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September 16, 2026
£56,000 returns cost tests UK-France migrant pilot
The UK’s returns arrangement with France has sent about 1,400 people back across the Channel, but its cost and limited capacity have intensified questions over whether it can deter crossings or be expanded.
Britain’s “one in, one out” migration arrangement with France is under fresh pressure after the home secretary put the cost of each return at about £56,000 — a figure that has sharpened the dispute over whether the pilot is an effective response to Channel crossings.
Since the scheme began in August 2025, roughly 1,400 people have been returned to France. Under the arrangement, the UK returns someone who arrived by small boat and accepts an asylum seeker through a legal route in exchange. Shabana Mahmood told MPs the cost was “about £56,000” per person, while stressing that she would provide the committee with updated figures.1
Mahmood’s case is that the comparison should not be the immediate cost of removal but the expense of supporting an individual over time. She said the sum was “still cheaper, or just about the same as supporting someone in a hotel for a year.”2 She has also argued that the pilot has returned more people than the former EU Dublin system did for Britain, rejecting the idea that a broader European pact alone would resolve the issue.
Yet the government acknowledges the programme has not been easy to expand. Mahmood said returns remained “relatively small” and that scaling them up was operationally difficult, with detention capacity among the constraints on both sides of the Channel.1
Opposition critics see those limitations as central rather than temporary. Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said that, with most small-boat arrivals remaining in the UK, the scheme had “no chance of deterring anyone,” and called for leaving the European Convention on Human Rights to enable wider deportations.3
France is advancing a different critique: not that returns should stop altogether, but that they should be shared more broadly. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez has said France wants to move beyond the bilateral pilot and place it within an EU-UK agreement, arguing that France should not carry the arrangement alone.1 The pilot, already extended once, is due to run until October, leaving its future unresolved.