Migrant boats in rush to beat Patel’s curbs and winter seas

CHANNEL people-smugglers have mounted an autumn blitz to beat Priti Patel’s tough new laws and the winter weather with a record 2,500 migrants crossing so far this month.

More than 800 people reached the UK in small boats in the past three days including 410 on Saturday, 102 Sunday and 294 on Monday, after exploiting the unseasonably calm and mild weather.

The 2,500 who have crossed so far in October is five times the rate for the whole of October 2020 when fewer than 500 landed. It takes the total for this year to 19,533, compared with 8,410 for the whole of last year.

Home Office and Border Force sources said traffickers were capitalising on the good weather and migrants’ fears that they must cross before Ms Patel’s new Nationality and Borders Bill comes into force in the new year.

It will increase the prison sentences for anyone arriving in the UK without permission from six months to four years, impose a maximum life sentence for people smugglers and pave the way for new processing centres both in the UK and, potentially, abroad.

Lucy Moreton, for the Border Force union ISU, said: “People smugglers will make use of any fears to try to encourage people to make the crossing and pay more for the crossing.”

With up to 2,000 migrants estimated to be stage-posting in northern France, whether sleeping rough or staying in cheap hotels, she warned the processing centre on the Dover quayside at Tug Haven was “massively overcrowded” and Border Force had converted conference rooms at Lydd airport and Frontier House in Folkestone into temporary overflow screening centres.

Spain’s Balearic Islands, a previously little-used route, has exploded since the start of the pandemic.

Last weekend saw a record 350 migrants arrive in 29 small boats from Algeria. More than 2,100 have now made the perilous 150-200 mile crossing this year, up from just 480 in 2019.