\n Britain has paid France \u20ac540 million since 2023 in fees to combat small boats carrying undocumented migrants across the Channel, a senior French official said.\n <\/p>\n
France has spent about \u20ac331 million in the same period on the campaign, according to figures provided by Laurent Touvet, head of the interior ministry\u2019s DGEF agency, which handles migration policy.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is estimated that the United Kingdom’s contribution to the fight against illegal immigration is around 62 percent of the total,\u201d with the remaining 38 percent covered by France, Touvet told a parliamentary commission.<\/p>\n
For 2023-2026, \u201cthis represents \u20ac540 million funded by the United Kingdom, mainly to cover \u201cpersonnel costs, but also for investment on French territory\u201d, he added.<\/p>\n
It was \u201cplausible\u201d to estimate that about 85 percent of the total sum had been spent on security missions and the rest on social, health and humanitarian costs, including rescues at sea, said Touvet.<\/p>\n
The parliamentary commission is looking into the impact of the 2004 Franco-British accord on cross-Channel migration on the rights of migrants.<\/p>\n
Elsa Faucillon, the communist lawmaker who chairs the commission, said there was \u201cthe feeling that there\u2019s a lot of vagueness and a lack of transparency regarding the amount of money deployed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are very substantial sums, and yet we have not only 40,000 crossings, but also very well-documented and numerous human rights violations,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
According to British figures, some 41,472 people crossed the Channel in small boats in 2025, the second highest figure since 2018.<\/p>\n
At least 29 would-be migrants died in the Channel in 2025, according to an AFP count from official French and British sources.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Britain has paid France \u20ac540 million since 2023 in fees to combat small boats carrying undocumented migrants across…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":792246,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5018,3,4],"tags":[748,393,4884,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-792245","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"category-uk","9":"category-united-kingdom","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-england","12":"tag-great-britain","13":"tag-northern-ireland","14":"tag-scotland","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116141922545029555","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=792245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792245\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/792246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=792245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=792245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=792245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}