The government’s “one in, one out” deal is costing about £56,000 for every person sent back to France, Shabana Mahmood has told MPs.
The home secretary disclosed the figure as she was questioned by the home affairs select committee over whether the scheme was delivering value for taxpayers.
About 1,400 people have been removed to France by the Home Office since the scheme began in August 2025, although some have subsequently returned to the UK in lorries or small boats.
Asked how much each return had cost, Mahmood said: “I’ll need to write to the committee on the most recent figures.
“I think it’s per person for the numbers that have been returned so far, it’s about £56,000.”
She later defended the cost, saying it was “still cheaper, or just about the same as supporting someone in a hotel for a year”.
Under the deal, the UK sends a person who arrives by small boats back to France in exchange for taking an asylum seeker applying through a legal route.
The pilot has already been extended once and is now due to run into October, with its long-term future still to be decided.
France wants the bilateral arrangement to be eventually replaced by a wider EU-UK returns deal.
An EU-wide returns deal known as the Dublin agreement existed before the UK left the EU. Attempts to continue the returns deal post-Brexit have been rejected by EU leaders.
Mahmood dismissed suggestions an EU-wide system would be a “silver bullet” for the Channel crisis.
She said the deal had already returned more migrants than Britain ever managed under the EU’s old Dublin arrangements.
“It is a real mistake to think that that pact is the future. And if we were in that, this problem would go away because I promise you, it would not,” she said.
She said the government’s scheme had struggled to scale up to larger numbers of returns, adding that it had been “operationally difficult” to increase removals because of constraints such as detention space.
“It’s not been without its challenges. Obviously, the numbers are still relatively small,” she said.
Laurent Nuñez-Belda, the French interior minister, has told Mahmood that he wants to end the scheme, it emerged earlier this week.
In June, Nuñez told a French parliamentary inquiry: “For our part, we want to move away from this bilateral relationship with the UK.
“We consider that France should not have to carry it alone, and that it would be better to integrate it into an agreement between the EU and UK.
“So I have already clearly told my counterpart that this pilot agreement, which we signed in August 2025, was not intended to be renewed beyond October 1, 2026.”
Mahmood told the committee only “relatively small numbers” of rejected asylum-seeking families have taken up a separate pilot offering them as much as £40,000 to voluntarily leave Britain.
She said: “If you’re a failed asylum-seeking family, what you’re trading off is an offer of £40,000, which will help you resettle back in your country of origin, versus, you know, access to free healthcare and education for your children.”
