The £56,000 Return: Britain's France Deal Faces an October Cut-off
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood told MPs the United Kingdom is paying about £56,000 for each person returned to France under the 'one in, one out' agreement. About 1,400 people had been removed to France since the scheme began in August 2025. The disclosure came under questioning about whether the pilot delivers value for taxpayers. The Guardian
Under the deal, the UK sends a person who arrives by small boat back to France in exchange for taking an asylum seeker applying through a legal route. The pilot had already been extended once. It was due to run into October, with its long-term future still to be decided.
Mahmood defended the unit cost. She said it was still cheaper, or just about the same as supporting someone in a hotel for a year. She said the scheme had already returned more migrants than Britain ever managed under the EU's old Dublin arrangements. Increasing removals had been operationally difficult because of constraints such as detention space. Some of those removed to France subsequently returned to the UK in lorries or small boats.
The French position now puts that timetable in doubt. French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez-Belda told Mahmood that he wants to end the 'one in, one out' scheme. He said the pilot agreement signed in August 2025 was not intended to be renewed beyond 1 October 2026. Paris wants the bilateral arrangement to eventually be replaced by a wider EU-UK returns deal.
Mahmood was also asked about a separate pilot offering up to £40,000 to rejected asylum-seeking families to voluntarily leave Britain. She told the committee that only relatively small numbers had taken it up. The evidence session is listed on the UK Parliament Committees website under an oral evidence page titled 'Shabana Mahmood'. MPs pressed her on costs and enforcement as part of broader scrutiny of asylum policy. The Sun
That scrutiny is not new. In November 2025, Mahmood defended sweeping changes to the UK's asylum system and told MPs the asylum situation is "out of control." BBC The language then framed returns, detention capacity and legal routes as linked pressures. The September figures give a price for one part of that approach.
The broader context here is the shift from bilateral experimentation to multilateral negotiation. London has treated 'one in, one out' as a test of whether reciprocal transfers can function outside Dublin. Paris treats it as interim. A bilateral readmission channel is easier to administer than a 27-member framework, but it leaves both sides exposed to displacement effects if returnees re-enter and if inflows shift to other points of the Channel coast.
Looking at what this means for the next phase, three constraints will shape any successor. Cost per removal sets the fiscal baseline. Detention space sets the operational ceiling. Re-entry sets the enforcement test. The £56,000 figure answers the first. It does not resolve the second or third. If Paris holds to the 1 October cut-off, London will need either a renewed bilateral text or progress toward the EU-UK returns deal France prefers, and will need it while the pilot caseload is still moving through the system.
