Britain’s Ended Deportation Scheme Has Booked Another Flight

Britain’s “one in, one out” arrangement with France ended on October 1. The Home Office nevertheless chartered a removal flight on Wednesday, and another is scheduled for November 17. Its explanation is that it is still processing the remaining people covered by the earlier scheme.

That distinction matters. Ending the arrangement for new arrivals does not automatically resolve every case already inside it. The reporting does not establish that these continuing removals are unlawful.

It does establish that the scheme has mastered a form of retirement unavailable to most of us: announce your departure, remain in the building, and keep booking travel on the account.

October 1 was apparently the end of the scheme in the same sense that the end of a meeting means somebody is about to say, “Just one more thing.” Except the one more thing has a chartered aircraft.

The Guardian reports that dozens of people are still detained. Those are human beings living with the consequences of the arrangement, not loose stationery the department needs to clear out. But the official language has already moved them into a “remainder” and a “cohort,” where the policy can finish existing without the government having to describe it as still existing.

Is it over? Yes. Are you still doing it? Also yes. Would anyone like to introduce those two answers to each other, or do they belong to different teams?

The original deal was announced in July 2025 as a deterrent to dangerous Channel crossings: return some people to France while bringing a similar number legally to the UK. Now the government is completing the old returns while the scheme itself has passed through its exit date with considerably less difficulty than anybody subject to it.

And there is the cost. The home secretary told a parliamentary committee that removals to France had cost at least £78 million. Some people sent there returned to the UK and were then sent to France again, at further expense.

We are not discussing a spreadsheet accidentally counting the same office chair twice. We are discussing an expensive machinery of movement whose stated purpose was to deter movement, with some of the people subjected to it making the journey again.

What does the success dashboard do with that? Does it count each removal as a fresh achievement? Is there a little celebratory animation while the previous achievement is being processed for another departure?

I want to see the column headings. Not the launch photograph. Not another minister standing beside equipment looking as if equipment has personally endorsed the policy. The column headings. The bit where somebody has to decide whether doing the same thing again means it worked twice or failed once.

Small-boat crossings are down about 40 percent this year compared with the same period last year. That does not establish that this scheme caused the decline: irregular migration to Europe fell by a similar proportion. The government cannot claim every favorable movement in a number as evidence that its particular arrangement moved it.

Otherwise I am claiming responsibility for autumn. Leaves are down substantially since I started complaining about this. Please transfer the funding.

The Guardian understands that at least seven people returned to France have come back to the UK since October 1. It interviewed two whose asylum claims are now being processed in Britain. One described being detained again, then released when officials could not find a safe third country to send him to. Those individual outcomes do not settle every case. They do put a rather large dent in the idea that the government can demonstrate success simply by pointing toward a departure gate.

And still the residual scheme continues. It has ended, but not finished. The announcement is complete; the detention is not. The calendar has moved on; the consequences have another booking.

November 17. Put it in the diary.

Apparently the one departure Britain has not managed to complete is the departure of its own fucking policy.