The UK is providing €767 million to France to tackle migration

Brussels – In April, Paris and London signed a new agreement to “step up operations to combat illegal immigration in northern France,” with the aim of preventing crossings of the English Channel. The UK has committed to paying £662 million (€767 million) to France between 2026/27 and 2028/29. Of these funds, £501 million will be allocated to strengthening existing controls in northern France, while £161 million will fund “new tactics”. This figure represents an increase, given that the previous three-year agreement, signed in March 2023, had committed London to paying €541 million.

In 2025, 41,472 people arrived in the UK on small boats that had set sail from France. A report by the House of Commons Library, written by Melanie Gower, a senior research clerk at the House of Commons, summarises the data on this border. The 2025 figure is the second-highest annual total since records began, representing a 13 per cent increase over 2024, while arrivals in the first few months of 2026 are down compared with the same period in 2025.

Meanwhile, since the start of 2026, there has been an increase in departures from Belgian beaches. Between January and April, in fact, there were 32 attempted departures, compared with just 2 in the whole of 2025. Research by the House of Commons Library suggests that this phenomenon may be attributable to increased police presence in northern France in recent months. “The Belgian police,” writes the report’s author, “are attempting to intercept boats before they are launched. To this end, they are carrying out targeted checks on vehicles on cross-border roads and using helicopters to monitor the beaches.” According to the report, cooperation between the UK and Belgium on migration issues has grown in recent years, with London having funded security measures at the Belgian borders—ranging from preventing departures to monitoring the port of Zeebrugge—“to a total of over £11 million.” In March 2026, Alex Norris, the UK Minister for Border Security and Asylum, travelled to Brussels to further this cooperation.

Money flows across the Channel

Cooperation between the United Kingdom and France on immigration controls at their shared borders has a long history. It was formalised through a series of bilateral agreements, including the Sangatte Protocol (1991) and the Le Touquet Treaty (2003). Melanie Gower has traced the history of the UK’s contributions to France, which began in 2014, well before Brexit. In September 2014, the UK and France published a

Joint Ministerial Statement with a detailed “comprehensive action plan.” The UK committed “to contributing €5 million per year for three years to a Response Fund,” intended to “strengthen security in the port areas of Calais and ensure effective measures for the protection of vulnerable people, such as victims of trafficking.”

Since then, the funds allocated by London have continued to increase annually. In 2017, the report notes, France received £36 million. The 2018 Sandhurst Treaty, moreover, marked a turning point. For the first time, cooperation between the UK and France on migration ceased to be a series of informal agreements or political declarations and became a fully-fledged, binding legal framework. Sandhurst codifies specific obligations regarding asylum, returns, the fight against organised crime, and the management of migratory pressures, and establishes permanent operational structures, such as the Joint Information and Coordination Centre.

On 31 December 2020, with the end of the post-Brexit transition period, the United Kingdom withdrew from the Dublin Regulation (the European system that determines which Member State is responsible for examining an asylum application and allows for the transfer of asylum seekers between states). For the Calais border, this had immediate practical consequences: the legal mechanism that allowed the UK to send migrants back to the European country of first entry no longer applied. From that point onwards, any form of cooperation on asylum and returns must be negotiated on a case-by-case basis through bilateral agreements. It is into this legal vacuum that the subsequent UK-France agreements fit, the author explains.

In January 2022, France, which held the six-month presidency of the Council of the EU, proposed negotiating a treaty on asylum and migration between the European Union as a whole and the United Kingdom. In December, a joint statement by the “Calais Group” (France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) confirmed the intention to work towards an EU-UK cooperation agreement on migration. Meanwhile, funds continue to flow across the Channel. For the 2022/2023 financial year, the amount guaranteed by the United Kingdom was €72.2 million.

The UK-France summit in March 2023 marked a significant step up from previous agreements. For the first time, a multi-year funding package was agreed. The UK has committed to providing €541 million over three years. The report explains that the money was intended to deploy 500 additional officers in northern France, fund new infrastructure and surveillance technologies—drones, helicopters, aircraft—and boost France’s capacity to manage irregular migrants, including the construction of a new detention centre in Dunkirk (not yet operational).

In May 2025, for the first time since Brexit, the UK and the European Union sat down together to discuss migration across the English Channel. A few months later, in July, French President Emmanuel Macron flew to London and signed the “one-in, one-out”  agreement with Keir Starmer, the UK Prime Minister. Anyone arriving in the UK on a small boat may be returned to France without their asylum application being examined, while in return, London opened a legal channel for an equivalent number of people already in France who have not attempted the irregular crossing. The agreement came into force on 6 August 2025.

Border violence

When the agreement was renewed in April 2026, the two countries did not specify what “new tactics” the £161 million would be used for. In general, the report clarifies, the UK and France use the resources provided under the agreements to identify and hinder the movements of migrants and boats to prevent them from reaching the coast. The tactics employed by the police, the author explains, “include checks at road and transport hubs, the use of roadblocks and buoys in waterways, the destruction of boats near crossing points, and patrols of beaches and coastlines.” Furthermore, extensive use is made of “surveillance technologies, including drones and thermal cameras.”

The measures to discourage migrants from reaching coastal areas or settling in northern France, the author continues, “include efforts to prevent the formation of informal settlements, regular clearance operations and a significant police presence in the area.” It is precisely here that civil society is seeking to intervene, documenting the evictions and calling for a public inquiry into “how British taxpayers’ money is being used on the border between France and the UK.”

Whilst UK funding for France continues to rise with each new agreement, people continue to die between the two shores. According to data from the  International Organisation for Migration, recorded deaths on the Channel route rose from 16 in 2022 to 24 in 2023, reaching 85 in 2024, the year following the signing of the major multi-year agreement worth €541 million. In 2025, there were 36 victims, and, to date in 2026, eight people have been recorded as dead or missing.