Less than 1,500 people have been returned to France through the scheme.
Fury as Labour admits ‘one-in, one-out’ deal costs £56k per migrant (Image: Getty)
Some Brits are furious after Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood confirmed the ‘one-in, one-out’ scheme with France costs £56,000 per migrant. This around £7,000 higher than the Home Office’s estimated cost of enforced returns, at £48,800.
The deal aimed to return migrants who entered Britain through illegal routes to France, in exchange for admitting one safe-route asylum seeker. However, since the scheme launched last summer, around £78million has been spent on the scheme with just 1,400 migrants sent back across the channel, according to GB News. This includes security and legal costs, and travel fees.
Shabana Mahmood admitted there were challenges to the scheme (Image: Getty)
The news has been met with outrage. Thomas King wrote on X: “It’s incompetent, wasteful and completely indefensible.” A second said: “Another utter failure. Why am I not surprised”
Another suggested that, instead of paying for costly deportations, “we should instead fast track asylum applications and allow them to work. Also allow safe and legal routes to stop the small boat crossings.”
Ms Mahmood defended the scheme, stating that it deterred people from getting on dangerous inflatable boats to cross the Channel, “because they think there is a chance of being accepted through the one-in, one-out deal”.
“I think it is having some effect,” she said, while admitting that the numbers were “still relatively small”, as it was a pilot scheme, designed to prove whether it was viable.
Asked by the Conservative MP Robbie Moore whether she thought the scheme had been a success, Mahmood said it was a viable concept.
She added: “It’s not been without its challenges, obviously. The numbers are still relatively small. What has been more operationally difficult is to scale up very large numbers of removals every week into the French system.”
She said families faced a trade-off between accepting £40,000 to help with resettlement costs in their country of origin and access to free healthcare and education for their children.
“We’re trying to assess what people respond to, and you’re trying to assess behavioural changes. I think it’s right to have trialled something different to see if we can break the log-jam on the removals of failed asylum-seeking families,” she said.
The agreement, which aims to deter people from making the dangerous journey across the Channel, was due to end in June 2026, but it has been extended into October.
So far this year, 17,425 people have arrived in the UK by small boat, a 44% decrease compared to the same time last year.