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Two women die trying to reach Britain in Calais Channel capsize tragedy
Britain has said it would pay France up to £660 million under a three-year border security deal.
Two women died after a boat carrying about 80 migrants trying to cross to Britain from France capsized near Calais, the local French administration said on Sunday.
"We regret to say that we found two people, two women, who had died," said Christophe Marx, an official for the Pas-de-Calais administration, adding that authorities had rescued the others.
The deaths highlight the difficulties faced by Britain and France over tackling small boats transporting migrants illegally across the English Channel.
Last month, Britain said it would pay France up to £660 million under a three-year border security deal to try to clamp down on illegal migrant crossings of the Channel, with part of the funding contingent on results.
The move is yet another attempt to slash the rising numbers of people making the perilous journey to the UK.
Around £160m of this money will be spent on new tactics, such as policing to stop "taxi boats" picking up migrants offshore, and is conditional on the success of the French operation, the Home Office said.
France will be measured on the number of boats stopped, the number of people smugglers arrested and the number of migrants stopped from boarding dinghies, among other things.
The UK will pay around £501m for more officers on the beaches of northern France and more surveillance technology, despite a previous boost in funding failing to bring the number of Channel crossings down.
The Home Office has said that there will be a 40 per cent increase in the number of boots on the ground in northern France, taking the number of law enforcement officers from 700 to nearly 1,100.
Home secretary Shabana Mahmood has pledged the deal would stop migrants making the dangerous journey to the UK, but the charity, Refugee Council, said ministers were "treating the symptom, not the cause".
Under the previous Conservative government, then-prime minister Rishi Sunak agreed to give France almost £500m over three years to tackle small boat crossings. Despite the surge in funding and policing, crossings in the Channel have soared, with some 41,472 people arriving in the UK by small boat in 2025.
This was up from 36,816 people in 2024, and 29,437 in 2023. The peak number of crossings was in 2022, when around 46,000 made the journey to the UK.
