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Keir Starmer’s returns deal with France will go ahead, a cabinet minister has insisted, despite a high court ruling that temporarily blocked the deportation of an Eritrean man.
Liz Kendall, the technology secretary, said the last-minute injunction stopping the 25-year-old from being flown to Paris would not scupper the “one in, one out” scheme for ever.
A judge on Tuesday granted a temporary injunction after the man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said he was a victim of trafficking and would be made destitute if sent to France.
Kendall told Times Radio on Wednesday she would not comment on “operational details”, but added: “This is one person, it is not going to undermine the fundamental basis of this deal. This decision is disappointing, but it won’t prevent the rest of that deal going ahead.”
A solicitor representing asylum seekers questioned why the government had taken “an arbitrary and chaotic approach” to choosing who would be removed, including mistakenly selecting children.
Imogen Townley, from the firm Wilsons, which represents several people earmarked for removal, said: “There has been quite an arbitrary and chaotic approach to selecting people arriving on small boats without much consideration given, or seemingly any consideration given, to whether they are suitable for return to France.
“You would think that the government of the UK working with France would be able to select some people, particularly in a pilot scheme when there is quite a lot of resources aimed at a small group of people.
“But unfortunately, they have been taking this unreasoned approach. You are even seeing children caught up in this process and children being chosen for removal to France when they should be explicitly removed from this process.”
Reports have claimed that two 17-year-old boys were wrongly identified for the scheme last month.
The Home Office last month detained dozens of Channel asylum seekers under the scheme on arrival in the UK, pledging to send them back to France “within weeks”.
They were supposed to be removed on commercial Air France flights from Heathrow to Paris on almost every day this week, but none have been taken back so far.
Ministers now face the prospect of further legal challenges and delays. Sources confirmed there were at least five more people earmarked for removal this week.
Some critics have claimed that ministers are facing similar problems to the previous Conservative government’s Rwanda deportation plan, which failed to forcibly remove anyone and was repeatedly challenged in the courts. However, unlike Rwanda, these are challenges over individual cases rather than the whole scheme.
Under the deal, signed in July by Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, the French president, the UK agreed to detain Channel claimants and send them back to France in return for taking a similar number of asylum seekers with family ties to the UK.
Starmer said at the time: “There is no silver bullet here, but with a united effort, new tactics and a new level of intent, we can finally turn the tables.”
On Tuesday night, Mr Justice Sheldon, who granted the temporary injunction blocking the deportation of the Eritrean man, said that more time was needed to investigate his claim that he was a potential victim of human trafficking.
The court was told he and his mother had travelled to Ethiopia when he was a young child and that he had been trafficked from there to Libya in 2023.
He said he had then made his way via Italy to France, and arrived in Britain by small boat across the Channel on 12 August after his mother paid £1,000 to smugglers, court papers said.
France has been planning to fly asylum seekers to the UK this Saturday as part of the agreement.
A French interior ministry spokesperson said: “The first migrants are still due to arrive in France from the UK this week and the first to leave France will do so starting Saturday.”
