The Boatwatch website started life when, in order to win an argument on the Internet, I idly Googled for small boat migration figures. The raw data is easily accessible on the official government website, but that's literally just dates and numbers. It's not a particularly user-friendly presentation of the data.
So, on the principle that you should always graph your data, I thought I'd put together a simple website which does just that for the small boat migrant data. And here it is.
As well as graphing the data supplied by the government, I've taken the opportunity to expand on that with additional data and presentations which you won't find on the government website, or anywhere else.
Important!
The presence of this website should not be used to infer any particular position on the immigration debate. It is generally agreed on all sides that small boat crossings are undesirable, not least because of the hazards they pose to participants and the fact that the only people who benefit from them are people traffickers with no concern for human life. But there is no concensus about the best alternative. Some want to simply eliminate unlawful migration by any means possible, while others would prefer to see the traffickers rendered unnecessary by the provision of safe and legal routes for all refugees. People at both ends of that spectrum may find the information on this site useful, but neither has a right to claim that this site supports their goals.
Copyright and Licence
All government data used on this site is © Crown Copyright 2025 and used under the Open Government Licence 3.0.
All derived data, and all original textual content, is copyright © Boatwatch UK 2025 and is published under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
What this means in practice is that you are free to re-use and share any content from this website without payment, but you must credit this website if you do so and you must publish any derived content under the same licence.
Contact
If you need to get in touch, then email me at admin{at}boatwatch.uk, making the obvious substitution to convert that into a working email address.
Support this website
This website has no external source of income, but it does still cost money to run. If you'd like to help offset those costs, you can make a small donation via Ko-fi.