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 significanty more generous than existing cash incentives to migrants who agree to leave voluntarily, which are 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.
The Home Office is also 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 taxpayer.
‘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
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.
Migrants jostled for a spot on the dangerously overcrowded dinghies
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, source 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.
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.’
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
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.
Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch UK which campaigns for tougher border controls, said of the new hand-outs: ‘I don’t know why they are necessary.
‘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.’
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’.
The number