Taxpayers face £500m bill to fly illegal migrants home: £200m will be spent on airline tickets alone as foreign criminals, overstayers and failed asylum seekers are kicked out

Source: By Steph Cockroft for Daily Mail -, 27/08/2015

• Figures listed in Home Office tender asking companies to bid for
contract


• Contract would be for five years and is based on estimated migrant
figures


• Keith Vaz, from home affairs select committee, said figure was
'enormous'


• In 2014, 12,460 failed asylum seekers and migrants were forcibly
removed


Taxpayers face a £500million bill to fly thousands of illegal migrants
and failed asylum seekers home from Britain.


Some £200m is due to be spent on airline tickets and Home
Office-chartered flights over the next five years to ensure foreign
criminals, overstayers and rejected asylum seekers are flown home.


The figures emerged in a Home Office tender which invited private
companies to bid for the 'Escorting and Travel Services Re-Procurement
Project' contract.


Whitehall sources said figures were based on the estimated number of
future migrants who have to be removed from the country via 'safe and
secure passage', The Times reports. They added that the contract
would probably last for five years.


Under the Immigration Act 1971 and the Immigration and Asylum Act
1999, the Home Office is responsible for 'detaining and/or enforcing
the removal of detainees' who have been sent to 'Immigration Removal
Centres and other locations from the United Kingdom'.


The tender says: 'In order to facilitate the removal of detainees from
the UK, it is necessary to provide sufficient escort and
transportation staff to enable their safe and secure passage.


This will include vulnerable detainees, as well as those who refuse to
leave the UK voluntarily and those being removed on chartered
flights.


'The total contract value for Escorting and Travel Services is
estimated at £500m including travel ticket costs of approximately
£200m.'


Keith Vaz, chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee,
described the figure as 'enormous' and said it demonstrates 'the lack
of more robust policies to stop people arriving in the first
place.'


Last year, 12,460 people were forcibly removed from the country,
including 4,000 asylum seekers and more than 8,200 illegal immigrants
and foreign criminals. A decade earlier, it was just 21,000.


A Home Office spokesman said: 'Those with no right to be in the UK
should return home. We expect people to leave the country voluntarily
but, where they do not, we will seek to enforce their departure.'


Earlier this week, dozens of failed Afghan asylum seekers won a
last-minute reprieve to stay in Britain.


Some 57 people were due to be deported on a plane chartered by the
Home Office on Tuesday night.


But they were removed from the flight lists at the 11th hour after a
legal challenge.


Lawyers for the illegal immigrants successfully argued that the
Government could not return them to some of the most dangerous parts
of Afghanistan.


Meanwhile, UK taxpayers will also have to pay for migrants at Calais
to be flown to their home countries after Home Secretary Theresa May
signed with her French counterpart.


The French border town of Calais has been overrun by migrants in
recent months, all of whom are desperate to make it to Britain.


They are living in illegal makeshift camps, the central of which is
known as 'The Jungle', as they plan their way across the Channel into
the UK.


Families and individuals, largely from Africa, have been caught hidden
on board lorries, cars and trains in their bids to make it to British
shores.