Britain30 September, 20262 min read
Britain Ends UK-France “One In, One Out” Migrant Exchange Deal After Home Office Stops New Cases
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Britain-France 'one in, one out' migrant exchange is scrapped and no longer processing cases About 1,500 people were returned to France under the deal
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Deal ends, flights continue
Britain’s Home Office said the “one in, one out” UK-France pilot deal to return migrants who crossed the Channel illegally on small boats is “no longer processing new cases,” ending the scheme’s operation. The Home Office said the pilot was agreed in 2025 by former British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and was intended to last three years, but it had a clause allowing both parties to end it earlier. The Home Office said deportation flights will continue in the coming weeks for people who have already been detained under the plan, even though the deal is scrapped.
The Home Office said the pilot programme was designed to break the business model of “people smugglers” by exchanging undocumented migrants who had made the crossing for people who legally applied for asylum. The Home Office said the number of people making the crossing fell sharply in 2026, with some 19,135 people crossing the Channel from France so far in 2026, down 42 percent year-on-year.
Numbers and who gets swapped
The Home Office said some 1,117 asylum seekers came to the UK from France from August 2025 to June 2026 while 1,087 were deported, under the “one in, one out” scheme.
More than 1,400 people who have arrived in the UK via small boats have been sent back to France under the deal.
The deal was extended to 1 October to help counter the anticipated increase in attempted crossings during the summer, and flights that remove people who have been already detained were expected to end within weeks.
A UK government source said, “We would like to see the deal continue. But it’s not the end of the world if it doesn’t because it never got to the scale where it would have been a proper deterrent to people coming to the UK in small boats,”.
France’s interior minister Laurent Nuñez told a parliamentary commission that he had made it clear to his counterpart that the pilot agreement “was not intended to be extended beyond 1 October 2026.”
Stakes, deaths, and costs
The deal’s end comes as French and British sources were used to tally at least 22 deaths this year trying to cross the Channel, and a French court sentenced six men to between six and 10 years in prison over deaths of at least 31 people in November 2021.
France 24 said a 10-year-old child and two women died on Monday when they were “apparently trampled to death on a boat packed with more than 100 people.”
Shabana Mahmood disclosed to MPs that the government’s scheme cost about £56,000 for every person sent back to France.
The government’s scheme struggled to scale up to larger numbers of returns and it had been “operationally difficult” to increase removals because of constraints such as detention space.
Mahmood told MPs, “It’s not been without its challenges. Obviously, the numbers are still relatively small,” as the UK and France moved to end the pilot.