UK spends about £56,000 per migrant returned to France under swap deal
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood told MPs the UK-France 'one in, one out' scheme costs roughly £56,000 per person returned. France wants to end the bilateral arrangement in favour of a broader EU-UK deal.
UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has told the home affairs select committee that the government's "one in, one out" agreement with France costs around £56,000 for each person sent back across the Channel. She was responding to questions about whether the scheme offers good value for taxpayers.
Since the pilot launched in August 2025, roughly 1,400 people have been returned to France, though some have since made their way back to the UK via lorries or small boats. Mahmood said she would write to the committee with the most up-to-date figures, but confirmed the per-person cost so far stood at about £56,000. She defended the price tag, arguing it was still cheaper than, or roughly comparable to, housing someone in a hotel for a year.
Under the arrangement, the UK sends back a migrant who crossed the Channel by small boat in exchange for accepting an asylum seeker who applied through a legal route. The pilot has already been extended once and is now set to run until October, with no decision yet on its longer-term future.
France pushing for a wider deal
France wants the bilateral scheme eventually replaced by a broader EU-UK returns agreement. Before Brexit, a Europe-wide system known as the Dublin arrangement covered such returns, but EU leaders have rejected UK attempts to keep participating after leaving the bloc.
Mahmood dismissed the idea that an EU-wide deal would be a "silver bullet" for the Channel crisis, noting the current scheme has already returned more people than Britain ever managed under the old Dublin rules. She acknowledged the programme has struggled to scale up, citing operational constraints such as limited detention capacity.
Earlier this week it emerged that French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez-Belda has told Mahmood he wants to end the scheme, saying France should not have to shoulder it alone. Mahmood also told MPs that only relatively small numbers of rejected asylum-seeking families have taken up a separate offer of up to £40,000 to voluntarily leave Britain.
