Border Force insider issues withering assessment of Labour’s flagship migrant scheme as Home Office faces looming diplomatic blow.
Officials had hoped the one-in-one-out deal would impact Channel crossings (Image: Getty)
Shabana Mahmood is scrambling to save the one-in-one-out migrant deal with France which has “floundered”, Border Force officers believe. French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez has told the Home Secretary that Paris does not want to renew the removals scheme when the trial ends in October.
It is potentially a huge blow for the Home Office, as it was becoming increasingly integral to removing the biggest cohorts of Channel migrants from the UK. And frontline officers believe Emmanuel Macron’s Government “won” because Britain has taken in more people than it has removed.
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Now insiders believe Mr Nunez’s preferred plan – for Andy Burnham to strike up a deal with the EU – will fail because of political chaos within the bloc.
A Border Force source told the Daily Express: “The idea of an EU-wide migrant distribution scheme has been floated before. It’s been batted about for 10 years.
“And it’s never succeeded because countries cannot agree how many they’re going to take.”
Asked if the agreement had impacted Channel migrant crossings at all, the official said: “No.
“If it has, it is absolutely minimal. It is true that the numbers coming by small boat are down. And that’s a great statistic for the government who like to parrot it a lot.
“What they don’t tie that to is the number of irregular migrants arriving through another route. So, our lorry drops.
“We certainly saw people come back. We knew we’d removed them under the “one in, one out”, and a week later they were back.
“The French weren’t doing anything with them, which, in fairness, they never said they would.
“The whole scheme just floundered.”
Britain has returned some 1,400 Channel migrants to France, which has sent a similar number of legitimate asylum seekers to the UK.
At this point, officials had been expecting to remove 200 migrants a week.
The officer said Labour had ignored warnings that human rights challenges and modern slavery claims would ground the majority of deportation flights.
They said: “They were always going to be the problem.
“The issue with this was refoulement. Nobody considered the asylum claim. We would simply have refouled them to France, and France would not have necessarily considered it themselves.”
Negotiations are underway between Britain and France on whether to renew the “one in, one out” deal, which is set to expire on Oct 1.
Shabana Mahmood and Laurent Nunez are struggling to agree a new deal (Image: Getty)
Ms Mahmood wants to make the arrangement permanent and increase the number of migrants being returned as a deterrent to further crossings.
But Mr Nunez has seemingly already ruled out the proposal.
And he wants Britain to negotiate a returns agreement with the EU. Such a proposal would see Labour accept more migrants from across Europe, in exchange for removing small boat arrivals.
Paris is said to have withdrawn support for the plan because immigration officials in France are struggling to deport those being returned from the UK.
Former Border Force Director General Tony Smith said: “France’s decision to end the one-in-one-out deal in favour of an EU wide deal on returns is destined to fail.
“I worked on various iterations of the Dublin Convention and although we were able to get some returns to Greece and Italy in the early days we never returned anybody to France because we couldn’t prove the migrants had entered the EU there.
“Up until Brexit, we ended up taking in more migrants than we ever returned under Dublin, which has now been replaced by the EU asylum pact.
“That is already struggling with some countries (like Poland and Hungary) who would prefer to pay fines rather than take migrants back from other EU countries.
“Although a safe third country returns deal with France for all boat arrivals offers our best chance of stopping the boats it’s clear that the current French government aren’t interested in it.
“The one-in-one-out deal might have worked if we returned everyone, and so wouldn’t have to take any in, but the numbers have been so small that there is no deterrent to others.
“Extra French patrols in and around Dunkirk and Calais have helped to reduce numbers but the smugglers won’t give up – they will just adapt their tactics to bring people over in bigger boats from further afield.
“Any new deal with the EU will inevitably just see us taking in more asylum seekers from other EU countries and won’t stop others from coming by boat anyway.”
On June 15, Mr Nuñez told a French parliamentary inquiry: “For our part, we want to move away from this bilateral relationship with the UK.
“We consider that France should not have to carry it alone, and that it would be better to integrate it into an agreement between the EU and UK.
“So I have already clearly told my counterpart that this pilot agreement, which we signed in August 2025, was not intended to be renewed beyond October 1, 2026.”
Asked whether an EU replacement could be ready by then, he added: “There is an action plan, there is interest, but it would be naive of me to tell you there will be a mechanism to bridge the gap.”