Rishi Sunak has admitted there is no “firm date” for when he expects to meet his pledge to “stop the boats” carrying asylum seekers across the Channel.
The prime minister made preventing people making the perilous crossing one of his five promises to voters at the start of this year.
Although the numbers arriving in the UK have fallen by a third in 2023, thousands have still made the journey.
Grilled by senior MPs on the Commons liaison committee on Tuesday, Sunak was asked directly for a date by which the boats will be stopped.
“There isn’t a firm date on this,” he said. “And we will keep going until we do. But this is not one of these things where there is a precise date.”
Sunak added: “We have made progress. That is that the numbers this year are by a third, which is considerable progress. They are for the first ever time down.
“This is something where, before I took this job, they had only ever gone up and now they are down by a third.”
Sunak has insisted that the government’s policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda will deter more from crossing the Channel.
But the plan has hit a series of roadblocks, with legal challenges preventing any deportation flights from taking off so far.
The prime minister is now pushing a new law through parliament which he claims will prevent the courts from blocking the flights.
Sunak stepped up his anti-immigration rhetoric over the weekend, when he said migrants were threatening to “overwhelm” Europe.
He said the UK’s “enemies” were deliberately “driving people to our shores to try and destabilise our societies”.
Sunak was speaking at a right-wing political festival in Rome, organised by Italy’s prime minister Georgia Meloni.