Full Fact Reveal Truth Behind '74 Illegal Attempts A Day To Enter UK' Claim

28 October 2016, 18:52 | Updated: 31 October 2016, 12:34

Earlier this week The Daily Express claimed that 74 people a day were stopped from trying to enter the UK. Full Fact dig into the details.

Does the Daily Express have the full story?

Earlier this week they said that 74 people a day were stopped from entering the UK illegally between 2010 and 2015.

Between 2010 and 2015 border guards detected nearly 164,000 attempts to enter the UK illegally from France and Belgium.

That does work out at around 75 attempts a day.

However, the average isn’t all that helpful when you consider that over half of those attempts happened in 2015 alone.

Read the Full Fact report in full here.

And the key word here is attempts, not people.

The numbers don’t count individuals – one person could try to enter the UK 10 times and be counted each time that they do.

The Express also said that “experts estimate that for every migrant caught at least two are successful”.

We spoke to experts at the Migration Observatory at Oxford University who told us that they don’t know of any studies that support this figure.

There was one study done in 2007 which estimated that the number of people living illegally in the UK and their children are somewhere between 420,000 and 860,000.

These estimates are pretty uncertain, which is why there’s such a big gap between the two numbers. Truth is, no one really knows exactly how many people are living illegally in the UK.

But researchers do agree that most people living illegally in the UK are likely to be either overstaying their visa or not complying with its terms.

Read the Full Fact report in full here.