Two men and two women have died after a small boat sank in the Channel between France and Britain, French local authorities have said.

“A taxi-boat sinking occurred today. The situation is still being assessed and remains subject to change,” local authorities in Calais stated.

According to the French media outlet La Voix du Nord, rescue services were called to Équihen-Plage early on Thursday morning.

In the past year, people smugglers have been using motoring dinghies along stretches of the northern French and Belgian coasts, picking migrants up along the shore. Authorities refer to them as “taxi-boats”.

Wednesday’s incident came the day after 102 people got into difficulty trying to cross the Channel and had to be rescued.

In another recent incident, two people died trying to cross the Channel at the beginning of April.

The use of taxi-boats by people smugglers is controversial as they move along the coast picking up people at different points rather than having one fixed launching point into the sea. There have been reports that some of these taxi-boats are starting their journey from Belgium and then moving along the French coast.

The UK and France are negotiating a fresh deal to stop small boats crossing the Channel, with an interim arrangement in place after they failed to renew an agreement that expired on 31 March.

About 2,200 refugees and migrants crossed the Channel, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, to the UK in the first two months of 2026, according to data from the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory. About 41,500 people made the crossing last year.