Home Office doubles French riot police after scrapping deal
The agreement, announced at a July 2025 joint press conference by Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron, allowed the UK to forcibly return some asylum seekers who arrived by small boat in exchange for accepting others through legal routes. The Guardian’s home affairs editor, Rajeev Syal, told the paper that political pressures on France likely contributed to the deal’s unwinding. “At a time when immigration is going to be a major issue in the French presidential election, France doesn’t want to be seen to be taking in more unwanted people from the UK,” Syal said.
The Home Office cited the scheme’s inability to scale up effectively as its stated reason for ending it. The numbers, however, tell a starker story. Nearly 50 asylum seekers deported under the agreement returned to the UK a second time, the Guardian reported in August, with an unknown additional number arriving undetected. British Future, the thinktank that had championed the policy, found that the scheme would have to be expanded twentyfold to shut down small boat arrivals as a viable asylum route.
The scheme also produced documented humanitarian costs. Nearly 100 children were misidentified as adults and wrongly detained, and some asylum seekers deported back to France were beaten by people smugglers, the Guardian’s asylum specialist reporter Diane Taylor said. “I’ve been writing about asylum seekers for 25 years and I’ve never seen as much suffering caused to refugees by a UK government policy,” Taylor said. Starmer, announcing the deal last year, had acknowledged that “it is right that we offer a haven to those in most dire need” — but Taylor wrote in September that, in her view, the policy’s effect had been the opposite, with asylum seekers “used as reluctant human shields to protect our borders from others in the same predicament.”
In place of the deal, the Home Office said it would double the number of riot police along the French coast. Daniel Trilling, author of “If We Tolerate This,” warned the paper that the security-led approach is already reshaping how crossings happen. Increased police presence in northern France has pushed smugglers toward larger “mega-dinghies” carrying more passengers per crossing, and toward longer launch routes from Normandy and Belgium rather than Calais. Far-right protests spread to Portsmouth earlier this summer, where boats had sailed from Normandy.
Small boat arrivals to the UK have actually declined over the past year, alongside a broader reduction in asylum arrivals across Europe. But the issue has fueled sharp escalation in domestic political rhetoric. The head of MI5 warned in the agency’s annual threat briefing Tuesday that extremists holding anti-immigration views are increasingly likely to consider terrorist attacks against immigration centres and asylum hotels. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage denied this week that a Reform government would authorize lethal force against Channel crossings.
Trilling cautioned that treating migration primarily as a security problem will not bend the numbers. “As long as we have wars, instability and persecution, people will be displaced, and we need to work out ways to respond to that, rather than pretending that a policy tweak here or extra security measure there will simply make it disappear,” he told the Guardian.
The political stakes extend into the French presidential election scheduled for April. If Marine Le Pen wins, a French government could refuse to accept any returnees from Britain, further complicating UK border cooperation and potentially increasing crossings that play into the hands of the far right at home, the Guardian reported.