France could still receive additional millions under Labour’s new ‘payment by results’ Channel deal even if the number of migrants crossing the English Channel increases, it has emerged. Downing Street suggested the agreement may allow British taxpayers’ money to be handed over even if small boat arrivals fail to decrease.
The deal, signed by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood today, includes an unconditional £500 million to fund beach patrols in France, plus £160 million in performance-related funding. When asked whether the extra cash would depend on a reduction in crossings, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s official spokesman stated: ‘No, this is another tool in our armoury to reduce the number of illegal boat crossings. The conditionality – the specific metrics – we are working on.’
He hinted that the French performance would be evaluated based on factors such as the number of arrests rather than the total number of crossings. ‘What we have announced today is the principle, for the first time ever, of this flexible funding arrangement,’ he said. ‘We will now work on the metrics that will evaluate that success. We will obviously be looking at things like arrests, disruptions. That will determine whether the additional funding will continue after year one.’
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp criticised the deal, saying: ‘France shouldn’t get a single penny unless they stop the vast majority of the boats. The Government’s deal hands over half a billion pounds of our money with no conditions at all. France only prevented a third of embarkations last year and they even let those illegal immigrants go to try again.’
Last year, 41,472 migrants reached Britain, the second-highest annual total since the crisis began in 2018. So far this year, more than 6,000 migrants have successfully reached the UK, including 602 on a single day last week. Labour has announced that a detention centre will be built near Dunkirk with 140 places, three years after it was first mooted by then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak under a previous agreement with Emmanuel Macron’s government in March 2023.
The new facility, funded from the £160 million conditional sum, will have capacity for 140 migrants. The Home Office stated that the centre, due to open by the end of the year, would ‘aim to remove hundreds of small boat migrants from French beaches every year’ to their home nations or other European countries they passed through. Labour’s three-year funding deal will push the total amount of British taxpayers’ money given to France since 2018 past £1.3 billion.
Since the previous three-year deal was agreed under the Tories, more than 84,000 migrants have reached Britain. A new YouGov poll of over 5,300 UK adults showed that only 13 per cent of Britons believe France is genuinely attempting to stem Channel crossings, while 61 per cent think the French are not making a ‘genuine effort’ to prevent migrants heading to the UK. The rest responded ‘don’t know’.
One of Sir Keir Starmer’s first acts as Prime Minister was to scrap the previous government’s Rwanda asylum deal, which was designed to deter crossings and save lives by removing Channel migrants to east Africa.
