Riot police will be sent to beaches in France to stop migrants from crossing the Channel under a £662m deal with the UK.
The three-year agreement with France will involve a squad of police officers, trained in “riot and crowd control tactics”, drafted in to tackle violence and “hostile crowds” at the water’s edge.
The number of officers sent to curb attempted journeys from northern France to Britain will also rise by about 42 per cent when the agreement comes into force in the summer, the Home Office said.
Part of the funding – £160m – will only be paid if the new tactics to reduce Channel crossings succeed.
Reform UK accused the Government of giving France more money “for a system that has already failed”.
Small boat crossings have risen
The previous Tory government signed a three-year, £476 million deal to tackle small boat crossings with France in 2023, with stopgap funding provided when the arrangement expired last month.
However, the deal in which the UK paid France for extra patrols to disrupt migrant smuggling gangs has so far had limited effect on the number of small boat crossings.
Crossings in the Channel have risen over the last three years, with 41,472 people arriving in the UK by small boat in 2025, compared with 29,437 people in 2023.
Last weekend, 602 migrants arrived in Dover on nine boats, bringing the total number of arrivals so far in 2026 to more than 6,000. However, the figure is slightly down on the same period last year.
Opposition MPs have claimed the expanded small boats deal is investing more money in an arrangement that hasn’t worked.
Chris Philp, Conservative MP and shadow home secretary, said: “France only prevented a third of embarkations last year and even let those illegal immigrants go to try again. France shouldn’t get a single penny unless they stop the vast majority of the boats.”
Beach patrols ‘not working’
In the previous deal signed with France in 2023, around 700 law enforcement officers patrolled beaches in France under the arrangement.
The number of officers in northern France will now rise to nearly 1,100. Just 50 riot police officers will be sent as part of the new deal.
However, some have questioned the impact of deploying officers around French beaches.
Alex Norris, the border security and asylum minister, admitted that so far French police had only used knives to slash inflatable vessels to stop crossings in six incidents.
Speaking to Times Radio, he declined to set a target and said the public had “heard time after time big press release promises on numbers that were never met”.
Imran Hussain, the council’s director of external affairs, at the Refugee Council, said: “By focusing on policing the Channel, the Government is treating the symptom not the cause. Policing alone will not prevent desperate people from turning to dangerous small boats in the first place.
“Without safe routes to reach the UK, these men, women and children will be forced into dangerous and potentially deadly small boat crossings.”
Smugglers now operating from Belgium
Experts have voiced concerns that the crackdown on smugglers in France, has simply meant gangs are operating from Belgium instead.
Smugglers are reportedly launching so-called “taxi boats” from coastal towns in Belgium – such as De Panne, Nieuwpoort and Middelkerke – which then pick up migrants from the water in France.
There have been 17 such departures this year, up from no more than two per year since 2021.
Belgian police have suggested the recent rise is because of increased pressure on smugglers in France.
In August 2025, the Labour Government signed a separate “one-in-one-out” deal with France, which allows the UK to return some small boat arrivals to France while taking in an equivalent number of asylum seekers from the country.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has said the new deal is a “landmark agreement” that will “really arm us to go after the people smugglers”.
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 had 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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