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.
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.
