Rare footage has revealed what happens onboard a deportation flight for foreign criminals – with some seen being handed bank cards pre-loaded with £2,000.
Footage shows the group of serious offenders, including killers, thieves and sexual abusers, being returned to Romania having served part of their prison sentences.
As many as six staff are seen accompanying every passenger up the stairs to the plane to avoid them attempting to flee – while others have to be put in restraints to stop them lashing out.
The footage – filmed by ITV News – is the first time journalists have been allowed onboard a deportation flight for foreign national offenders (FNOs).
A total of 47 people were deported, most of them men with half a dozen women, in an operation requiring almost a hundred staff that would have cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of pounds.
The FNOs onboard originally came to the UK legally, before forfeiting their right to remain by committing a serious crime.
Those handed cards pre-loaded with cash as part of the Facilitated Return Scheme, which hands criminals up to £2,000 to encourage them to volunteer to be returned.
They were told to withdraw the cash after landing and use it to aid their resettlement in Romania.
Criminals were handed cards pre-loaded with cash part of the Facilitated Return Scheme, which hands criminals up to £2,000 to encourage them to volunteer to be returned
One particularly aggressive deportee had to be fitted with arm restraints
The ITV film began in a deportation centre near Heathrow, where a journalist began quizzing some of the migrants.
‘Do you want to go home?’ he asked one.
‘No,’ he replies. ‘I’ve been living here ten years.’
The journalist asked a second man what crime he had committed, but he refused to say.
Several deportation flights leave Britain every week heading to a variety of different countries, with 5,000 FNOs sent home last year.
More than 10,000 inmates in the country’s seriously overcrowded jails are foreigners, and removing them is a government priority.
The deportation flights take place in the dead of night to avoid being disrupted by protests, with every FNO accompanied by three staff, while the most violent require half a dozen and are driven to the airport in their own individual van.
The Home Office did not disclose the airline that was used for the flight or the airport it was heading to.
Three migrants who were meant to be onboard avoided the flight by mounting legal claims.
Commenting on the footage, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood admitted the sight of criminals being handed £2,000 in taxpayer cash ‘doesn’t look good’.
But she said: ‘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.’
Once they arrive in Romania, the criminals are free to go.
One said he was ‘very happy’ and would ‘never come back to London’ after spending four months in an immigration centre.
Since becoming Home Secretary earlier this month, Ms Mahmood has promised ‘to do whatever it takes to secure our border’ and fight legal challenges to prevent deportations ‘at every step‘.
The criminals leaving the plane in Romania, where they were met by their loved ones
The MP for Birmingham Ladywood said: ‘If we have got control of our borders I think that creates the space for fundamental, decent, British people to be welcoming of those who come to our country and to contribute.
‘I think that having a secure border is necessary for maintaining what are actually very positive race relations in our country.
‘I am also worried about the rise of the far right, I’m very worried about some of the rhetoric, I think it is getting out of control and I worry about where that may lead.
‘As politicians we should hold the line on what is patriotism and what is nationalism, there is a line there – I know where it is.’
Ms Mahmood also said she intended to ‘ramp up’ one-in, one-out deportations to France.
Under the scheme, which came into force last month and seeks to remove those who crossed the English Channel back to the continent, in exchange for those who apply in France and are approved being able to come to Britain.
Just three have been removed so far.
‘I will be ramping up the numbers and I hope to say more about that in the weeks to come,’ Ms Mahmood added.
‘You start with a small first step and then you ramp up, which is exactly what we’re going to be doing.
‘We have a clear agreement with the French, we will want to see those numbers increase… I’m not going to get ahead of operational decisions.’
She continued: ‘I want us to get to a point where the numbers that are being removed are acting as a deterrent and stop people getting on the boats in the first place.
‘We have proved it can work, we’ve got flights off the ground, more are going this week, and we will be looking to ramp up the numbers.’
It comes as new research suggested that deporting a backlog of foreign criminals will take decades at current rates for certain nationalities.
A wide range of convicted criminals – particularly those from African, Middle Eastern and Caribbean nations – are being removed from Britain at a glacial pace.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp, who compiled the analysis of government data, said it was ‘totally unacceptable’ that some nationalities are not being deported.
There are 145 Eritrean criminals in jail here, according to latest data, but in the 12 months to June only two were removed.
It means the Government will take 73 years to deport the total number at current rates, according to the new research.
Similarly, despite the Iranian jail population in England and Wales standing at 279 only six were deported in the last year – meaning the total would take 47 years to remove.
For the 338 Jamaican prisoners it would take 15 years to kick them all out, after just 23 were deported in the year to June, while for Somalis it would take 22 years.
The true rates of removal will be even lower than those set out in the analysis, seen exclusively by the Daily Mail.
