One way of doing this is by attracting new players.

Since 2020, the government has been increasingly reliant on hotels, partly because the supply of other types of asylum accommodation has not kept up with the numbers arriving in small boats.But using asylum hotels is expensive -

.As of 20 May, 12,748 people had arrived in the UK in small boats - up by nearly a third compared with this time last year.To reduce the number of crossings, the government has pledged to disrupt the people-smuggling gangs behind them.

But it is unclear how the government plans to measure its progress, or when the goal will be met.The Home Office told us data on actions taken by officials to disrupt criminal gangs was "being collected and may be published in the future".

There is some information on efforts to prevent small boat crossings by French authorities - who, under a 2023 deal, are receiving £476m from the UK over three years.

They say about 24,791 people were prevented from crossing between July 2024 and May 2025. We do not know what happened to them or whether they tried to cross again., draw together three main strands of evidence to underline this case.

First, records of the Earth's distant past suggest significant melting – with sea levels several metres higher than present - during previous similarly warm periods, such as 125,000 years ago.And the last time there was as much planet-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as today - about 3 million years ago - sea levels were about 10-20m higher.

Second, current observations already show an increasing rate of melting, albeit with variation from year to year."Pretty dramatic things [are] happening in both west Antarctica and Greenland," said co-author Prof Jonathan Bamber, director of the Bristol Glaciology Centre.