Now the French want to make us pay even MORE for border controls

FRANCE has signalled new moves to make Britain pay even more for border controls on its soil.

The British taxpayer has already shelled out tens of millions for security measures at Calais and other French ports, and now ministers across the Channel will demand extra cash.

French interior minister Gerard Collomb said yesterday he wanted to negotiate a new deal on the 15-year-old treaty that lets the UK conduct border checks on French soil. ‘I want to reach an additional protocol to these agreements and to take concrete measures to look after a certain number of costs by the British,’ Mr Collomb said in an interview with Paris newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche.

He also said that Britain should ‘take concrete measures’ to take on ‘a larger number of people, as regard to the reception of refugees and unaccompanied minors’.

In 2003 prime minister Tony Blair and president Jacques Chirac signed the Le Touquet agreement that provided ‘juxtaposed’ border controls in Channel ports. This meant moving the UK frontier to northern France and the French frontier to the south coast of England.

But with Brexit approaching and the number of Britain-bound asylum seekers in ports such as Calais growing, the French want Le Touquet to be updated.

Mr Collomb’s comments came as president Emmanuel Macron prepared to meet Prime Minister Theresa May on Thursday the 35th UK-France summit at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst, Berkshire. Brexit and related issues such as immigration will be high on the agenda.

A group of hardline pro-European MPs, including Tory Brexit rebels Dominic Grieve and Anna Soubry, will today meet the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier in Brussels on a ‘fact-finding mission’.