More than 170 migrants were rescued from a blazing “mega dinghy” in the English Channel as asylum seekers are taking increasingly dangerous risks to try to reach Britain, The i Paper has been told.
Efforts to clamp down on small boat crossings are having an impact, with Home Office data showing crossings so far this year are down around 43 per cent compared to the same period in 2025.
But tactics to prevent people making the dangerous journey has resulted in some taking “impossible” risks, including hundreds of people at a time loading into enormous “mega dinghies” that measure longer than a double-decker bus.
Rescue specialists operating in the Channel have long observed a trend for smuggling gangs to use ever larger boats to carry migrants to the English coast.
Where inflatables carried an average number of seven people in 2018, that rose to 41 in 2022 and reached 61 last year. The figure for this year is likely to exceed that record because of the arrival of the so-called “mega dinghy”. A French official said this week: “The number of people on board each boat never ceases to go up.”
Utopia 56, a charity which supports migrants and monitors human rights enforcement, said the use of these giant inflatables remained rare but said it was a growing phenomenon. One vessel carrying 167 people arrived off the British coast last month.
Smugglers are also running these boats like a taxi service, making multiple pick-ups at locations further along the French coast to avoid police, prolonging the journey and increasing the load.
A crew member hoists life vests after migrants disembarked from a French rescue ship (Photo: Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP/Getty)French authorities said 173 people were rescued in the incident on Tuesday at just after 6am in French waters off Boulogne-sur-Mer, with 11 people suffering from minor injuries.
A helicopter and five French and British rescue vessels, including a RNLI lifeboat and two UK Border Force cutters, were involved in the rescue.
The incident was the latest to involve a so-called “mega dinghy” – an enormous new type of inflatable boat measuring up to 13m in length. The poor-quality vessels are being used by smuggling gangs to maximise the number of passengers in each crossing, and thereby their profits.
The large-scale rescue operation came just a day after Prime Minister Andy Burnham pledged his government will be “relentless” in reducing the number of people arriving on the English coast on small boats, and also follows a controversial pledge from Reform UK leader Nigel Farage to use the Royal Navy to return migrant vessels to French ports.
The UK earlier this year struck a deal with Paris which will see London pay £662m in return for action by the authorities to confront small boat crossings.
But it also prompted warnings from human rights groups that asylum seekers are taking ever-increasing risks to try to reach the British coast from France amid efforts by the French security forces to crack down on crossings by attempting to disrupt departures by migrants gathered around Dunkirk and Calais.
Six people have died in the last week attempting to cross the Channel, including three women who died from respiratory failure as they tried to leave the French coast from a beach where there had earlier been clashes between migrants and riot police.
A ‘taxi boat’ service – making routes longer
The French authorities said the vessel which became the subject of the rescue operation had departed from a location in rural Normandy some three hours to the west of Calais.
The departure from a beach close to the pretty holiday resort of Veules-les-Roses, about 200km from Calais, is the latest example of smuggling gangs choosing locations a considerable distance from places like Calais and Dunkirk, which are the focus of policing operations and the subject of heavy surveillance.
Utopia 56 said the crossing on Tuesday was an example of a “taxi boat” service.
Under this system, a vessel is put into the water out of view of the security forces and then travels along the French coast for several hours to pick up groups of migrants from pre-designated locations before then striking out to open seas to attempt to cross the Channel.
But the charity said the result was that those trying to reach the UK coast, who pay as much £1,500 each to criminal gangs for the crossing, were being forced to take ever-increasing risks.
A spokesperson said: “The smuggling gangs start these journeys increasingly far away from the areas which are watched by the police, and then collect their passengers along the coast.
“These taxi boat services are increasingly dangerous, especially as the smugglers try to put ever more people on board. People are taking impossible risks and it makes a perilous situation even worse. As we saw with today’s rescue.”
The heavily-laden inflatable was tracked by French rescue services throughout the early hours of Tuesday, with five people being taken on board while other passengers declined assistance.
In a statement, the French maritime prefecture for the Calais region said: “The remaining people on board refused the assistance offered by the French patrol boats. Determined to reach the United Kingdom, migrants crossing the Channel refused assistance offered, accepting it only in situations of extreme emergency”.
The French authorities said the situation then became an emergency when the outboard motor powering the inflatable caught fire and the “vessel’s integrity deteriorated very rapidly”.
Two French naval vessels attended the scene, along with the RNLI Eastbourne lifeboat and the UK Border Force vessels, BSC Contender and BSC Courageous. The Contender took on board 54 of the rescued migrants and took them for disembarkation at Boulogne.
A UK government spokesperson said: “This incident underlines the terrible dangers of small boat crossings. We continue to work relentlessly with the French and our partners overseas to prevent these perilous journeys.”
Hundreds loaded on to ‘mega dinghies’
The vessels, which first started appearing in recent weeks and are longer than an old-style Routemaster double-decker bus, are thought to be manufactured in China, along with accompanying outboard engines.
Several companies have been caught on Chinese retail websites offering “refugee boats” for sale. Last year, the Treasury seized the UK assets of a Chinese producer after it used the same wording to offer large inflatables for sale on its website.
The boats, which are often of low quality and made from shoddy materials, are routinely transported through Turkey to the European Union border with countries like Bulgaria, and then smuggled to collection points in Germany and the Low Countries.
Last Wednesday marked the busiest day for small boat crossings in the English Channel so far this year, with 752 migrants arriving in the UK.
But the number of overall arrivals for 2026 has dropped since last year.
The provisional total for the year is 14,561, 43% lower than the number recorded by this time last year (25,436) and down 15% on the same period in 2024 (16,903).
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