People smugglers on the northern French coast have begun loading migrants onto fewer and larger boats after enforcement action cut their supply of inflatable dinghies, a BBC investigation has found.
The broadcaster reported that once-rival criminal groups were now working together and pooling passengers onto single vessels. Gang members said more of the so-called mega dinghies were being prepared.
A 15-metre boat carrying a record 230 people reached British waters in August. That beat the previous high of 165 recorded in July.
French officers said they were intercepting two-thirds of small boats before they reached the coast. Charity workers told the BBC that gangs had switched from launching in darkness to the middle of the day, because patrols had made the old routine too risky.
The broadcaster’s crew was attacked with stones near a migrant camp at Loon-Plage, close to Dunkirk in northern France, and its cameraman was injured. Riot police had cleared tents at the site days earlier.
Taxi boats, which set off from one stretch of coast and collect passengers from another, are travelling greater distances to avoid detection. One filmed picking up migrants at Gravelines had come from Belgium, the BBC said.
The Home Office said the National Crime Agency and its international partners had seized more than 1,100 boats and engines in an effort to choke off the smugglers’ equipment.
European agencies have gone after the same supply chain. Eurojust and Europol said in March that four people had been arrested over deliveries of nautical equipment manufactured in Asia and imported into Germany through Türkiye, in packages worth more than €10,000 on the black market.
The larger vessels have brought new dangers. On August 4, 170 people had to be rescued after their boat caught fire in mid-Channel, and a dinghy carrying 173 sank off Boulogne after launching from Dieppe, in Normandy.
French sea rescue crews warned that overloaded boats made recovery operations far more perilous. The record vessel was reported to have buckled in the swell.
Ministers were accused of losing control of the crossings after images of that boat circulated, and French police were again criticised for standing by as it made its way out to sea.
Frontex, the European Union border agency, detected some 9,900 attempts to leave the bloc for Britain across the Channel between January and April, close to half the number recorded a year earlier.
