South American cartels target the Channel in £200 million plan to get cocaine into Britain

10 June 2025, 06:14 | Updated: 10 June 2025, 15:08

South American cartels dumped over £200 million worth of cocaine into the English Channel last year to be picked up by small fishing boats and brought ashore, LBC can reveal.

We have been given rare access to a Home Office-funded police boat tasked with tackling the foreign gangs exploiting southern England’s 1,500-mile coastline.

Cartels release packages of cocaine, wrapped in waterproof flotation devices with GPS trackers, from cargo ships and private yachts.

British smugglers then recover the floating packages and bring them ashore on small boats.

Once on land, cocaine is sold by county lines gangs, fuelling child exploitation, gang violence, and drug addiction, an expert said.

Figures obtained by LBC show 3.5 tonnes — the equivalent of a small warehouse or lorry load, worth around £210 million — were seized by Border Force after being dropped in UK territorial waters in 2024, up from none recorded in 2022.

A Home Office source told LBC that Border Force intercepted 1.5 tonnes in a single haul in Dover in January - more than a third of the total seized in the previous 12 months.

The figures only include packages intercepted by law enforcement, with the true scale of the issue likely to be far higher.

It comes after four British men were convicted for trying to smuggle a £100 million cocaine haul aboard a fishing boat off the coast of Newquay, Cornwall, last year.

Drug gangs in Channel a 'national security risk'

Tony Saggers, former intelligence chief at the National Crime Agency, told LBC that sea smugglers are posing a rising challenge to authorities in the English Channel.

He said: “It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

“We’ve got one of the busiest channels of water in the world, with lots of vessels sailing innocently and freely and only a few containing drugs.

“Without being in the right place at the right time, you need to rely on good intelligence or profiling.”

Mr Saggers, who has 30 years of experience tackling organised crime, described the exploitation of Britain’s coast as a national security risk.

He said: “Many organised crime groups are also trafficking people — who are enslaved when they arrive at their end destinations.

“If they're women, they're at significant risk of being sexually exploited.

“The money gets laundered, which is corrupting our seaports, airports, and infrastructure, so that becomes a security issue.

“Gangs buying the cocaine are feuding — involving the use of violence, intimidation, and weapons.

“County lines gangs commonly recruit and exploit children and vulnerable adults, so this is part of a much bigger picture."

Most cocaine reaching the UK via the Channel is sourced from Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, Mr Saggers said.

Such is the scale of the problem that the Government is supplying police forces in southern England with new boats to help monitor the sea, with a Home Office source saying they were successfully busting more seafaring gangs year-on-year.

LBC was given access to one of these vessels — a Sargo flybridge boat which can travel around 500 nautical miles before refuelling — as it patrolled the UK’s largest natural harbour in Poole, Dorset.

It follows a 2023 incident in which a fisherman discovered hundreds of kilos of cocaine floating at the nearby beauty spot of Durdle Door.

David Sidwick, the local Police and Crime Commissioner, said: “When you have cocaine being hung off a buoy or being washed up on our beaches, as we had here, we know we have organised crime.

“I want the police to be able to tackle those drug dealers who think it’s a good idea to bring their stuff into the UK this way.

“In the Southwest we’ve made it difficult for county lines gangs to work the way they used to, so they will constantly flex - and we must do the same.”

A Home Office source said Border Force were becoming more successful at busting the seafaring gangs, after seizing around £44 million worth of cocaine from a large container ship carrying crates of bananas from South America to Dover in January.

The source said they were working “tirelessly around the clock” to bring anyone who threatens the UK’s borders to justice.

They added: “With increased use of intelligence and advanced technology, our officers are able to stay ahead of the smuggling gangs and take effective action to disrupt their operations."