Starmer and Macron to announce ‘one in, one out’ migration deal
Plan for
Channel crossings marks forward step for the two leaders, though further UK
funding remains a sticking point
Kiran Stacey
Political correspondent
Thu 10 Jul
2025 07.47 BST
Keir Starmer
and Emmanuel Macron will announce a “one in, one out” migration deal on
Thursday that will involve the UK accepting some cross-Channel asylum seekers
but returning others to France.
The two
leaders are expected to cap the French president’s three-day state visit to the
UK with a press conference in London at which they will announce the new plan
to tackle small boat crossings.
Officials
were still in talks over the details of the plan on Thursday morning, including
when it would begin, but other hurdles such as the opposition of other European
countries are understood to have been cleared.
The
announcement will come at the end of a three-day state visit – the first by a
European leader since Brexit – during which the president has met King Charles
and given a speech to MPs and peers in parliament’s royal gallery.
On
Wednesday, government sources in France and Britain described the negotiations
as “complex” and “fluid”, with Downing Street saying it hoped to make “concrete
progress” towards a deal.
One French
source said the request for extra money to help pay for police on their
northern coast was proving “clearly very politically sensitive”.
Under a
pilot scheme, the details of which were revealed by Le Monde newspaper on
Wednesday, Britain would send back only 2,600 people a year – about 6% of the
total number of crossings.
The
government has proposed in its immigration white paper to give Border Force
officers biometric testing kits to see whether people are working legally in
the UK, in an attempt to assuage French concerns about the country’s shadow
economy.
Governments
have been trying to sign a returns agreement with France for several years to
reduce the number of small boats crossing the Channel, though with little
success.
People on a
dinghy as it prepares to cross the English Channel.
Conservative
ministers from the previous government say they got close to agreeing one but
that the French government remained concerned about how the UK’s shadow economy
could attract migrants to work illegally in Britain.
In March
2023, the then immigration minister Robert Jenrick advised the former prime
minister Rishi Sunak to sign a deal in which the UK would take “one … or,
indeed more than one” asylum seeker for every person returned. This would
“quickly break the business model of the smugglers and initial numbers, even if
large, would subside”, he argued in a memo.
Labour
officials say one reason they have been able to make further progress is
because they have dropped the controversial Rwanda scheme. They also cite the
relationship between Macron and Starmer as another reason and the government’s
action to tackle illegal working.
Britain has
also been willing to help fund police on the northern coast of France, signing
a £480m deal two years ago to pay for additional border patrols and
surveillance equipment such as drones and night-vision binoculars.
But with
hours to go until the two leaders were due to make the announcement,
negotiators were still arguing over how much the UK would pay to set up the new
system, when it would start and what scale it would reach.
The French
have recently agreed to intercept boats in the sea which are up to 300 metres
from their shore, and are now asking for extra funding to pay for police
officers, boats and drones to enforce that policy.
Paris is also understood to be concerned about the possibility of a legal challenge in the French courts against that policy, which officials worry could prove successful.
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