Pilot scheme that swapped small-boat arrivals for legal asylum seekers winds down as Paris pushes for EU-wide alternative.
Britain has formally ended its flagship “one in, one out” migrant returns deal with France after talks to extend the year-long pilot scheme failed, the Home Office confirmed on Wednesday.
The agreement, launched in August 2025 under then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron, allowed the UK to return some people who arrived on small boats across the English Channel in exchange for accepting an equal number of asylum seekers from France who had legitimate claims and often family links to Britain.
A Home Office spokesperson said the pilot is “no longer processing new cases.” Deportation flights for those already detained will continue for several more weeks, and officials said lessons from the scheme would be used to speed up returns of people with no right to remain.
Restricted numbers and steep costs:
Around 1,500 people were returned to France under the deal since it began, while a similar number-roughly 1,100 to 1,500 depending on the latest tallies-were transferred to the UK through the legal route. That represents only a small fraction of total Channel crossings during the same period, which exceeded 40,000 in some estimates.
The average cost of each return was reported at about £56,000 ($73,000), bringing the overall bill to around £84 million. British officials acknowledged the scheme never reached the scale needed to act as a strong deterrent.
“We would have liked the scheme to continue,” a UK government source told media, “but it never got to the scale where it would have been a proper deterrent.”
France Declines to Extend UK Migration Deal:
French officials made clear they did not want to renew the bilateral arrangement. Paris has long argued that France should not shoulder the burden alone and preferred an EU-wide returns mechanism involving other member states. French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez had previously stated the pilot was not intended to continue beyond 1 October 2026.
“We are discussing with the British the terms of exit from the agreement,” the French Interior Ministry said.
The deal had already been extended once, from an original spring expiry to 1 October, to cover the peak summer crossing season.
UK-France Migration Cooperation Continues:
Despite the scheme’s limited reach, overall small-boat arrivals in 2026 have dropped sharply-by more than 40 percent compared with the same period last year, according to British figures. Summer crossings were the lowest in six years, the Home Office said, crediting increased French patrols, better surveillance and other joint efforts.
Still, the issue remains highly sensitive. A recent incident in which a 10-year-old child and two women died after being trampled on an overcrowded boat underlined the ongoing dangers.
Britain insists cooperation with France will continue. A new task force has been established to curb illegal crossings, and both governments say they remain committed to tackling the people-smuggling networks that profit from the dangerous journeys. For now, the end of the “one in, one out” pilot closes one chapter in the long-running effort to manage Channel migration.