France Returns Deal Ends: What the Official Numbers Show

Britain’s returns pilot with France has closed after just over a year. The Home Office’s own figures show what it did. They do not show what it was for, because no one published a test of whether it worked as a deterrent.

On 30 September 2026 the Home Office confirmed that the UK-France “one in, one out” pilot was “no longer processing new cases.” The agreement, signed in July 2025 and operational from August, was meant to run for three years, with a clause allowing either side to leave early, according to the Electronic Immigration Network. It ended after just over a year.

The political argument over its closure has been predictable. Critics call it a failure; the government calls it a proof of concept. Both positions can be tested against published numbers, and the numbers are more revealing than either camp admits. They show a scheme that returned a small fraction of arrivals, at a high unit cost, and that was only approaching meaningful volume in the final months for which data exist. They also show that the central claim made for it, that it deterred crossings, rests on an assertion rather than a measurement.

What the Home Office Published

The Home Office’s monthly table, published on 16 July 2026, covers 6 August 2025 to 30 June 2026. It counts completed returns to France (“OUT”) and people transferred to the UK through the legal route (“IN”). The totals are 1,087 out and 1,117 in. The department notes the figures “may be revised.”

Three features of the table matter.

The UK took in more than it sent back. Over the period, 30 more people came in than went out. Whatever the scheme’s merits, it was not a net removal mechanism.
It scaled late. Returns in April, May and June 2026 were 142, 218 and 264, a combined 624. That is 57 percent of all returns in the whole eleven-month period. February 2026 saw only three transfers in, against 49 returns, before the pattern recovered.
The table stops in June. RSN has not located monthly figures for July, August or September, the months after that late surge. Press reports since have cited higher cumulative returns, including more than 1,400, attributed to the Home Secretary’s evidence. RSN could not trace that number to a published table.

Against these returns stands the volume of crossings. In oral evidence to the Home Affairs Committee on 15 September, committee member Robbie Moore put the figure at about 28,000 small-boat arrivals over the pilot period (Q85). Euronews gives 27,920 for 4 August 2025 to 30 June 2026. On those figures, returns equalled about 3.9 percent of arrivals.

The Cost, in the Home Secretary’s Words

Asked by Mr Moore what each return cost, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood replied that “per person, for the numbers that have been returned so far, it is about £56,000” (Q86-87). The transcript, as read by RSN, does not itemise what that figure includes, and the Home Office has not published a total.

Multiplying the average by the published returns gives an illustrative order of magnitude: about £61 million for 1,087 returns. That is RSN’s arithmetic, not a Home Office figure, and it would be higher if later returns are counted. When a committee member observed that the scheme cost far more than the EU migration pact, the Home Secretary answered (Q95) that “£56,000 is still cheaper than, or just about the same as, supporting someone in a hotel for a year.”

That comparison has force. A return that ends a year of accommodation costs is not wasteful on its face, and taxpayers should hear the argument at full strength. But it carries an assumption that deserves examination: that each person returned would otherwise have stayed in hotel accommodation for a year. The published data do not say. It also sits beside a second payment. The Home Secretary told the committee (Q82) that she had signed a new three-year agreement with France worth £662 million, larger than its predecessor. The public is paying France to police its coast and, separately, to receive a limited number of returns. France, meanwhile, told lawmakers in June through Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez that it wants a European approach, and was reported by Le Monde, via EIN, to have been eager to end the pilot.

The Deterrence Claim

The scheme’s strongest justification was never the returns themselves. It was the expectation that a credible chance of removal would change smugglers’ and migrants’ decisions. Mr Moore put the sceptical case directly (Q88): it did not look to him as if the pilot was working as a deterrent. The Home Secretary’s reply is worth reading carefully. She pointed to reports from UNHCR that some people are not getting on boats because they think there is a chance of being returned, and added that “it is not possible to separate out which one of the things is making the biggest difference.”

That is an honest answer, and it is also an admission. The government’s headline claim for 2026 is that crossings are down. ITV, citing provisional Home Office figures, put 2026 arrivals at 18,565 as of late September, 42 percent below the same point in 2025 (32,188). The Home Secretary gave the committee a figure of 40 percent (Q78) and attributed it to the policy environment and law enforcement work generally. But the fall of roughly 13,600 arrivals is about twelve times the 1,087 people the pilot returned (the periods differ, so this is a comparison of scale, not an exact accounting). Returns alone cannot arithmetically explain it. A deterrent effect might, but that effect has not been isolated, and RSN has found no published evaluation attempting to.

Other facts cut the other way. The same ITV report records 781 arrivals on 23 September, the highest single day of 2026, at an average of 78 people per boat. An earlier summary of Home Office data found July’s average of 72 per boat was the highest monthly figure since records began in 2018. Larger boats do not show that the deal failed, and RSN does not claim they do. The Home Secretary herself told the committee (Q81) that the move to larger boats puts people in more danger. They show that falling headline totals can coexist with a more dangerous crossing, which is a reason to judge border policy on more than one number.

The Case for the Government

A fair account states the department’s defence in full. The Home Secretary told the committee the aim was “to prove the concept that such an agreement can work” (Q85), and the numbers in and out tracked each other as the design intended. She conceded (Q87) that “the numbers are still relatively small” and that scaling up had been operationally difficult. She said the pilot had already been extended into October because it would otherwise have expired before summer (Q93). A Home Office spokesperson said in response to the closure, as reported by LBC, that lessons would be used to speed up returns of people with no right to remain, and that flights would continue for people already detained.

There is also a legal dimension. According to EIN, the Home Secretary described the pilot as a way to test whether such an arrangement could overcome legal hurdles. The courts have been active on the scheme. As RSN reported on 20 October, a High Court test case on age assessments under the treaty ended with four Home Office decisions quashed and three removals declared unlawful, though the judge also noted the department had won the deferential standard of review it sought. Whether litigation contributed to the closure is not established. The government’s stated reasons, so far as they have been reported, concern scale, and France’s preference for an EU-wide framework.

Critics on the other side say the harm outweighed any benefit. Médecins Sans Frontières said, as reported by EIN, that the approach “has generated huge suffering and has not prevented deaths at sea.” RSN has not verified that claim independently.

Proven, Disputed, and Not Established

Established by official sources: The pilot returned 1,087 people to France and brought in 1,117 between 6 August 2025 and 30 June 2026. The Home Secretary stated an average cost of about £56,000 per return “so far” on 15 September. She also stated a new three-year French funding agreement of £662 million. The Home Office confirmed on 30 September, as reported by Euronews, that the scheme was no longer processing new cases.

Disputed: Whether the pilot deterred crossings. The Home Secretary relies on UNHCR reporting that she described to the committee; she also said the effect cannot be separated from other measures. Whether £56,000 per return represents value for money depends on what the alternative would have been.

Not established: Total programme cost; what the £56,000 average includes; returns and transfers after June 2026; nationality or case breakdowns; how many returned individuals re-crossed (the Home Office table counts a re-entrant only once); and why, in the government’s own terms, the pilot ended. Reporting on the reasons for closure, including the French position, comes from press accounts of ministerial and official statements, not a published government document. EIN reports that no GOV.UK press release accompanied the closure, and RSN located none.

Why It Matters

The lesson is not that returns agreements cannot work. It is that this one was judged by volume and by assertion, with no published success test. A government that spends tens of millions of pounds on a pilot, and hundreds of millions on the neighbouring state’s border effort, should be able to say before it starts what result would count as success, and then publish whether it got it. The 3.9 percent figure, the late scale-up and the missing post-June data are not evidence that the policy was foolish. They are evidence that Parliament and the public were asked to assess it with too little to go on.

The same pattern runs through the Home Office’s recent record. RSN has examined how a falling asylum decision backlog concealed a rising tribunal queue, and how departmental accounts to the courts have repeatedly failed to match the department’s own records. Each case involves headline numbers that are real but measure only part of the system. For conservatives who want the Channel route closed, the stakes are practical. A policy that cannot demonstrate its effect cannot be defended against critics who oppose it, and cannot be improved by allies who support it.

What Parliament Should Ask For

The Home Secretary told the committee she would write with the latest figures (Q86). That letter should be published. Beyond it, the committee has grounds to require: monthly returns and transfers to the date of closure; the full cost breakdown behind the £56,000 average and a programme total; any internal evaluation of deterrent effect, or confirmation that none was commissioned; and the success criteria set at the outset, if any existed. Any successor arrangement, bilateral or European, should be required to publish its own measures before it begins, not after it ends.

Sources

Featured image: Border Force vessel Defender at Ramsgate. Photo by Hsq7278 via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.