UK’s flagship one in, one out migrant exchange deal with France ‘to end’

Labour’s flagship one in, one out deal with France that saw small boat migrants returned to Paris in exchange for asylum seekers will end.

The deal, signed in July 2025, is set to expire on Thursday and efforts to extend the arrangement have fallen flat, French government sources have told the media.

France reportedly wants to end the scheme to replace it with a EU-wide arrangement that would share the intake of small boat migrants returned to Europe.

Many migrants who are deported back to France under the deal have been sleeping homeless in the French capital, others have returned to the camps around Calais and Dunkirk, and some have made the Channel crossing back to Britain.

Home secretary Shabana Mahmood said this month that around 1,400 people have been deported to France under the scheme so far, at a cost of £56,000 per person on average. As of the end of June, there were 1,117 people brought to the UK under the deal.

The French Interior Ministry told French media on Wednesday: “We are discussing with the British the terms of exiting the agreement”.

One senior French immigration official told The Telegraph: “It’s over”. The paper reported that the scheme is set to end at the end of October, with one or two flights left to depart before the programme is wound down.

The source said: “The president [Emmanuel Macron] has made it quite clear, he did so when he met Andy Burnham - so that’s its, it’s over... France has been asking for it to be a European agreement from the start but, as far as I understand, the other countries don’t want it.”

Ms Mahmood told MPs this month that the scheme has been “difficult” to scale up and the numbers involved were still “relatively small”.

She said: “What has been more operationally difficult is to scale up very large numbers of removals every week into the French system”.

She said that some migrants were not making the journey across the Channel because they thought there was a chance they could go to the UK through the transfer scheme for asylum seekers.

Small boat crossings to the UK are down around 42 per cent on last year. The National Crime Agency has said that increased law enforcement activity has been a key factor in bringing down the numbers of crossings.

They said that in the year to April 2026 arrests linked to organised immigration crime increased by more than 55 per cent.

The number of irregular border crossings into the European Union are also down, with detections down by 35 per cent compared to last year.