Families of failed asylum seekers have been offered up to £40,000 to leave Britain voluntarily in a new pilot scheme.
The Home Office today informed 150 families they are eligible for lump sums of £10,000 a head for up to four people if they agree to go.
The programme could be expanded to thousands more families if it proves successful.
It is significantly more generous than existing cash incentives offered to migrants to leave voluntarily, currently capped at £3,000 a head.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has sanctioned the huge pay-outs in a bid to save even larger sums currently being spent on keeping the families in migrant hotels and other types of accommodation at the taxpayers’ expense.
Financial incentives are necessary because Labour scrapped the previous government’s Rwanda scheme, which would have seen adult asylum seekers compulsorily sent to east Africa to lodge claims there rather than here.
The pay-outs are also an attempt to overcome barriers faced by the Home Office when it attempts to remove failed asylum seekers, including last-minute human rights claims and problems obtaining travel documents from their home nations.
The scheme will only apply to people whose home countries are deemed safe – leading critics to question why they needed to be handed huge sums of taxpayers’ money to leave Britain.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp branded the scheme ‘an insult to the British taxpayer’.
The Home Office is planning to use physical force to remove failed asylum seeker families – including against children – if they reject the offer, it emerged.
It has launched a consultation with experts in the police, teaching and care work to determine what levels of force could be used against children in what officials said would be a ‘lawful, dignified and proper’ way.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has unveiled the new scheme – which begins immediately – as she delivered a keynote speech on immigration policy in central London today
Ms Mahmood, in a speech at the IPPR think-tank in central London today, said the ‘increased incentive payments’ could bring a ‘significant saving’ for the public purse.
‘Where a voluntary removal is refused, we will escalate to an enforced removal for those who can be returned to their safe home country,’ she said.
‘We are now consulting on precisely how the removal of families with children must take place in a way that is humane and effective.
‘For too long, families who have failed their claims have known that we are not enforcing our rules, which created a perverse incentive to make a Channel crossing with children in a small boat.’
The pay-outs will save taxpayers’ money because it currently costs an average of £158,000 to support a family of failed asylum seekers, the Government believes.
‘That is a staggering amount of money, which is ridiculous,’ a Home Office source said.
‘We need to get them out.’
Migrants sprint across Gravelines beach in northern France earlier this week to board smugglers’ dinghies bound for Britain
Migrants jostled for a spot on the dangerously overcrowded dinghies
Asylum seekers in the first batch of 150 families have been given seven days to accept the new offer.
If they fail to do so it will then be permanently withdrawn.
If they agree to leave, the money will be loaded onto electronic payment cards which can be accessed once the families reach their home country aboard taxpayer-funded flights.
The £10,000 per head sum could be increased – or lowered – depending on take-up of the pilot scheme, sources said.
There are currently thousands of failed asylum seeker families being supported by public funds, officials said, but the exact number is not known by the Home Office due to weaknesses in its data-gathering.
The families have had claims rejected by the Home Office and have then gone on to fail to win refugee status in the appeal system.
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Scores of migrants were brought into Ramsgate port in Kent today by UK Border Force – just as Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood was announcing her new measures
But sources were able to confirm that 700 Albanian families who have exhausted their appeals process are still being supported by the public purse.
Challenged over the principle of handed failed asylum seekers such a huge sum of money, border security minister Alex Norris told LBC: ‘This is better value for the British taxpayer.
‘The situation today which will house them indefinitely [is] costing £158,000 a year.’
He added: ‘The people we’re talking about are families who have failed in their initial application. They’ve failed in their appeal.
‘They have no live asylum application in this country, and no future in the country.
‘It’s not good for them, not good for the children.
‘So we’re supporting them, as has been done before in the past, but we’re increasing the levels in this pilot of support, up to that number, to incentivise them to leave.’
If all 150 families offered the first places on the returns scheme take up the offer, it will cost the taxpayer an estimated £6million but save £23.7million a year in ongoing support costs, based on an average family.
Conservative frontbencher Mr Philp said: ‘This is an insult to the British taxpayer.
‘Shabana Mahmood has to resort to paying illegal immigrants to leave because she has utterly failed to forcibly remove them – only six per cent of small boat arrivals have been removed under this Labour Government.
‘Offering £40,000 to failed asylum seekers to leave the country will only reward and incentivise illegal immigration.
‘If we exit the European Convention on Human Rights we can deport all illegal immigrants without needing to pay them.
‘But Shabana Mahmood is too weak to do this.’
Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch UK which campaigns for tougher border controls, said of the new hand-outs: ‘If these people have gone through due process and can be removed, then they should be removed without being paid to do so.
‘It is simply wrong.
‘It is also unfair to people in this country who are struggling financially to see these very significant sums being handed out to people who have no right to be here.’
He added: ‘Offering up to £40,000 and a taxpayer-funded trip to people who could be returned to their home countries without such an eye-watering inducement is absurd.
‘All this risks doing is encouraging more illegal arrivals, safe in the knowledge that if all efforts to stay fail, there will still be a £10,000 handout at the end and a flight home.
‘This is madness.’
The Home Secretary’s keynote speech today also included a number of other immigration reforms trailed over recent days, some of which were first unveiled last year.
They include measures to withdraw asylum support from migrants who commit crimes, work illegally, have been granted the right to work or who can support themselves.
A Home Office source said they were unable to say how many asylum seekers currently being housed at the taxpayers’ expense have committed crimes.
But they added that it was ‘in the region of thousands’.
There were a further 275 small boat arrivals on Wednesday.
It brought the total number to have come to Britain since Labour came to power to just over 67,400.
Scores more migrants were brought ashore at Ramsgate in Kent aboard Border Force vessels today, just as the Home Secretary was delivering her speech.
Schemes offering migrants cash to go home were first introduced in 1999 and were continued under the Conservative government.
Reform UK’s migration policy, published last August, said it would introduce a six month ‘voluntary returns window’ during which illegal migrants would be ‘offered a financial incentive to self-deport’, but it did not specify how much money would be offered.
Reform’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf said of Labour’s new scheme: ‘Shabana Mahmood has kicked hardworking British taxpayers in the teeth.
‘Nearly 200,000 illegal migrants have arrived from France over the past eight years because the Tories and Labour treat Britain like a global food bank, paid for by British taxpayers.
‘Now Labour is making it worse, offering a staggering £40,000 for illegals to leave voluntarily. It’s a disgrace.
‘Only Reform will detain and deport every illegal migrant and end welfare handouts for foreign nationals.’
