France could still receive extra millions under Labour’s new ‘payment by results’ Channel deal even if the number of migrants goes up, it has emerged.
Downing Street suggested the agreement may allow British taxpayers’ cash to be handed over if small boat arrivals fail to reduce.
The deal – signed by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood today – includes an unconditional £500million to pay for beach patrols in France, plus £160million in performance-related funding.
Asked if the extra cash would hinge on the number of crossings being reduced, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s official spokesman said: ‘No, this is another tool in our armoury to reduce the number of illegal boat crossings.
‘The conditionality – the specific metrics – we are working on.’
He suggested the French performance would be measured on factors such as the number of arrests rather than the total number of crossings.
‘What we have announced today is the principle, for the first time ever, of this flexible funding arrangement,’ he said.
‘We will now work on the metrics that will evaluate that success.
More than 6,000 migrants have successfully reached Britain so far this year, including 602 on a single day last week, and now Labour has announced a detention centre will be built near Dunkirk with 140 places
‘We will obviously be looking at things like arrests, disruptions.
‘That will determine whether the additional funding will continue after year one.’
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said: ‘France shouldn’t get a single penny unless they stop the vast majority of the boats.
‘The Government’s deal hands over half a billion pounds of our money with no conditions at all.
‘France only prevented a third of embarkations last year and they even let those illegal immigrants go to try again.’
Last year saw 41,472 migrants reach Britain, the second-highest annual total since the start of the crisis in 2018.
A detention centre for migrants will finally be built in France three years after it was first announced – but it will only have 140 spaces.
The French government has agreed to detain small boat migrants on the beaches, transfer them to the new centre and then deport them, Ms Mahmood said.
The deal was first mooted by then Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak under a previous agreement with Emmanuel Macron’s government in March 2023.
The new facility in Dunkirk, funded from the £160million conditional sum, will have a capacity of 140 migrants but, by comparison, more than 6,000 have reached Britain so far this year including 602 on a single day last week.
The Home Office said the new centre, due to open by the end of the year, would ‘aim to remove hundreds of small boat migrants from French beaches every year’ to their home nations or other European countries they passed through.
Labour’s three-year funding deal will push the total amount of British taxpayers’ money given to France since 2018 past £1.3billion.
Since the previous three-year deal was agreed under the Tories more than 84,000 migrants have reached Britain.
It came as a new survey showed only 13 per cent of Britons believe France is sincerely attempting to stem Channel crossings.
A YouGov poll of more than 5,300 UK adults showed 61 per cent believe the French are not making a ‘genuine effort’ to prevent migrants heading to the UK, while 13 per cent did, with the rest ‘don’t knows’.
One of Sir Keir Starmer's first acts as PM was to scrap the previous government's Rwanda asylum deal, which was designed to deter crossings and save lives by removing Channel migrants to east Africa.