The UK Government’s “one in, one out” returns deal with France is costing about £56,000 (€65,500) for each person sent back across the Channel, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has admitted to MPs.
Giving evidence to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee on September 15, Mahmood said the figure applied to those returned so far.
“I think it’s per person for the numbers that have been returned so far, it’s about £56,000,” she said, adding that she would write to the committee with the latest official numbers.
The amount is higher than the Home Office’s published average cost for enforced returns, put at £48,800 (€57,100) in the 2024-2025 financial year. A voluntary return cost an average of £4,300 (€5,000) over the same period, according to departmental analysis published in March.
About 1,400 people have been removed to France since the pilot began in August 2025.
On that basis the scheme would have cost around £78 million (€91 million), covering detention, security, legal work and the transport of an equivalent number of eligible asylum seekers from France to Britain.
Official statistics to June 30, 2026 recorded 1,087 returns to France and 1,117 transfers into the UK. Mahmood’s later figure of about 1,400 refers to the period through mid-September.
Some of those sent back have subsequently re-entered Britain by lorry or small boat.
Under the reciprocal arrangement, formally the UK-France Agreement on the Prevention of Dangerous Journeys, the UK can return certain small-boat arrivals to France. In exchange it must accept the same number of people from France who have not attempted an illegal crossing and who pass security and eligibility checks.
The pilot, due originally to expire in June, has been extended into October.
Its longer-term future is still under negotiation. French officials have floated replacing it with a wider European returns framework.
Mahmood defended the cost as “still cheaper, or just about the same as supporting someone in a hotel for a year”.
She said the scheme had proved that such a deal was “viable” and that returns could be got “off and up and running”, while conceding that numbers remained “relatively small” and that scaling weekly removals had been “operationally difficult” on both sides.
Small-boat detections this year have fallen, with 17,425 arrivals between January 1 and September 14, down 44 per cent on the same period in 2025, when 31,031 people had reached Britain by that point.
The £56,000 unit cost is separate from the wider UK payments to France for operations against Channel crossings, including a three-year package of £662 million (€767 million) for 2026-2029. Mahmood is expected to confirm a precise breakdown in writing to the committee.
Right-wing parties oppose the “one in, one out” policy.
Reform UK considers it a failed, expensive swap rather than a deterrent.
The party’s alternative is to intercept boats in the Channel and return people to France without taking an equivalent number in the other direction, under a plan it calls Operation Fortress, which would use the Royal Navy and Royal Marines.
At its annual conference in Birmingham on September 4, Nigel Farage signed a political memorandum with Jordan Bardella of France’s National Rally under which a future Reform government would intercept vessels in British waters and France would “normally receive” those on board before their removal to their countries of origin. The English text drew criticism in France, where it was read as committing Paris to take back people intercepted by the British side.
Reform has also said illegal arrivals who reach the UK should be detained and deported to home countries, not swapped for other asylum seekers. The party has previously described paying failed asylum families large sums to leave as “another kick in the teeth for hard-working British taxpayers”.
Restore Britain has been hostile to the pilot from the start. Party leader Rupert Lowe, a former Reform MP who registered his movement as a party in February, has tabled parliamentary questions on the legal cost of challenges to the scheme and has argued that Britain should stop taking people from France in exchange for returns.
Volunteer clowns in red noses and dungarees have been performing for queues of migrants at a squalid camp near Dunkirk, metres from the tents of Kurdish people-smugglers organising the next Channel crossings. https://t.co/rQIMAlKa0d
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) August 13, 2026
