ITV has filmed migrants being handed £2,000 in bank cards under the Facilitated Return Scheme in order to return to their home country. These are Foreign National Offenderswho have committed a ‘serious crime’ – sex offenders, killers…
A flight to Romania with 47 individuals on board cost £94,000 in cash handouts alone. That’s before the cost of jet charter…
Just-released data obtained via Freedom of Information request shows that the Home Office does not even bother centrally storing data on how much taxpayer cash is handed to voluntary returns. It says “it is not possible to provide a breakdown of information by the numbers of people who have received different levels of financial support payment while being classed as a ‘Voluntary Return’. We would need to manually examine the cases of all those individuals who had been subject to a voluntary return during the period requested. The information… is not held centrally on Home Office systems and could only be obtained by manually examining individual case records.” Off flies the cash…
Shabana Mahmood defended the practice: “Out of context, it’s not great, it doesn’t look good. A voluntary removal is actually cheaper for the British taxpayer. It has long been the case that we do offer financial packages as an incentive to people to drop their claims and drop the attempts they make to stay in our country, and to board a flight and leave.” Legacy politics…
Speaking to Adam Boulton on Times Radio about kicking the Golders Green suspect, Heidi Alexander said:
“I thought that if I was in the shoes of that police officer, then if I’m honest, given the situation, and the fact that he had a backpack on his back, and they were worried about whether that might go off, I could, if I was a police officer, frankly, I could see myself having taken similar action.”