Woman becomes 23rd person to die in small boat Channel crossing this year

A woman has died during a small boat crossing of the Channel – the 23rd such fatality this year as an unprecedented number of people make the treacherous journey from France to seek shelter in Britain.

One person was found dead after a boat trying to cross the busy shipping lane near Calais got into difficulties overnight, French authorities said.

A total of 34 other people were rescued and taken to emergency services, the local French department responsible for the Calais region said.

With a dearth of safe and legal routes available for people to seek asylum in the UK, more than 12,000 asylum seekers have arrived in Britain on small boats this year, making perilous crossings in overcrowded dinghies that risk capsizing.

Some 1,500 people have arrived in the most recent week for which data is available and, as of June, more people had made the crossing than at the same point in any previous year.

Such attempts to reach Britain first started to be detected in late 2018 after increasingly stringent security measures at ports and the Eurotunnel succeeded in preventing stowaways on lorries and trains bound for the UK.

A total of 23 people have now died making the journey this year, close to double the total number of fatalities in 2023, including seven people this month alone.

Citizens of five countries – Iran, Albania, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria – have made up two thirds of those crossing in small boats since 2018, according to the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory.

With neither the past nor current government proposing to offer safe routes, people have continued to make the journey in ever-larger numbers despite Tory ministers criminalising unsanctioned crossings and threatening to send people to Rwanda, in a £500m scheme now scrapped by Sir Keir Starmer.

The new Labour government has vowed to go after people-smuggling gangs and to increase cooperation with European nations after years of frayed relations, with home secretary Yvette Cooper moving to establish a new Border Security Command in her first days in office.

“It is devastating that another person has died trying to cross the Channel this morning,” said Gunes Kalkan, of the charity Safe Passage International. “This tragedy was entirely preventable – we need urgent action to stop it happening again.

“This government has the opportunity to take a radically different approach to welcome refugees. This must start by urgently opening safe routes so people fleeing war and persecution have safe ways to reach protection and family in the UK.”

The small dinghies which cross the strait are frequently dangerously packed with far more people than is safe to carry, with a father describing to the BBC in May how his seven-year-old daughter was fatally crushed aboard a boat carrying 110 people.

Those who do reach Britain face often years-long waits for their asylum claims to be processed, with a backlog of more than 120,000 cases awaiting a verdict from the Home Office.

Ms Cooper told MPs this week that civil servants had “effectively stopped making the majority of asylum decisions” due to the impact of the Illegal Migration Act, a piece of legislation brought in under the Tory government.

The new home secretary said it was the “most extraordinary policy that I’ve ever seen”, adding: “Thousands of asylum caseworkers cannot do their proper jobs and, as a result, the backlog of asylum cases is now going up.”

Housing these people in taxpayer-funded hotels would cost £30-40bn over the next four years, according to Home Office projections, she said.

Earlier this month, The Independent reported that United Nations human rights experts had written to the UK to warn that it was at risk of breaching international law over allegations of child asylum-seekers being placed in adult detention centre as a result of its age assessment policies.