Riot police armed with tear gas and rubber bullets will be deployed to stop small boats reaching Britain across the Channel.
A renewed multimillion-pound deal with France will see a squad of 50 officers specially trained in riot and crowd control tactics to intercept groups of people trying to access the coast.
They will be armed with specialist riot control equipment such as tear gas to “stop illegal migrants in their tracks”, the Home Office said, with the number of general officers sent to halt attempted journeys also ramped up.
The new three-year deal, costing £662m, will include conditions that ensure some of the money is only provided if the number of small boat arrivals is reduced.
Under its terms the UK will hand over £501m to cover five police units and enforcement activity on French beaches – with an extra £160m only paid if new tactics to curb Channel crossings succeed.
If efforts fail, the additional funding will stop after a year.
France will also tackle taxi boats
The French will also double down on fresh tactics to tackle so-called taxi boats – where people smugglers try to avoid detection by sending one person sailing a dinghy along the coast alone to beaches where migrants scramble aboard in the water.
There have been a small uptick in smuggling gangs launching such boats from Belgium as a result of the crackdown along French shores.
And laws in France were updated in recent months to allow the French authorities to intercept boats that contain fewer than 10 people.
The new rules, which apply to boats with fewer people because there is considered to be a lower risk of someone drowning when the vessel is intercepted, allow them to turn back the taxi boats launched from the Belgian coast, it is understood.
Drone and camera surveillance, as well as helicopter patrols, will be stepped up and the number of police, intelligence and military officers deployed rising from 750 to nearly 1,100.
New measures will come into force in the summer
The increase in boots on the ground will come alongside the specialist riot squad of 50 officers who will be on hand to prevent surges of people attempting to overwhelm authorities to reach the shore.
The new measures will come into force in the summer, when the number of small boat crossings tend to spike.
Tory shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp, said the Government should have put conditions on a larger proportion of the funding, arguing France “shouldn’t get a single penny unless they stop the vast majority of the boats”.
“This weak Government has no control of our borders. Since the election over 70,000 illegal immigrants have crossed – a 45 per cent increase compared to before the election. Their claim to smash the gangs is laughable,” he said.
According to analysis of government data, more than 6,000 migrants have arrived in the UK after making the journey across the Channel in 2026 so far – a reduction of about a third on last year.
Numbers had been falling from the peak in 2022 of 46,000 but there was another spike in crossings in 2025, to around 41,000.
The Home Office said joint work with the French had stopped over 42,000 illegal migrants attempting to cross the Channel since the general election in July 2024 and seen 480 migrant traffickers arrested in 2025.
In a statement, Sir Keir Starmer said work between the UK and France had “already stopped tens of thousands of crossings” and “this historic agreement means we can go further: ramping up intelligence, surveillance and boots on the ground to protect Britain’s borders”.
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