UK Scraps 'One In, One Out' France Deal, Doubles Riot Police on Coast

The UK government has quietly abandoned its 'one in, one out' agreement with France after just 423 days, according to The Guardian. In place of the returns deal, the Home Office announced it will double the number of riot police stationed along the French coast. The partnership had been presented as a way to deter small boat crossings in the Channel, but it had limited impact and faced mounting criticism.

Announced by Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron in July last year, the scheme allowed a person arriving in the UK by small boat to be returned to France in exchange for another person being brought legally to Britain. The Guardian reports that of about 40,000 people who arrived while it was active, only around 1,500—roughly 4%—were sent back to France. A think tank that supported the policy, British Future, acknowledged it would need to be expanded twenty-fold to close the route, though critics doubted it could ever work at that scale.

The deal also drew sharp criticism from specialist reporter Diane Taylor, who described asylum seekers as being used as 'reluctant human shields.' The Guardian reported that nearly 100 children were misidentified as adults and wrongly detained under the scheme, while some deported asylum seekers were beaten by people smugglers. Taylor said she had never seen as much suffering caused to refugees by a UK government policy in 25 years of reporting on the issue.

The government attributed the deal's collapse to an inability to scale it up effectively, but The Guardian notes that political concerns in France likely played a role. Rajeev Syal, the Guardian's home affairs editor, said France does not want to be seen taking in more unwanted people from the UK as immigration becomes a major issue in its presidential election. Meanwhile, increased security along the French border has been credited with helping reduce small boat crossings this year, alongside an overall drop in asylum seeker arrivals to Europe.

However, those security measures have also pushed people toward more dangerous journeys. More police in northern France have led smugglers to use larger 'mega-dinghies,' and some people now sail from Normandy and Belgium rather than Calais. Daniel Trilling, author of If We Tolerate This, told The Guardian that while security measures may appear to work, they also make boat journeys far more dangerous and add to a sense of spectacle.

The MI5 chief warned in an annual threat briefing that extremists with anti-immigration views are increasingly considering terrorist attacks against immigration centres and asylum hotels. Looking ahead, The Guardian reports that if Marine Le Pen is elected in France next April, her government could refuse to take any asylum seekers from Britain, further politicising the issue. Trilling argued that as long as wars, instability and persecution persist, people will continue to seek asylum, and governments must make a political case for responding to that reality rather than treating migration only as a security problem.