LONDON (Reuters) -Britain said it will begin implementing a deal to return some migrants who arrive on small boats to France within days, a key part of its plans to cut illegal migration, after a treaty on the arrangement is ratified on Tuesday.
Under the new deal, France has agreed to accept the return of undocumented people arriving in Britain by small boats, in exchange for Britain agreeing to accept an equal number of legitimate asylum seekers with British family connections.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron announced the “one in, one out” pilot scheme on migrant returns last month.
More than 25,000 people have come to Britain on small boats so far in 2025, and Starmer has pledged to “smash the gangs” of smugglers to try to reduce the number of arrivals.
Starmer, whose popularity has fallen since winning an election landslide last year, is facing pressure to stop small boats from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which leads national opinion polls.
In recent weeks in England, there have been a number of protests around hotels housing the asylum seekers who have arrived on small boats, attended by both anti-immigration and pro-immigration groups.
French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said on X that the new agreement between the countries has a “clear objective” to break up the people-smuggling networks, although British interior minister Yvette Cooper would not say how many people would be returned under the scheme.
“The numbers will start lower and then build up,” she told Sky News on Tuesday, adding that the people returned would be those who had immediately arrived on small boats, rather than people already in Britain.
Government sources previously said the agreement would involve about 50 returns a week, or 2,600 a year, a fraction of the more than 35,000 arrivals reported last year.
Critics of the scheme have said that the scale will not be sufficient to act as a deterrent, but Cooper said that the agreement with France was just one part of the government’s wider plan.
The government has also targeted people smugglers with sanctions, clamped down on social media adverts and is working with delivery firms to tackle the illegal work that is often promised to migrants.
A treaty on the scheme was signed last week but not previously announced ahead of Tuesday’s ratification. Britain said the European Commission and European Union member states had given the green light to the plan.
(Reporting by Alistair Smout; Additional reporting by Sarah Young and Sudip Kar-Gupta;Editing by William James and Helen Popper)
