The Channel migrant crisis is not as bad as many are suggesting, the head of the UN’s refugee agency has sensationally claimed.

Filippo Grandi said the almost 40,000 small boat arrivals in the UK in 2024 were the equivalent to daily arrivals in some countries around the World.

He said: “There is nothing that creates a hostile environment as [much as] a badly organised welcome, and unfortunately we’ve seen that.

“In the UK, the small boats and the challenges of dealing with these people and some of the choices that were made – and that the Government is trying to correct – have conveyed the wrong impression that this brings chaos.”

Mr Grandi said the 36,816 people who crossed the Channel last year was equivalent to the “daily arrivals” of refugees in countries such as Chad.

He said immigration in Western nations needed “to be organised much better”, and that this included sending back people who did not qualify for asylum.

“When this doesn’t happen, people say there’s no leadership in this chaos, it’s dangerous, let’s listen to those who say, ‘Push back, build walls, don’t rescue people at sea’.”

It comes after Xavier Delrieu, head of the Office for the Fight against the Smuggling of Migrants, said the number of small boat crossings to Britain “is not huge”.

He said: “There were 636 successful crossings in 2025 compared with 633 last year. It’s not huge. On the other hand, the number of migrants is 39,000 that managed to cross while we were at 36,000 in 2024, because there are many more migrants per boat, on average 62 in 2025 against 53 last year.

“To date, with police pressure on the beaches, 58% of crossings are prevented, despite 200 days of favourable weather.

“If one day we get to 80%, it will become much less profitable for these networks.”

Mr Delrieu also told local paper LaVoix Du Nord: “The phenomenon of taxi boats spoils these good results a little, which is why we must make a maximum of interceptions to harm this traffic. If we can, we’ll be more efficient.” Asked if the England-France border is too weak, he said: “We can’t let all the migrants go to England either.

“In 2018, the small boats did not exist, it was the Iranians who created this practice.

“In 2020, it developed with the health crisis. The networks could no longer pass by truck and they fell back on the small boat, they saw that it was profitable, with a success rate of up to 70% at the beginning.

“The Kurds got their hands on the sector because they were the most advanced in this crime, it allowed them to make big profits immediately, and they stayed on it.”