Officers seized more than a dozen boats and 700 life jackets in raids which also revealed a “factory” supplying marine equipment. The ring, based in Lille, a city in northern France about 60 miles from Calais, and run by Iraqi Kurdish immigrants, is suspected of having organized 80 crossings across the Channel over the summer, of which 50 were successful. Each Channel boat generally carries more than 40 migrants and is said by police to have netted smugglers around £70,000 each, or more than £3.5m in total. News of the raids came as an estimated 650 to 700 migrants crossed the Channel on Thursday after 667 were confirmed to have been intercepted in the Channel on Wednesday. A total of 31,000 are needed for this year, compared to 28,561 for all of 2021. A new analysis also revealed that the cost of housing asylum seekers in hotels has risen by more than £1bn in a year, from an estimated £70m a year in March 2021, to a total this year of £1.28bn a year . Around 33,000 migrants are thought to be housed in hotels, at a cost of £4,250 a month per asylum seeker, as a result of the surge in migrants across the Channel, according to analysis by the Migration Watch UK think tank.
