The lifeboat charity RNLI has vowed to continue to rescue asylum seekers in the Channel despite attacks on volunteers and staff after the recent high-profile small boat landings. RNLI bosses said workers had been subjected to online and physical abuse and there had been “baseless” rumours that the charity had housed asylum seekers or moved them to secret locations after helping them to shore. The charity emphasised that responding to small boats was only a tiny percentage of its work and updated its webpage explaining its work in the Channel, which includes powerful testimonies from volunteers involved in the operations.
RNLI staff and volunteers have been put in the spotlight over the charity’s involvement in a rescue on Sunday in which it a dinghy carrying asylum seekers was brought into Portsmouth, prompting protests by far-right agitators and local people. Peter Sparkes, the RNLI chief executive, said that for more than 200 years the RNLI had rescued people without judgment, fear or favour. Their action, in contrast, is wholly unacceptable in a civilised society.” Sparkes said rumours that the RNLI housed asylum seekers on its premises, or that there were RNLI missions to move migrants to secret locations were “completely baseless and untrue”.
The charity said RNLI lifeboats launched 9,058 times in 2025 but only 109 of those were to small boats in the Channel, representing 1.2% of its rescue work. It said almost 95% of those who crossed the Channel in small boats last year were picked up by the UK Border Force. One of the testimonies on the RNLI’s small boats webpage came from Dan Sinclair, a volunteer helm at Walmer lifeboat station in Kent.
He said: “One thing I would like people to understand is that these people genuinely need our help.” Speaking about one rescue in the Channel, he said: “We launched to an overcrowded, unseaworthy small boat that was taking on water. One family was so scared. Their boat was sinking in front of their eyes.
It was a horrible, horrible situation. We stopped them from drowning. There was a little girl on the boat.
She looked me straight in the eye and said: ‘I love you, thank you.’ As a father, that went straight to my heart. That rescue cemented in my head that what we are doing as an organisation is exactly the right thing.” Paula Lain, a volunteer lifeboat crew member at Dover, described another Channel rescue: “When I arrived on scene, it was a shock. There were people in the water, some disappearing under the water.
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