What happens to all of the small boats?

r/

We keep hearing about people arriving on small boats, one thing that I’m curious about is what happens to the boats? Is there a pilot who is in charge of it who then turns around and heads back to France?

Or does he or she come ashore and abandon the boat? In that case what happens to the boat? If the numbers we’re told are accurate then if there are five boats arriving every day what happens to the boats? Are they taken to a big warehouse somewhere? Are they destroyed? Are they returned to France and reused?

Where are they getting the boats from in the first place? There can’t be that many dinghy manufacturers in France? If they’re getting them new and the authorities are serious about stopping the crossings why don’t they shut down the manufacture?

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  2. Big_Industry_2067 Avatar

    There’s a lot of them stored around Dover. I think Steve Laws did a video about it a while back.

  3. tmstms Avatar

    They are indeed impounded and destroyed.

    I don’t think it is very easy to shut down the trade in second hand boats since mostly they are bought for legit purposes.

    It’a analogous to saying that because getaway cars are used in robberies, cars should be banned.

  4. cougieuk Avatar

    They’re just dinghies. Cheap. Easily made. Plenty of legitimate uses for dinghies too. 

  5. ThePolymath1993 Avatar

    >There can’t be that many dinghy manufacturers in France?

    We’ve got some way to go before we run mainland Europe out of dinghies. This line of reasoning sounds like “Keep charging, the enemy will run out of bullets eventually!” energy.

    The best way we ever had of shutting down the flow of boats was cooperation between us and the French police and having immigration processing centres in Calais. The previous government knackered that.

  6. Azyall Avatar

    They are impounded. This is a link to a story about a Home Office warehouse in Kent.

    Discarded Migrant Boats

  7. MDK1980 Avatar

    There are piles of them in yards. They originally get them from smugglers who import them from places like Turkey. They recently bust a big ring in Germany who would send the boats via the Netherlands to France.

  8. GuybrushFunkwood Avatar

    We float knackered Citroens back over to France on them for refurbishment.

  9. Ill_Refrigerator_593 Avatar

    One thing i’ve heard is that there’s been a change to fewer, larger boats.

    Most have 50+ people on recently while at first they had around 10-25 on average.

  10. Fellowes321 Avatar

    sell them back to the gangs.

    It’s like when they say they seized £4m in drugs. That’s how much they got for them.