UK-France and UK-EU cooperation on small boat arrivals: what are the options?

by Mihnea Cuibus & Peter Walsh

In April 2025, the UK government confirmed that it was in negotiations with France on a scheme to return people reaching the UK by small boat. France has indicated that an agreement of this kind would “anticipate” a future agreement between the UK and the EU as a whole — an option reportedly supported by France, Belgium, Germany, and others. This Q&A discusses the evidence related to UK-EU co-operation on asylum and unauthorised migration.

• The UK’s ability to return asylum seekers to Europe is limited without an agreement with France or other EU states. Around 400 people who arrived by small boat arrivals returned to the EU between 2018 and 2024. 

• While the details vary, both a bilateral deal with France and a deal with the EU would likely involve sending some asylum seekers to the EU while receiving others in return. A deal with France may offer a more flexible approach, such as the principle of a ‘one for one’ exchange, but would not offer access to EU data on who has already applied for asylum on the continent. 

• Whether a returns deal would deter people from crossing to the UK would likely depend on how many people it affected – we would expect to see a deterrent effect only if a relatively large proportion of people were affected. 

Can the UK send people who arrive on small boats back to the EU?

Yes, in theory. But few have been returned in recent years, largely because of the lack of any agreement with France or other countries to do so.  

Most people who arrive in the UK without authorisation by small boat claim asylum. UK and international law prevent the government from sending asylum seekers back to their country of origin unless their claim has been considered and refused. However, it would be legal for the UK to send asylum seekers to other safe countries that are willing to assess the asylum claim.  

Before Brexit, the UK was part of the EU’s “Dublin” system, which aimed to facilitate the transfer of asylum seekers between EU member states (though the UK transferred few people under Dublin, as explained below). After Brexit, the previous government said it wanted a deal with the EU to transfer asylum seekers back to the bloc and maintain access to the EU’s Eurodac database of asylum applications. However, no agreement was reached. The Conservatives did sign a separate deal with Rwanda to accept asylum seekers, though this was cancelled by the Labour government in 2024. 

Between 2018 and 2024, 400 people who arrived by small boat were returned to the EU, out of a total of around 5000 returns. During this period, there were around 151,000 arrivals and 30,000 initial refusals on asylum applications from people who arrived by small boat. Though relatively few people were returned to the EU in 2019 and 2020 – when the UK was still a part of the Dublin system – numbers fell further after Brexit. Around 60 Channel migrants a year were returned to the EU in 2023 and 2024, compared to around 130 in 2019 and 2020 (though note these figures include voluntary returns as well as enforced removals). Returns of small boat arrivals to non-EU countries increased after 2022, with a majority of these being to Albania. 

Figure 1

What would UK-European cooperation involve?

Current cooperation on asylum is largely limited to sharing intelligence, and the UK making financial payments to France, including a £476 million commitment between 2023 and 2026. 

There are three main options for UK-European cooperation on returning asylum seekers, at least in theory. First, a bilateral deal with France. Second, joining the EU’s asylum cooperation rules wholesale, including all aspects of its newly negotiated Pact (discussed below). Third, a deal with the EU or multiple EU member states with bespoke rules. These options might have slightly different implications, but also common features. Key questions for any deal include:  

• How many people are transferred from the UK, and under what circumstances? How many are transferred to the UK in return, and who?  

• Are there any other obligations on either side (e.g. financial contributions)? 

• Does the UK get access to the Eurodac database? 

• Can diplomatic agreement be secured? 

Bilateral UK-France deal

Cooperation between the UK and France on immigration goes back decades, and has been formalised through a series of bilateral agreements over the years. Negotiations with France on a new agreement are reportedly ongoing. According to initial reports, this would include a pilot based on the principle of a one-for-one exchange: for each person returned to France, the UK would receive one person already in France. The total number of people who might move under such a deal in practice remains unknown.  

A bilateral deal would need to specify who would be transferred in either direction. Initial reports have suggested that the UK would receive people with UK family connections, though it remains uncertain which family members would qualify. It is also unclear whether the UK would receive people who have a pending asylum claim in France, a person who has received a positive decision on their asylum claim, or another legal migrant.  

Any other obligations would need to be determined. However, it seems likely that the UK would continue to fund policing to disrupt boat departures in Northern France. It is also possible that a deal would touch on enforcement tactics, such as intelligence sharing or interceptions of boats in French waters.   

A bilateral deal with France would not give the UK access to the Eurodac asylum database, which enables member states to identify people who had already applied for asylum – or been granted or refused status – elsewhere within the EU. Access to it would require consent from the EU as a whole. In theory, France and the UK could share some data bilaterally if they chose to. 

Joining the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum

The EU has a new policy governing its approach to managing migration, asylum, and unauthorised migration: the Pact on Migration and Asylum.  Multiple new and updated policies are set out across the 9 pieces of legislation that make up the Pact (for more information, see the Appendix below). The key provisions include measures to streamline asylum processing, standardize registration of asylum seekers, collect more detailed information in the Eurodac fingerprint database, and increase returns of refused asylum seekers.  

The Pact aims to make it easier for countries to transfer asylum seekers back to first countries of arrival, including by reducing the paperwork needed before governments can remove asylum seekers to other member states. It would also create obligations for asylum seekers to apply in the first EU state of arrival, with sanctions imposed where people move to another participating country.  

Joining the Pact would allow the UK to send some pending asylum seekers to EU countries, as it did when it was a part of the Dublin system. In theory, a large share of people crossing in small boats might be eligible to be transferred to other EU countries. Currently, however, many EU countries struggle to transfer asylum seekers to other member states in practice. When the UK was part of the Dublin agreement, it transferred an average of around 560 people a year between 2008 and 2020. The share of the UK’s transfer requests that were successful fell from around 30-50% in the late 2000s and early 2010s to under 10% after 2016 (Figure 2). Because the Pact will not be fully implemented until 2026, it is still too early to say how much its changes will affect number of transfers in practice.

Figure 2

As a participant in the Pact, the UK would also have to receive asylum seekers from the EU. First, it would have to accept asylum seekers with family ties in the UK. When the UK participated in the Dublin system, the number of asylum seekers it received was typically less than 1,000 per year, albeit with a peak of around 1,200 in 2018. From 2016 onwards, the UK switched from being a net sender of asylum seekers to other EU countries, to receiving more people under Dublin than it transferred out. The Pact aims to make transfers based on family ties easier, by reducing the amount of proof of family relationships required. However, there are no data on the number of asylum seekers with qualifying family ties. 

Figure 3

Second, a Solidarity Mechanism in the Pact creates an annual pool of at least 30,000 asylum seekers to redistribute from frontline member states, to be divided across countries receiving fewer asylum applicants. This mechanism is voluntary. Participating countries could opt to accept asylum seekers, pay €20,000 per person not taken, or provide other kinds of support to receiving countries, like personnel or capacity building. Press reports suggesting the UK alone would have to accept over 100,000 asylum seekers from EU countries are incorrect.

A deal with the EU creates the possibility of access to the Eurodac fingerprint database, which enables governments to identify whether a person has applied for asylum in an EU member state.  

Securing such an agreement could be legally and politically challenging for both sides. The European Commission would require unanimous approval from all EU member states, some of which may not consider a deal with the UK a priority, may not wish to take back asylum seekers from the UK, or may not consider it appropriate for a non-EU country to have access to EU databases. The UK government may be required to commit to the entire legislative package, including measures to standardise asylum and return procedures across the bloc, or make financial contributions. 

Would a returns deal with Europe reduce the number of small boat arrivals?

There is some evidence that suggests a returns deal could affect asylum seekers’ decisions to come to the UK from Europe, including in small boats. However, the impact could depend a lot on how any deal worked in practice. Among the most important considerations are numbers and data. 

If the government wants a returns deal to deter people from crossing to the UK, the number of people transferred would be extremely important. If the risk of being transferred was very small, it is more likely that prospective asylum seekers would not know about the policy or would be willing to take the risk. A similar logic applied to the Rwanda scheme – we would expect to see a deterrent effect only if a sufficiently large proportion of people were affected (although there are instances of returns agreements coinciding with a decline in arrivals, such as the UK’s deal with Albania in 2022, it is very hard to precisely disentangle their effects from other factors). How high this proportion would need to be is impossible to forecast. It is difficult to know in advance whether a bilateral or an EU-wide deal would involve larger numbers of asylum seekers transferred from the UK. Even if an agreement is reached that allows a significant number of people to be returned to the EU, it is uncertain how many would be transferred in practice. As with the Dublin system in the past, there may be further administrative barriers to returns, such as legal challenges to removal. 

An EU agreement could potentially offer access to the EU’s biometric asylum database, Eurodac, which stores the fingerprints of asylum seekers and unauthorised entrants. Regaining access to the database had been described as a potential “gamechanger” by Home Office officials, because it would allow Home Office caseworkers to identify where an individual has previously applied for and been refused asylum in the EU, enabling swifter refusals of claims. 

The ability to identify people who had already applied or been refused asylum in EU countries might affect prospective migrants’ decisions, although it is difficult to forecast how much. In interviews, migrants in Northern France often cite the UK’s lack of participation in Dublin as one of their reasons for wanting to cross the Channel. This evidence suggests that some asylum seekers choose to go to the UK to escape the EU’s common arrangements on asylum — either after a claim has been refused or because they do not want to be sent to their first country of entry. This ability would be removed if the UK participated fully in the Pact, with access to Eurodac. 

Acknowledgments

Thanks to CJ McKinney and one other reviewer for comments on an earlier draft.

Appendix: The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum

There are nine legislative measures contained within the EU Migration and Asylum Pact: 

1. Eurodac Regulation. This expands the EU’s existing fingerprint database of asylum applications. The database will be able to track individual applicants rather than just applications. More data are to be collected for each person, including facial photographs and biographical information. Coverage is extended to include children aged 6 to 14.

2. Screening Regulation. This sets up uniform procedures for the registration and initial processing of unauthorised arrivals at the EU’s external borders within 7 days (including people rescued at sea). It entails identity verification, data collection, security checks, and initial screenings for health and vulnerability. After screening, people are directed towards either asylum or border return procedures.

3. Asylum Procedure Regulation (APR). This contains several measures related to streamlining procedures. Most notably, it introduces border asylum procedures. Asylum seekers under border procedures are considered to be outside EU territory for legal purposes (despite physically being within the EU’s borders). These procedures restrict rights for asylum seekers, allowing people to be detained for up to 12 weeks. Member states can optionally apply border procedures to any unauthorised arrivals, through these become mandatory for some groups of asylum seekers – those considered to pose a security risk, who conceal information, or have nationalities with an initial grant rate below 20%. People whose application is rejected during the asylum border procedures can be directed towards border return procedures or be denied entry (returning them to the external border, if possible). Despite their name, border procedures can also be applied to unauthorised migrants detected inside the EU’s territory.

4. Border Return Procedure Regulation. This applies to asylum seekers denied protection under the new border asylum procedures. It allows them to be detained for an additional 12 weeks pending return. People who cannot be returned in this period are released and referred to the in-country returns process.

5. Asylum and Migration Management Regulation (AMMR). This has two major components:

– Updated rules to determine responsibility for an asylum application among member states, replacing the Dublin Regulation. Processing deadlines are shortened, the period first arrival countries are responsible for processing applications and accepting returns is extended from 12 to 20 months, and several exceptions allowing transfers to other countries are added (for example, for asylum seekers who obtained a degree in another member state, or families formed during the journey to Europe).
– A new Solidarity Mechanism to share the asylum caseload between member states. A minimum of 30,000 asylum seekers a year will be added to a Solidarity Pool, with the aim of transferring them from countries with many asylum applications to other member states receiving fewer applications and unauthorised arrivals. However, countries that have to accept transfers will be given three options: take their quota of asylum seekers from the Pool, provide a financial contribution of €20,000 per person not taken, or provide assistance worth an equivalent amount (e.g. capacity building or personnel).

6. Crisis and Force Majeure Regulation. This addresses emergency situations related to migration, such as mass arrivals that render national systems non-functional. It includes procedures for determining if states are facing an emergency, provisions for enhanced solidarity mechanisms, and derogations from standard asylum procedures and deadlines, such as extended periods for registration and border procedures.

7. Qualification Regulation. This aims to ensure that member states use common criteria to determine which asylum seekers qualify for protection. It also defines the rights and obligations of the beneficiaries of protection.

8. Reception Conditions Directive. This provides for minimum standards of assistance for asylum seekers across different member states.

9. Union Resettlement Framework. This creates common procedures for refugee resettlement across member states. It envisages the creation of 2-year plans to determine the number of people to be resettled in the EU, individual contributions, and nationalities that should be prioritised for admission.