It doesn’t make sense for France to stop small boat crossings, says Aaron Newbury.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Keir Starmer. (Image: AFP via Getty Images)
It might be time to admit that our politicians just aren’t very good at making deals. The agreement signed between Britain and France to ‘stop the boats’ is a prime example, and might just be one of the most calamitous contracts ever written. Now, faced with a renegotiation of the terms, we can probably guess how a new deal will work out.
Whitehall will plunder even more taxpayers’ money to hand over to our French friends, and they, in return, will continue to pay lip service to the bargain while doing very little. In fact, it emerged yesterday that Shabana Mahmood has forked out an extra £16 million of taxpayers’ cash to extend the deal over the next two months while negotiations continue.
Soon, we’ll find ourselves having a conversation that comes up every few months -why is France not doing more to stop the boats? But the answer is simple. It’s because the French have no meaningful incentive to do so.
And why should they want a change when they can refuse to budge and get handed £16million to keep the current bad deal going? Consider the logic from Paris’s perspective. Every migrant who successfully crosses the Channel is one fewer person France must house, feed, and process through its own asylum system.
In fact, the UK is solving a French problem at British expense, because each and every boat making the crossing represents a highly effective form of outsourcing: we take their unwanted arrivals, and they wave them goodbye.
We also pay for the privilege, so why would any rational French Government interfere with such an arrangement?
Since the first deal was signed, the UK has always been negotiating from a position of weakness. We need France to act, but they do not need us to pay. France is one of the world’s largest economies and doesn’t need a begging bowl to be filled by Whitehall. What we offer is not aid but a premium for a service France has little interest in providing.
It even transpires that there isn’t a plan B if the deal cannot go through – Labour didn’t make a backstop; we just pay hand over fist to keep the current situation going.
The structure of these agreements compounds the problem. Britain has spent hundreds of millions funding French border patrols with no clear targets. There is no minimum number of boats France must intercept to receive the next payment. The arrangement effectively rewards activity rather than results. We have created a system in which French officials can patrol beaches, sign off on reports, and then collect cheques while boat departures continue largely unabated.
This is not a criticism of French actions; it is an observation about how incentives work. If you pay someone to address a problem they benefit from not solving, do not be surprised when the problem persists. France has discovered a revenue stream with no performance criteria, and we have designed a deal that prioritises optics over outcomes.
No matter the wording used to dress up a negotiation, it is extremely likely that France will demand more funding and that Britain will likely agree. Ministers and their aides will brief journalists about stern conversations and renewed commitments and the ‘national interest’, yet within six months to a year, we shall return to this exact spot, mystified that the boats continue.
Until Britain attaches concrete metrics to every pound transferred, nothing will change. The very basis on which this deal is forged must change; the incentive structure must shift; and France must gain more from stopping crossings than from allowing them. Otherwise, we are simply funding our own failure.