boats between Friday and Monday, including almost 700 on Friday, the highest daily record this year, according to the Home Office.

In the first six months of this year, the number of people arriving in small boats decreased by 10 per cent, to 11,433, compared with the same period last year, although immigration specialists cautioned at the time that poor weather may have skewed the data.

Asked to provide clarity on Sunak’s pledge on small boat migration and what target he had set himself, a government official said the prime minister was not being prescriptive about what “stop the boats” means.

“It will be for the British public to judge whether the government has done everything it can within its power to stop the boats,” they said.

A surge in the number of people arriving over the past few days is threatening to undermine the narrative that the government’s policies have acted as a deterrent. Last year, nearly half of all people who made irregular Channel crossings arrived in July, August and September.

Despite figures showing an increase in crossings over the past few days, Sunak pointed to other areas where government policy was working, including reducing the backlog for dealing with asylum applications by a fifth and in finding accommodation for those that do arrive in Britain.

“There are a range of things we need to do to fix this problem — we need to get people out of hotels, we need to save taxpayers billions of pounds, we need the backlog down and processed,” he said.

The prime minister’s comments came as the government’s illegal migration bill has returned to the House of Commons after it suffered severe opposition in the House of Lords last week, where peers proposed 20 changes to the legislation.

Speaking in the House of Commons on Tuesday, Robert Jenrick, immigration minister, said the Lords had peppered the bill with “exceptions and get-out clauses,” that would neutralise its impact.

“The bill as passed by this house made it unambiguously clear to illegal migrants and people smugglers alike that if you come to this country by illegal means you will not be able to stay.”

With a few exceptions, he said, the changes made in the Lords were “little short of wrecking amendments”.

Responding, Stephen Kinnock, Labour’s shadow immigration minister, described the government’s whole approach to the small boats crossings, in particular its stalled plans to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda as an expensive and “shambolic farce”.

The debate also drew fierce comment from former prime minister Theresa May who said that unless changes made in the Lords are retained, the bill will undermine the modern slavery act she introduced and tie the hands of the police.

“It will consign more people to slavery — no doubt about it,” she said.