The home secretary has said the new migrant returns scheme agreed with France on Thursday is “robust” enough to withstand potential legal challenges.
Yvette Cooper said she had been in close contact with European governments which have expressed concerns about the “one in, one out” deal, saying the European Union had been “very supportive and helpful”.
She told BBC Breakfast the government had done “a lot of work to make sure that the system is robust to legal challenges”, which hampered the previous Conservative government’s efforts to deport some illegal migrants to Rwanda.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp described the plan to return an expected 50 migrants a week to France as a “gimmick”.
The deal was signed and announced by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday, at the end of his three-day state visit to the UK.
The scheme – which will initially run as a pilot – proposes that for each migrant the UK returns, Britain will accept another who has made a legal claim in France.
Both countries say the “ground-breaking” plan would help “break the model” of the people smugglers and deter migrants from crossing the Channel in small boats.
Cooper would not be drawn on how many migrants would be exchanged under the deal, though it is expected the pilot will involve about 50 people a week.
She said the government would “provide updates” on figures as the pilot progressed.
Cooper said the UK and France were “not fixing the ultimate figures either for the pilot or further phases of this”, adding: “We will want to extend it as far as we’re able to.”
The home secretary said the pilot scheme would be accompanied by a plan to target those working illegally in the UK, which she said was a pull factor driving small boat crossings.
Cooper said migrants who attempted to come back a second time, having already been sent back to France, would be “immediately returned again” and “banned from entering the UK asylum system”.
“They will be paying thousands of pounds to people smugglers to no avail,” Cooper said.
Lucy Moreton of the Immigration Services Union said it was “entirely possible” the plan could come into force next week but warned legal challenges linked to the scheme “could take a year”.
She said individuals selected for return to France could mount a legal challenge over how they were chosen.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Moreton asked whether a criteria would be set or whether it would just be the first 50 people who arrive, and said there could be a “legal challenge that flows from that”.
Philp dismissed the plan as “another gimmick” that will allow the majority of illegal migrants to remain in the UK, and said Labour’s pledge to “smash the gangs” had not worked.
He said the Rwanda scheme originally proposed by Boris Johnson would have seen “100% of illegal arrivals being removed” and described Sir Keir’s decision to axe the plan as a “catastrophic” mistake.
Cooper said only four migrants had ever been sent to Rwanda and on a voluntary basis, and described the previous government’s approach to migration as “chaos”.
Since 2018, when figures began to be gathered, more than 170,000 people have arrived in the UK in small boats.
Numbers this year have reached record levels with nearly 20,000 arriving in the first six months of 2025.
On Thursday, Macron suggested Brexit had made it harder for the UK to tackle illegal migration.