A new French report has accused the United Kingdom of not sufficiently coordinating in efforts to reduce the number of migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats.

The criticism comes as part of a broader assessment pointing to the “uncertain effectiveness” of illegal migration policies.

France is “struggling to develop operational cooperation arrangements” with the UK, according to the report published on Thursday by France’s Court of Accounts, a body in charge of auditing the use of public funds – independent from government. 

The report refers in particular to a joint intelligence unit created in 2020 to fight human smuggling and reduce the number of people risking their lives to cross the Channel illegally. In 2022, the unit helped dismantle seven illegal migration networks.

The Court “found that the British don’t provide usable information on the departures of small boats, and give very general, first-level information that has not been counter-checked.”

Information on the circumstances in which migrants arrive and their nationalities and on boats “appears to be very patchy,” the report said.

“The relationship between France and the UK is therefore unbalanced in terms of information and intelligence exchange,” it added.

The UK Defence Ministry estimated that crossings of the English Channel by boat increased by at least 58% between 2021 and 2022, a year that saw over 45,000 migrants arrive on British shores.

The report claimed some 56% of crossing attempts were prevented that same year – unchanged from the year before.

The British government announced this week that the number of migrants crossing fell by more than a third in 2023, to just under 26,000, thanking the “partnership with France” for their role in the drop.

Why are these cracks showing now?

France, in recent years, has stepped up efforts to prevent migrants from crossing the Channel, including through more police, equipment and facilities. 

The country received €222 million from the UK from 2018 to 2022 as part of a bilateral agreement.

Last March, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak signed off a further €541 million for the 2023-2026 period.

The number of people living illegally in France is unknown, but researchers from the Pew Research Center estimated their numbers in 2017 to be between 300,000 and 400,000, in a country of 67 million inhabitants. 

This is about three times fewer migrants with no legal status than in the UK and in Germany.

The Court of Account’s report also assessed a series of other issues related to illegal immigration policies, which were subject to 133 changes in law in the past decade.

It pointed to the difficulty of implementing orders to leave the national territory, despite France carrying out the most deportations in the European Union.

More than 150,000 such decisions were made in 2022 and only 10% of the concerned people actually left, it said.

Amid recent debate over an immigration bill focused largely on how to speed up the deportation process, the report said that “international comparisons suggest that a change of scale is not realistic” regarding such policies.

UK authorities sent back about 3,500 people to their home country and Germany sent back about 13,000 people in 2022, according to statistics gathered by the French Interior Ministry.

Reasons listed by the report include French authorities’ difficulty in proving the identity of the concerned migrants, reluctance from home countries to issue authorisation to let them in, and refusal by commercial airlines and plane pilots to take them onboard.