People are being helped ashore from a RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution) lifeboat at a beach in Dungeness, on the south-east coast of England (Picture: AFP)

Britain will pay at least £60 million to France as part of an agreement against ‘illegal migration’ across the Channel.

Suella Braverman is expected to travel to Paris to sign the joint declaration today to stop people seeking help from making the perilous journey.

According to figures cited by the Financial Times, the deal will see the number of French officers patrolling beaches rise from 200 to 300 by the middle of next year.

British officials are also expected to be stationed in French control rooms for the first time.

For weeks, the home secretary has been under mounting pressure to finally fix the asylum system, which she and her predecessor Priti Patel described as ‘broken’.

Reports of the deal with France come as the latest figures show more than 40,000 migrants have crossed the Channel to the UK so far this year.

A group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent (Picture: PA)

Some 972 people were detected on Saturday in 22 boats.

This comes after Rishi Sunak voiced ‘renewed confidence and optimism’ on the issue at the Cop27 summit in Egypt.

He vowed to ‘grip this challenge of illegal migration’ by working with European nations.

Home Office data also shows that tens of thousands of migrants are waiting more than a year for a decision on their asylum claim, with hundreds waiting over five years.

The number of people waiting for an initial decision on their asylum application to almost quadrupled in the last five years from 29,522 in December 2017 to 122,206 in June 2022.

The figure was 64,891 in December 2020, meaning it nearly doubled in the last year and a half.

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Britain is expected to pick up the bill.