A New Prime Minister, a New Deal: Time for an ambitious UK–EU pact on small boats

With the British government’s change in leadership at 10 Downing Street imminent, there is a window to step up the United Kingdom’s relationship with Europe on migration—and to pursue a more ambitious, mutually beneficial deal.

Channel crossings are the top migration concern for the UK public and policymakers alike. But they are not just a British problem, as many of those entering the European Union irregularly are ultimately bound for the United Kingdom. EU policymakers hope that the new Migration and Asylum Pact, which establishes a common framework for border procedures, asylum, and returns will deter some people from entering the European Union irregularly. But they also have an interest in preventing asylum seekers headed for the United Kingdom from entering the bloc in the first place, and stopping deaths at sea off the EU coast. At the same time, the Pact’s flagship solidarity mechanism, an annual Solidarity Pool,1 has been hard to agree in practice, and UK support could help to break the logjam.

A more ambitious UK–EU agreement could turn the United Kingdom from an awkward outlier in Europe into a constructive partner that helps operationalise solidarity. The UK and French governments are currently testing a small ‘routes and returns’ pilot, under which some people arriving irregularly in the United Kingdom are returned to France, while a similar number are admitted through legal pathways.2 This approach could be broadened and form the backbone of a new partnership: Member States would take back a substantial share of small-boat arrivals in exchange for expanded legal routes into Britain from across the bloc. Moving away from the ‘one for one’ idea at the heart of the pilot, which has conveyed a transaction rather than a genuine sharing of responsibility, could unlock more support among EU Member States, civil-society partners, and publics.

The Solidarity Pool, which pledges to relocate elsewhere in the European Union asylum seekers from Member States that are under pressure, is not just one of the Pact’s core political bargains—it is also one of its most fragile. For now, few Member States have stepped up to offer the 21,000 relocation places earmarked for Greece, Italy, Spain, and Cyprus for the rest of the year, instead opting for financial contributions and negotiating offsets on their Dublin cases. This raises awkward questions about whether the Pact can really mend old rifts. 

'A more ambitious UK–EU agreement could turn the United Kingdom from an awkward outlier in Europe into a constructive partner that helps operationalise solidarity'.

As the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) recently argued in recommendations co-developed with the Future Governance Forum (FGF),3 the UK government could help unlock this bargain by offering a sizeable contribution—say half—of the target relocation numbers for this half year, thus helping deliver the solidarity element and ultimately strengthening other core elements of the Pact.

Accepting 10,000 people would be a big number relative to the overall EU relocation target, but the offer needs to be bold to attract the attention of Europeans who are focused on their own priorities, not least the Pact. Crucially, this would not be additional to small boat arrivals; it would be a replacement. Polling suggests that the British public—and especially Labour voters and former Labour voters who have switched to parties further to the left or right—support ‘routes for returns’ deals that trade small boat crossings for similar numbers of orderly refugee pathways.4 Such an approach would also make it possible for community groups to house and sponsor newcomers instead of having the latter housed in asylum hotels, thus helping address one of the most unpopular features of the current system. 

Why a British Headache Is a Europe Problem 

Pictures of overloaded dinghies have long been headline fodder and clickbait for the far right. In the past years, these crossings have repeatedly been deadly: in 2025, 24 people died in the Channel, and 73 did in 2024.

It is also a humanitarian disaster for northern France. Smugglers prey on the vulnerable and desperate, and French police repeatedly dismantle migrant encampments to avoid larger camps emerging, compounding the situation. Local leaders have long complained about encampments, repeated clearances, and the strain on local services and tourism. And French parliamentarians and civil society figures have begun to say enough is enough. A recent commission bringing together national and local elected officials, NGOs, and experts condemned the current approach and called for a new strategy centred on relocations, expanded legal pathways, and more humane reception in northern France.5

And the issue has become politically toxic in the United Kingdom: the May local elections saw the incumbent Labour Party hemorrhage votes to the far-right Reform UK and the Greens, ultimately prompting Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s resignation. The small boats issue has been a major factor in Reform’s rise, even though Labour’s incoming Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has thus far said little about his migration platform and specifically about the boats. Early signals of pressure on his government have already surfaced, including a letter signed by 80 Labour MPs denouncing the Home Secretary’s proposals to lengthen the time before migrants can get permanent residence, suggesting that any Burnham approach will have to navigate the threat from Reform and frustration on the party’s left.

The Channel has also become a structural vulnerability in Europe’s migration system. Since Brexit, the United Kingdom has acted as a ‘second chance’ asylum destination for people rejected or stuck in limbo in EU states. In 2025, irregular arrivals into the European Union fell on several key routes, yet small boat arrivals to the United Kingdom stayed close to record levels. They ballooned from around 8,500 on the eve of the formal departure to an average of 35,000 yearly between 2021 and 2024. Of course, there are many factors behind this rise, not least broader global displacement trends, overall arrival numbers in Europe, and the EU approach to asylum and integration. More specifically, dynamics along the route play a role, including increased enforcement targeting trucks crossing via the Channel tunnel.

If the Pact works as advertised, it will speed up screening and returns at Europe’s borders and offer frontline states relocations or cash via the Solidarity Pool. But its success will largely depend on whether governments deliver on solidarity and practical cooperation—starting with its first implementation period, launched last month. Without a parallel arrangement with the United Kingdom, asylum seekers and other migrants may still see Britain as an alternative destination and thus seek to make their way across the bloc. Better, then, to bring the United Kingdom into the Pact’s orbit as a structured partner for protection and responsibility sharing, rather than leaving the Channel as Europe’s back door.

Building on Burgeoning UK-France Cooperation

France-UK cooperation, including amped-up enforcement and the new routes and returns pilot (sometimes dubbed ‘one in, one out’), is having some limited success on numbers. Crossings are down so far this year compared to the 2022–24 peak, although this may partly reflect a lag effect since irregular arrivals to the European Union fell in 2025, as well as new French interception practices at sea. And awareness of the pilot has been low, and people continue to drown and face abuses on both sides of the Channel, underlining that the current model does not go far enough.

But it does contain the seeds of a potential way forward, one that balances enforcement and legal pathways. The pilot involves an exchange whereby for each person returned from the United Kingdom to France, another travels legally to the United Kingdom via a managed route. Numbers are small—admissions and returns of a few dozen people a week—and the pilot is not widely known or trusted among migrants or the NGOs that support them. 

The scheme has also faced significant constraints. Scaling up returns has been hard, hobbled by legal challenges, limited detention space, and UK operational bottlenecks. A recent High Court ruling found that guidance used to implement the one in, one out returns unlawfully removed the right of potential victims of human trafficking to seek reconsideration of negative decisions before removal to France could delay the process further.

More importantly, there was a missed opportunity to clearly communicate on selection criteria and showcase the pathway as reliable and quick. The government could have designed a digital-first, user-friendly system and tested and tweaked messaging to shift behaviour of migrants and NGOs on the ground—ultimately encouraging applicants to stay within the system rather than take their chances on a small boat. Instead, civil society was not engaged as partners and the one in, one out framing has been rejected by NGOs, which denounced the deal as treating asylum seekers like bargaining chips. Ultimately, this way of working also contributed to artificially capped numbers on each side.

Still, the pilot shows that balanced arrangements that link returns to legal routes are politically and operationally possible, and that many of the obstacles lie in administrative capacity, design, and outreach to migrant communities, which could be improved in future iterations.

Scaling the Pilot

To encourage people to use legal pathways over illicit crossings, the pilot needs to scale—and be embedded in a broader EU-UK framework. There is a window of opportunity for European governments to agree a deal that sharply increases, in the short term, the share of small boat arrivals who are returned to Europe, while opening sizeable legal routes from Europe into the United Kingdom that reinforce EU solidarity.

One practical way to organise this would be in two phases: an intensive six month scale-up phase to shift behaviour quickly, followed by a more permanent cooperation framework that turns the United Kingdom into a core ally in managing protection and sharing responsibilities.

The scale-up phase would see participating EU partners—potentially France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and other Calais Group members, together with interested Med5 states—accept the return of a high proportion of people detected after crossing by boat.

In parallel, the UK government would open a new humanitarian pathway from Europe, possibly capped at around 10,000 people during the first phase and framed explicitly as a UK contribution linked to the 2026 Solidarity Pool commitment. Around half of these places might be delivered via community sponsorship, helping to reduce pressure on state run reception systems and support better integration outcomes.

After this initial period, the United Kingdom could continue and expand managed admission routes from Europe and selected transit countries, with an initial annual cap of perhaps 20,000 people. The portfolio might include humanitarian admissions from EU states, community sponsorship, and evacuations from key transit hubs such as Libya, particularly for nationalities that are heavily represented in Channel crossings. This could help buy valuable capital with Italy and other border states, while helping divert people from dangerous sea journeys farther upstream.

On the EU side, Member States participating in the scheme could offer a returns backstop for residual irregular arrivals, agreeing to take back those who continue to cross irregularly. Because the legal routes should siphon off many would be small boat passengers, the number of people to be returned ought to fall over time, leaving the United Kingdom taking in more people through orderly channels than it sends back.

A New Approach in Northern France

For France and other EU partners, any scaled-up responsibility-sharing arrangement would also need to sit alongside a clearer plan for managing the vulnerable population currently in northern France. That would mean not only breaking up coastal informal camps but also bringing people into the French and wider EU asylum systems. Existing French efforts and infrastructure investments to intensify registration and case tracking could be deployed to bring as many people as possible out of the shadows.

French officials are understandably cautious about being seen as the outsourced UK border guard. But France could repurpose some of the £660 million in immigration enforcement funds the UK government has agreed, instead funding reception centres away from Northern France that support both people applying for the pilot and returnees. People would be assisted to move to the reception centres, and provided with a stay there while given counseling and screened for eligibility to enter the United Kingdom; migrants moved from Northern France and returnees could be supported to apply for French asylum or given access to assisted voluntary return and reintegration counseling. This would help reduce pooling in Northern France in a more humane and sustainable way than the current de-encampment approach. 

An EU-badged deal in which Britain visibly props up the Pact’s Solidarity Pool—through relocations, financial support, and humanitarian pathways—and helps evacuate people from key transit regions would be easier to defend than a narrow bilateral fix. It would allow French and other EU leaders to present cooperation on the Channel not as a favor to London, but as a way to strengthen Europe’s migration management as a whole. 

A Political Window That May Not Last

With Andy Burnham becoming Prime Minister on 20 July and the recent entry into force of the Migration Pact, this is the moment for Britain and Europe to stop muddling through and strike the bigger deal that could strengthen both systems and spare lives in the Channel. 

French President Emmanuel Macron, entering the later phase of his presidency and having invested considerable political capital in Franco British cooperation on migration, has a rare opportunity to turn that investment into a legacy of more orderly and humane Channel management. A next step could be ensuring that irregular migration is on the agenda for the UK-EU Summit, now rescheduled for the first months of the Burnham government—possibly in exchange for firming up a widely discussed youth mobility scheme.

'This is the moment for Britain and Europe to stop muddling through and strike the bigger deal that could strengthen both systems and spare lives in the Channel'. 

An ambitious UK–EU Channel arrangement, anchored in the Pact’s solidarity framework and built on the lessons of the one-in, one-out pilot, would show that Europe can move beyond reactive crisis management. It would signal that solidarity is not just a slogan, but a practical tool for sharing responsibility across borders.