A drop in the price of the crossing, prompted by the ease with which smugglers can take people across the Channel on small boats, has only made things worse.
The cost has dropped by about a fifth in a year, from £15,000 in 2021 – when most were making the journey on lorries – to £3,000 for a boat crossing now.
Supply increases so that prices drop……cool beanz, eh?
There’s also a point about reduced government action / barriers in there too
That’s true… Nowadays government agencies do half the channel-crossing on behalf of the smugglers, so they don’t even need to fuel the boats to do 23 miles.
One of the very, very, very few occasions when government intervention has made commercial transactions safer, slicker and more profitable. Good oh!
Oh, wait…
12.000 is a fifth of 15.000?
Oh, arts graduate “journalism”.
The real surprise is that people weren’t using small boats ten or twenty years ago. What changed? My hunch is that today’s migrants have more money to splash.
Sink the boats; the price will go right up.
Slightly off topic, there has been, and still is, I understand, anger that the invaders have been accommodated in 4 star hotels, leading to cancellations of weddings, conferences, and family gatherings. The government complain that they are running out of hotel accommodation. For years, according to sites such as trip advisor, Britannia hotels have been described as offering the worst service, yet for some reason they are still operating. Why not use Britannia hotels to house the invaders? They may, at least, experience what thousands of hard working Brits have had to put up with over the years.
@Andrew M
Twenty years ago they hid in and under lorries, but tighter security at the ferry ports has largely ended that. It’s trickier to erect barriers along hundreds of miles of coastline.
so 40,000 illegal immigrants crossing this year so far at £3,000 a head is a £120 million, estimate is for 50,0000 to 60,000 by end of the year so a fairly substantial business, I’d assume the margins are pretty good especially given they can buy thing like PFD’s in bulk
“The cost has dropped by about a fifth in a year, from £15,000 in 2021 – when most were making the journey on lorries – to £3,000 for a boat crossing now.”
No, a fall of one-fifth (-20%) would be a fall in the previous price by £3,000 to a new lower price of £12,000.
Of course, if the price really has fallen to £3,000 then this would represent an -80% reduction, or a fall in the price to 20% (1/5) of the previous price.
Rob
Exactly.
@MC – “Sink the boats; the price will go right up.”
Why? The people supplying the boats expect them to be single-use. If the boat survives the crossing it will almost certainly be seized, and since the pasengers have already paid by the time they start crossing, if they are killed it does not reduced the profits.
Of course, murdering people as they cross might reduce demand, but it shouldn’t have much effect on the cost.
@Penseivat – “The government complain that they are running out of hotel accommodation”
Why is this happening? Nightingale hospitals were built extremely quickly – why can’t we build something suitable for this purpose? And many of the migrants must have skills – privide a field and materials and they can build stuff – it should be an easy problem to solve.
The issue is the assumption of a right to accommodation, should be a right to shelter but the bleeding hearts brigade would never allow that.
Some tents and an area marked out for them to dig a latrine should do, certainly no worse than what they have come from