Children – including babies – are feared to have been left adrift in small boats in the Channel by overwhelmed UK rescue agencies days before a mass drowning in 2021, prompting the former children’s commissioner to call for an investigation.
In at least nine incidents in coastguard logs, obtained by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates, no attempt to establish the safety of small boats containing children is recorded after calls for help.
In three of the cases, the documents suggest, call handlers responding to requests for help from the boats could hear children crying.
The crossings were made four days before a vessel sank on 24 November 2021, killing at least 27 people, including three children, in the worst maritime disaster in the Channel for more than 30 years.
The UK’s official report on the mass drowning, published last year, found the rescue attempt was hampered by confusion. Failings identified by the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) included too few staff processing emergency calls in the Dover control room and a lack of aerial surveillance due to bad weather.
Anne Longfield, the former children’s commissioner for England, said the report had failed to address concerns that young people would continue to be placed in danger. She said the latest revelations by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates demanded a full investigation into the search-and-rescue response to small boat crossings and the safeguarding of children.
“Children crossing the Channel on small boats are extremely vulnerable, and have been given little or no say in the dangerous journey they are being taken on,” she said.
Maritime search-and-rescue experts who reviewed the cache of coastguard logs from before the November 2021 tragedy said they raised serious questions over the government’s under-resourcing of rescue agencies despite the ramping up of the Channel crisis in the preceding years.
The logs indicate that in two of the documented incidents there is no evidence of a rescue being launched even after the boats were spotted by helicopter or drone – including one reported to contain five children.
When pressed, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) told reporters there was “no SAR [search and rescue] requirement” in these cases.
However, a former senior coastguard, who requested anonymity, said these cases potentially breached policy to treat all migrant boats in UK waters as requiring “immediate assistance”.
Asked whether it had established the safety of all reported passengers, the MCA spokesperson said it would be “inappropriate” to comment pending the outcome of continuing investigations.
Crossings had been increasing since 2018 and by late 2021 smugglers were advising migrants to make repeated 999 calls once in British waters, the MAIB report said.
This, it said, made it harder for operators to determine which calls were from boats they had already sent rescue crews to. The MAIB also found rescuers at the time believed some migrant callers would falsely exaggerate their circumstances.
HM Coastguard has primary responsiblity for search and rescue, but has no rescue boats in the Channel. It mostly relies on a fleet of Border Force patrol vessels – which were deemed unsuitable for rescuing children in a Home Office-commissioned independent review – and, less frequently, the RNLI.
Previous reports have highlighted how the coastguard also downgraded 999 calls from migrants crossing the Channel days before the disaster.
Coastguards must document steps taken to coordinate rescues in the logs – but many were so sparse they gave the former senior coastguard the sense staff were “effectively overwhelmed”. All the evidence pointed to “carnage” in the control room, another SAR expert said.
Between 5am and 7am on 20 November, a team of three in the Dover coastguard control room received 27 calls from small boats, the logs suggest.
Some appear to have been diverted to other control rooms, leaving staff in different parts of the country piecing together fragments of information from the same boat.
In one such incident, 999 calls were repeatedly made from a boat carrying 45 people – on which there were said to be “kids crying” – answered by a Falmouth-based coastguard at 6.28am, followed by one at Dover at 6.39am, and another in Fareham at 6.49am.
It took almost four hours to establish that the calls came from the same telephone number.
After 15 hours, the incident was closed with no updates on attempts to locate and rescue the vessel, one of many where notes suggest operators closed incidents when they could not be certain passengers had arrived safely.
In multiple logs, staff said they were “satisfied they would have been found” based on the number of rescue crews used throughout the day.
It was not until early November 2021 – just weeks before the tragedy – that the MCA recognised there was a risk of deaths due to the coastguard becoming “overwhelmed”.
Even so, plans to increase the size of Dover’s team were not scheduled for completion until March 2022.
Some changes have been made since the tragedy. Policies require coastguards to record actions taken prior to closing off incidents, while the number of operational staff at Dover has increased sixfold, from four to 20.
An independent inquiry – due to hold an opening hearing on 6 March – will further examine the disaster.
In the meantime, the number of fatal incidents in the Channel has reportedly increased, most within French waters, according to research that attributes the rise to French policing measures funded by the UK.
Among the most recent victims was the 14-year-old Obada Abd Rabbo, one of five people who died on 14 January this year.
