World
UK puts cost of returns to France at £56,000 per migrant under exchange scheme
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood gave the figure to MPs during a parliamentary hearing. The bilateral program, launched in August 2025, has been extended to October as its future remains under review.
UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood told MPs that the government’s one in, one out arrangement is costing about £56,000 for each person returned to France.
As reported by The Guardian and BBC Mundo, Mahmood gave the figure while appearing before the House of Commons home affairs committee, where she was asked whether the policy was delivering value for taxpayers. She said she would later write to the committee with the most up-to-date number.
Under the deal, the UK sends some people who arrived by small boat back to France and, in exchange, agrees to admit the same number of asylum seekers from France through a legal route.
Both outlets said around 1,400 people have been removed to France since the scheme began in August 2025. The Guardian added that some of them later made their way back to the UK in lorries or by small boat.
Mahmood defended the cost, arguing that it is still cheaper than, or roughly the same as, housing someone in a hotel for a year. BBC Mundo added that the average is higher than the Home Office estimate for enforced migrant returns, which it put at £48,800.
The home secretary also said the policy had been hard to scale up and that the numbers remained small. According to both reports, she linked those limits to operational difficulties, including detention capacity.
The Guardian said the pilot has already been extended once and is now due to run into October. It also reported that France wants the bilateral model replaced by a broader EU-UK returns arrangement.
According to The Guardian, French interior minister Laurent Nuñez told Mahmood that he wants the scheme to end. Speaking to a French parliamentary inquiry in June, he said the agreement signed in August 2025 was not meant to be renewed beyond 1 October 2026.
Mahmood, The Guardian reported, dismissed the idea that an EU-wide framework would be a definitive answer to the Channel crisis and said the current program had already delivered more returns than the UK managed under the old Dublin system.
During the same hearing, she also said only relatively small numbers of rejected asylum-seeking families had accepted a separate pilot offering up to £40,000 to leave Britain voluntarily, according to The Guardian.
Sources
About this piece. Written by El Notero with AI assistance, from reporting published by the outlet cited above. El Notero did no original reporting on this story.
