Would scaling up the UK-France asylum deal really stop the small boats?

How do you really ‘stop the boats’? With asylum hotels dominating headlines, politicians across the spectrum are grappling with this thorny question.

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has proposed deporting 600,000 people, ripping up human rights protections and building mass detention centres on army bases.

But a new report by British Future argues that this inhumane model “won’t work” – and has set out a very different solution. The think tank is calling on the government to expand the UK-France ‘routes and returns’ deal signed this summer by Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron.

The first flight carrying a cross-channel small boat migrant landed in Paris yesterday (18 September).

Read more:

• Why the Home Office plan to confine asylum seekers to military barracks is especially cruel
• I fled the Taliban and crossed the Channel in a small boat. People come to England as a last resort
• Are asylum seekers ‘living it up’ in luxury hotels like Rylan says? Here’s the reality

At present, around 50 people a week will be sent back to France in exchange for approved asylum seekers coming to Britain – meaning small boat arrivals face just a one-in-17 chance of return.

But the report argues that if scaled up 10- or 20-fold, with up to 50,000 people admitted legally each year, the scheme could cut Channel crossings by 75% and collapse the smugglers’ business model.

“At 20 times the scale, it would have the potential to close down the irregular route as a viable way to claim asylum in Britain,” the report authors conclude.

Polling for the think tank shows strong backing across the political spectrum: 55% support a UK–France deal, with just 15% opposed. Strikingly, even 53% of Reform voters backed the principle, despite their party pushing a far harsher approach.

Support remained resilient even when researchers specified an intake of 50,000 asylum seekers per year – 20 times the pilot’s scale. Nearly half of the public (48%) still supported the plan, while just over a third opposed it.

These numbers show the public appetite for an approach that combines “control and compassion”, said Sunder Katwala, director of British Future and co-author of the report.

“Most people would prefer an orderly, controlled and humane system to the populist threat to tear everything up,” she added.

But critics question whether deterrence on this scale would deliver the promised results.

Daniel Sohege – director of human rights organisation Stand For All and a specialist in international refugee law and protection – warned that expanding the “one in, one out” model could backfire.

“Expanding it would be the biggest benefit to human trafficking gangs that they could imagine,” he said. “Deterrence just does not work. We’ve seen deterrent policies for years now – they are counterproductive on every single level.”

“Sending modern slavery victims back means they go straight back to traffickers. It plays into the traffickers’ hands,” he said.

British Future, however, insists that the alternative is worse: continuing with failed policies that neither stop the boats nor protect refugees.

Its report draws on the US experience, where the Biden administration combined expanded legal routes with tough returns, reducing illegal border crossings by more than 80% in 2024.

But Sohege pointed to a Home Office study which found deterrence schemes often increased the risk of exploitation. “Migrants have limited knowledge to no knowledge of migration and welfare policies,” it found.

“If you don’t address why people are coming to the UK in the first place, which tends to be because they have existing ties here, you don’t address the real root of it,” he said.

“Asylum is secondary – it is a way to legitimise and regularise their status, but they’re coming because they feel safe here and they have ties.”

For now, the government says it wants to expand the pilot. But legal challenges are already testing the policy: this week, a High Court judge blocked one planned return flight, giving the claimant 14 days to present more evidence of his claim to have been human trafficked.

As Reform surges in the polls, a convincing solution must be a priority for the government, the report authors find.

“Fail to come up with a convincing and effective response by the time of the next election and Labour may struggle to get a hearing on the issues it would rather talk about,” they warn.

“Local elections next May, in which Reform UK are expected to secure slews of new seats on an immigration platform, may offer a taste of what’s to come.”

For Sohege, that solution means expanding legal routes and clearing the asylum backlog, giving people a viable alternative to smuggling.

“Making it safer and simpler removes the supply element for gangs,” he said. “That is the only way you can combat them.”

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