BBC corrects small boat arrivals figure overstated by 143 per cent

The BBC has corrected an online article that more than doubled the number of people who crossed the Channel in small boats last year, the second migration-related error the corporation has acknowledged in a matter of days.

The article, published on the BBC News website on 14 April and opening with the declining number of hotels used to house asylum seekers, stated that 100,625 people had arrived by small boat in 2025. The correct figure was 41,472. The BBC added a correction note to the article on 21 April.

How it was caught

The error was flagged by Sunder Katwala, director of the think tank British Future, who asked the BBC to correct it in a post on X on 18 April. The SNP MP Pete Wishart later criticised the mistake, describing it as an error of around 140 per cent. As of 30 April, according to The Canary, the correction had been made on the article but had not been added to the BBC's central Corrections and Clarifications page.

A second entry

The small boats error followed a separate acknowledgement. On 17 April the BBC added an entry to its Corrections and Clarifications page concerning an episode of the Political Thinking podcast, broadcast in February, in which Nigel Farage attributed falling net migration to an "exodus" of people leaving the UK. Official figures for the year to June 2025 show net migration fell by around two thirds, mainly because fewer people arrived, and the claim went unchallenged on air.

Why it matters

Migration is the issue on which public perception and official data diverge most sharply, and broadcasters' figures carry particular weight because they are so often repeated. An inflated small boats number does not stay on one web page. It is screenshotted, quoted in comment threads and cited back to politicians as fact, long after a correction note is appended.

There is a further point about prominence. A correction that sits on the article itself reaches readers who return to it, which is to say very few. The BBC's central corrections page exists so that significant errors are visible in one place. When an error of this size takes weeks to reach it, the system is working more slowly than the misinformation it is meant to correct.

Neither error was obviously partisan in direction: one overstated arrivals, the other let a politician's explanation for falling numbers pass unchallenged. What they share is a lapse in basic numerical checking on the most scrutinised subject in British politics. That is a standards problem before it is a bias problem, and it is the easier of the two to fix.