Report: Britain Kept Sending Asylum Seekers to France After the Deal Ended

Britain continued detaining asylum seekers and forcibly returning people to France weeks after the countries' one in, one out arrangement ended, according to a Guardian report published on November 1. ^[1]

The newspaper said officials chartered a flight for October 28 for a group thought to have reached Britain by small boat before the scheme ended on October 1. It described a group as forcibly removed that week. Unnamed Home Office sources said returns of the remaining people covered by the arrangement were continuing, with dozens understood to be detained and another flight scheduled for November 17. ^[1]

The arrangement paired forced returns to France with a legal route into Britain for a similar number of people from northern France. French President Emmanuel Macron and then-British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced it in July 2025, aiming to deter small-boat crossings of the Channel. ^[1]

The reported removals raise an immediate question about what the agreement's end meant for people already selected for return. Ending admission to a scheme and ending every action under it are different things. The terms governing those remaining cases are essential to judging what the Home Office is doing.

The Guardian gives no named Home Office response or legal authority for the post-October 1 detentions and removals, whose lawfulness has not been established. ^[1]

People still held for removal

Emma Ginn, director of Medical Justice, an organisation concerned with the health of people in immigration detention, said asylum seekers were still being held in detention centres in preparation for forced removal to France. She said detention and the prospect of return were causing harm, particularly to vulnerable people who reported violence and abuse by smugglers in France. ^[1]

Her account puts a human consequence alongside the dispute over dates.

The Guardian attributed the continued returns to unnamed Home Office sources, who described the people involved as the remaining members of the scheme's cohort. The group on the October 28 flight was thought to have arrived before the arrangement ended. That points to the processing of earlier cases, rather than a confirmed reopening or extension of the agreement. ^[1]

For scrutiny to be meaningful, the government needs to identify the rules applying to that group: who remains covered, how detention is authorised and what review takes place before a person is put on a flight. Those are the practical tests of the policy's operation after its stated end.

Returns that did not end the journey

The Guardian reported that at least seven asylum seekers sent to France had returned to Britain since October 1. Several more were reportedly waiting in northern France for another chance to cross. ^[1]

Two people interviewed by the newspaper said they had been returned under the arrangement and then reached Britain again after it ended. One said the Home Office initially detained him while looking for a safe third country to which he could be removed, before releasing him and beginning to process his British asylum claim. The other described abuse by smugglers in France and said he wanted to escape. ^[1]

A further person interviewed in Dunkirk said at least five or six people previously returned through the scheme were waiting in the camp known as the Jungle to cross back to Britain. These are interview accounts, rather than an official count of repeat journeys. ^[1]

The reported return journeys expose a weakness in measuring success by removals alone. Sending someone across the Channel records an administrative outcome. If that person subsequently crosses back, the movement has not produced a durable result.

That matters financially as well as operationally. According to the Guardian, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood told a recent session of Parliament's cross-party home affairs committee that removals to France had cost at least £78 million. Some people were returned more than once, adding to the expense. ^[1]

The numbers behind the deterrent

Flight cancellations also complicated the scheme. Freedom of information data cited by the Guardian showed that seven of 23 deportation flights under the arrangement were cancelled between July and September 2026. That is about 30%, or roughly three in 10 scheduled flights. The number cancelled was more than twice that recorded for flights to France in the first six months of the year. ^[1]

Those figures describe the difficulty of carrying out removals. They do not, by themselves, measure whether the prospect of removal discouraged crossings.

Small-boat arrivals were down by about 40% so far in 2026 compared with the same period in 2025, according to the Guardian. But irregular migration to Europe had fallen by a similar amount. The parallel decline makes it difficult to attribute Britain's reduction to this arrangement alone. ^[1]

Crossings also continued. After three weeks without them, 263 people arrived in three boats on Thursday, followed by 671 in nine boats on Friday, the newspaper reported. ^[1]

The immediate business is now the treatment of those still held for return. The reported November 17 flight would carry the scheme's consequences further beyond its October 1 end date. Before then, the Home Office should publish the terms governing the remaining cases and explain the authority under which detention and removals continue. ^[1]