The UK has “not fixed the numbers yet” on how many migrants will be returned to France as part of a new “one in, one out” deal, the home secretary has said.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron announced the “one in, one out” deal on Thursday to return migrants crossing the Channel to the UK on small boats.
In exchange for every migrant returned to France as part of the agreement, an asylum seeker who wants to come to the UK via a safe, legal route will be allowed entry to the UK – if they have not already tried to enter illegally.
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But Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said they had not agreed on how many migrants would be returned, after reports said 50 would be sent back to France each week.
She told Sky News: “We haven’t fixed the ultimate numbers yet or the progress that we’ll make as it’s a pilot, because it’s right we do this in a step-by-step way, and we trial this and develop it.
“We’ll provide updates throughout, we need to get this going, we need to make sure we get this one-for-one agreement that we made with France.”
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Sir Keir and Mr Macron confirmed the pilot will start in a few weeks, but Ms Cooper insisted not setting a number of how many will be sent back to France is “the right approach because we’re going to make sure that this works”.
She added: “We’re going to make sure that we can increase it.”
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Just hours before the two leaders announced the deal, dozens of people arrived in the UK on a dinghy, while more arrived on Friday morning as the UK hit its third heatwave of the year.
So far, more than 21,000 people have arrived in the UK on small boats this year – a nearly 50% increase in the same time last year.
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Ms Cooper said she has been discussing and developing the deal with the French interior minister since October last year.
They have also been talking to EU commissioners, representing each of the EU’s 27 members, who she said have been “very supportive and helpful”.
The home secretary added: “We’ve done a lot of legal work on this…so that we have a robust position to be able to respond to any legal challenges that are made.”
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While announcing the deal on Thursday alongside Sir Keir, Mr Macron said Brexit was the reason for the rise in small boats crossing the Channel, because he said the UK had no migration deal with the EU after it left, creating an “incentive to make the crossing”.
He said the British people had been sold a lie.
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Ms Cooper avoided agreeing about the lie, but said the criminal smuggler gangs charging high amounts for people to cross the Channel “will weaponise anything that is happening”.
She said in the run-up to the UK leaving the EU in January 2020, criminal gangs said people had to pay money quickly so they could cross before Brexit, but after that, they continued by saying people could not be returned because the Dublin Agreement was not in place.
The Dublin Agreement is an EU law based on the principle that only one country is responsible for an asylum claim, generally the one where the asylum seeker first entered the EU.
After Brexit, that was no longer in place, so the UK could not automatically return asylum seekers to the EU country they had first entered.
