The Home Secretary will travel to Italy for talks on irregular migration this weekend as hundreds of people continue to cross the Channel in small boats.

Yvette Cooper is set to meet her Italian counterpart, Matteo Piandetosi, along with the UN refugee agency’s representative to the country, Chiara Cardoletti, at the end of a week of diplomacy on migration.

She is also expected to attend the Atreju festival, an annual event organised by Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, where she will speak alongside Mr Piandetosi on tackling migration across Europe.

Previous speakers at the event have included former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon, Hungarian prime minister Victor Orban and, in 2023, Rishi Sunak.

Ms Cooper’s trip to Rome comes as the number of people crossing the Channel in small boats this year exceeded 34,500, a 19% increase on the same point in 2023.

Some 609 people made the journey on Thursday, making it the busiest December day for crossings on record.

The visit also follows a meeting of the so-called Calais Group in London, where ministers and police from the UK, Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands agreed a plan to tackle people smuggling gangs in 2025.

Separately, the UK and Germany set out a joint plan earlier in the week on how to tackle people smugglers, with Berlin pledging to make it a clear criminal offence to “facilitate the smuggling of migrants to the UK”.

Ministers have committed to reducing the number of crossings by “smashing the gangs” operating the cross-Channel route.