French authorities stopped less than 15 per cent of nearly 1,400 attempted migrant crossings yesterday as Britain’s defence secretary said France must take stronger action to intercept the boats.
Home Office figures have revealed that 1,194 migrants crossed the Channel in 18 boats on Saturday, a new daily record high for crossings this year and the fourth highest daily figure ever recorded.
The French maritime prefecture said it had rescued 184 migrants, out of all 1,378 that attempted the crossing on Saturday.
Saturday’s arrivals took the total number to have crossed so far this year to 14,811 — the highest ever recorded for the first five months of the year and 42 per cent higher than this time in 2024.
John Healey, the defence secretary, said the scenes were “shocking” and that it was a “really big problem” that the French authorities were unable to intervene to intercept the boats.
In February the French agreed for the first time to amend its laws to allow police to intercept migrant boats in shallow waters and prevent them from crossing but three months later they are yet to implement the plans.
Calling on the French to follow through on the pledge, Healey told Sky News: “They’re not doing it, but for the first time we’ve got the level of cooperation needed, we’ve got the agreement that they will change the way they work.
“And our concentration now is to push them to get that into operation, so they can intercept these smugglers and stop these people in the boats, not just on the shore.
“That’ll be part of, part of, I hope, dealing with this absolutely intolerable problem.”
He admitted that Britain had “lost control of its borders” but blamed it on the previous Conservative government and insisted that new border security laws currently going through parliament would “help us smash those gangs” behind the small boat crossings.
Photos have emerged of more than half a dozen French police officers standing by as they watched migrants enter the water to clamber onto boats bound for the UK. One officer was seen taking photos of the scenes on a beach at Gravelines in northern France, about 20 km north of Calais.
However, local French mayors have highlighted the dangers for police on the beaches.
In Audinghen — 30km south of Calais — two officers were hospitalised after being pelted with stones thrown by migrants who were embarking on two boats.
Marc Sarpaux, the mayor of Audinghen, said: “The two gendarmes were stoned by the migrants.”
Bruno Retailleau, the French interior minister, was silent on the daily record high of migrant crossings, instead posting about Paris Saint-Germain’s victory in the Champions League final over Inter Milan last night.
It came after the coastguard had to issue an urgent appeal for fishing boats to assist a yacht and kayaks in trouble in the English Channel because all Border Force vessels and lifeboats were occupied rescuing migrants.
The coastguard’s appeal was made on Saturday morning as Border Force, coastguard, RNLI and several French vessels dealt with an estimated 15 small boats bearing migrants attempted to cross the Channel. The ships involved include two patrol craft, four Border Force vessels, seven French vessels, a warship and two lifeboats.
The yacht had issued an alert when it started taking on water.
At least seven of the dinghies, each holding about 50 people, left the coast of Gravelines just after 5am. Men, women and children waded waist-high into the chilly water wearing jeans, fleeces and fluorescent orange lifejackets.
When the craft finally set sail, it did so in the shadow of two Maritime Gendarmerie vessels, which slowly followed the migrants.
On Thursday, Home Office figures revealed that France is intercepting fewer Channel migrants than at any time in the past, despite a £480 million deal with Britain to stop the crossings. This year, French police stopped 8,347 asylum seekers from reaching the UK in small boats, while 13,167 have successfully made the journey.
The figures mean that just over 38 per cent have been intercepted, down from an estimated 45 per cent last year. In 2023 that figure was 47 per cent. In April, the government revealed that the number of migrants arriving in the UK via the English Channel reached a new record for the first four months of the year.
Saturday was a record day for migrant crossings this year after a week of bad weather. The previous highest daily number in 2025 was on May 21, with 820 migrants.
Chris Philp, the Tory shadow home secretary, described it as a “day of shame for Labour, Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper”.
He wrote on X: “2025 so far has already been the worst in history — and now this. Labour has completely lost control of our borders. Their pledge to smash gangs lies in tatters. Labour foolishly scrapped the Rwanda removals deterrent days before it was due to start. It is now clear this was a catastrophic mistake.”
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “Starmer promised to smash the gangs, but they’re smashing him.”
Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, accused the government of failing “to hold the French government to account as they stand back and allow illegal migrants to cross the Channel” in small boats.
“Both governments are propping up the appalling exploitation of people through their failure to grip this issue,” said Patel, who was home secretary between 2019 and 2022. “British taxpayers are paying the price of Labour’s failure.”
Since 2014, the UK has spent increasing amounts of money to support joint efforts with France to tackle small boat crossings. Between 2014 and 2023, successive Conservative governments spent a cumulative £300 million on improved security improvements at Calais and police patrols on French beaches.
In 2023 Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, announced an extra £480 million to double patrols to 800 officers and set up a joint command centre and a detention centre.
Later that year, French authorities revealed under freedom of information laws that most of that had been spent on transport, including helicopters, cars and motorbikes, and surveillance equipment such as binoculars and drones. But it also detailed how money was used to buy microwaves and vacuum cleaners, supporting a horse brigade in the Somme Bay and buying equipment for police at the French-Italian border.
French officials have accused Britain of fuelling the surge in migrant crossings, and said the UK is seen as “El Dorado” — the mythical South American city made of gold — because of its lax approach to migrant workers.
“The issue for England is to have an internal system that appears to be an El Dorado — and probably wrongly so — since it’s a country where you can work very easily without having a residence permit,” Didier Leschi, the director of the French Office of Immigration and Integration, said last year.
In January 2024, before Labour took power, a report published by France’s Court of Accounts, a body in charge of auditing the use of public funds, said that UK co-ordination with France was insufficient.
“The British don’t provide usable information on the departures of small boats, and give very general, first-level information that has not been counter-checked,” the report said. “The relationship between France and the UK is therefore unbalanced in terms of information and intelligence-gathering.”
In July Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, launched a new government agency called Border Security Command (BSC). The agency aims to tackle smuggling gangs facilitating small boat crossings by drawing together the work of the National Crime Agency, intelligence agencies, police, Immigration Enforcement and Border Force.
Martin Hewitt, the former chairman of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, was appointed to lead BSC in September, at the same time that a package of £75 million was announced to support its work.
This month Sir Keir Starmer announced plans for return hubs based in the western Balkans in order to send migrants back to their home countries more easily. Serbia, Kosovo, North Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina are on a shortlist of about nine countries drawn up by ministers as potential destinations to which rejected asylum seekers would be sent after all avenues of appeal have been exhausted in the UK.
But heading off migrants before they arrive in the UK relies heavily on French intervention.The law in France means police are unable to stop boats at sea unless they are in visible distress, leading to a loophole where people-smuggling gangs employ “taxi boats” which remain in the water and collect migrants from the beach.
Tony Smith, the former director general of UK Border Force, said he had seen no evidence that the loophole was being addressed, despite the agreement in February that it would be. “I think there is a political direction from the French government not to intervene,” he said.
“They were talking about this legal change, allowing them to intervene in shallow waters, but I haven’t seen any change there even though it was promised. On land, the figures speak for themselves. The French are clearly not doing as much on the beaches as they could be doing.”
Smith said that French police previously punctured dinghies to prevent people from embarking. “They have that capability,” he said. “The French reaction now seems to be one of indifference.”
HM Coastguard confirmed it had been “responding to small boats activity in the Channel today”, but said “the co-ordination of multiple, simultaneous incidents is not unusual, and at no time was public safety compromised”.
The yacht had issued an alert when it started taking on water, but the coastguard confirmed that ultimately, neither the kayakers nor the yacht needed assistance.
The Home Office said: “We all want to end dangerous small boat crossings, which threaten lives and undermine our border security.
“The people-smuggling gangs do not care if the vulnerable people they exploit live or die, as long as they pay and we will stop at nothing to dismantle their business models and bring them to justice. That is why this government has put together a serious plan to take down these networks at every stage.
“Through international intelligence sharing under our Border Security Command, enhanced enforcement operations in northern France and tougher legislation in the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, we are strengthening international partnerships and boosting our ability to identify, disrupt, and dismantle criminal gangs whilst strengthening the security of our borders.”
