Labour delivered blow for handing asylum seekers £40k to leave UK | UK | News
Experts have cast doubt on Labour’s new plans to tackle the immigration crisis by asking taxpayers to pay up to £40,000 per family to ask them to leave the UK. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has touted a scheme under which up to four members of a failed asylum seeker family will pay £10,000 to leave the UK within seven days of receiving taxpayers’ money.
Ms Mahmood said the “incentive payments” were offered in a trial to 150 families living in taxpayer-funded accommodation. The Home Office said the scheme could save the Treasury £20 million a year if it was successful. Larger payments are being trialled alongside the existing voluntary repatriation scheme, which offers unsuccessful asylum seekers a £3,000 payment to leave before the seven-day period is up. Nearly 80,000 migrants will be refused asylum in 2025, but only 10,000 will accept the £3,000 handshake.
Housing a family of three in shelter costs taxpayers up to £158,000 a year, the Home Secretary said, and the “increased stimulus payment” would save taxpayers money and be reminiscent of similar schemes established in Denmark.
But now experts on the Danish system have warned that Labor could be heading down a path to nowhere with its new £40,000 per family plan. Michelle Pace, a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford’s Center for Refugee Studies and associate researcher at think tank Chatham House, said i Paper’s involvement in the Danish scheme remained “relatively small”.
He told the newspaper The new British payment system “may facilitate the return of small numbers of immigrants, but is unlikely to transform immigration patterns on its own”.
Sine Plambech, senior fellow at the Danish Institute of International Studies, said that if Labor was presenting the new payment as a solution, it was “not what we see here” in Denmark.
He claimed that it was “not money that makes people return home” but rather the “condition” of the country from which they came to Britain.
Last year saw the second highest annual number of people crossing the Channel, with 41,472 people arriving in the UK on small boats.
According to official figures, around 3,863 people have arrived in the UK by small boat so far this year; among them were 144 people on two boats on Thursday.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said: “Keir Starmer and Shabana Mahmood are too weak to take the necessary steps, such as leaving the ECHR and deporting all illegal immigrants within a week of their arrival.
“Labour’s decision to scrap the Rwandan removal plan was a disaster. 67,000 illegal immigrants have crossed the channel since the election, a 45% increase on the same period before.”
