The Home Office has refused to disclose how many failed asylum seeker families have snapped up Shabana Mahmood’s offer of up to £40,000 to leave Britain voluntarily.
A new pilot scheme unveiled last Thursday offers families with no right to be in this country lump sums of £10,000 a head for up to four people if they agree to go.
The Home Office has already told 150 families they are entitled to apply for the cash.
They were given a seven day deadline – which had been due to expire at midnight tonight – to accept or lose the offer forever.
But a Home Office spokesman refused to reveal how many families so far had opted for the cash bonanza by 6pm this evening, with just a few hours to go before the original cut-off.
‘We are not going to be giving a running commentary on the offers that have been made,’ the spokesman said.
The deadline for applying is now the end of Thursday, they added, eight days after it was launched.
The programme could be expanded to thousands more families if ministers deem it to be a success, Home Office sources have indicated.
Migrants sprint through the surf at Gravelines beach in northern France last week to board a dinghy to Britain
It is significantly more generous than existing voluntary returns schemes, currently capped at £3,000.
Home Secretary Ms Mahmood 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.
It currently costs an average of £158,000 a year to support a family of failed asylum seekers and by paying them to go home the taxpayer will save money in the long run, the Government argues.
The scheme will only apply to people whose home countries are deemed safe – leading critics to question why they needed to be paid to leave Britain.
Each family has had asylum claims rejected by the Home Office and then exhausted the appeals process in the courts.
The £10,000 per head sum could be increased – or lowered – depending on take-up of the pilot scheme, officials have indicated.
Labour scrapped the previous government’s Rwanda scheme which would have seen adult asylum seekers compulsorily sent to east Africa.
Channel migrants have reached Britain on seven days in a row for the first time this year, in what Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp described as ‘a week of shame for Labour’.
There were 309 arrivals who crossed from northern France aboard four dinghies on Monday, pushing the total number of arrivals since Labour came to power past the 68,000 mark.
It means 1,200 migrants reached British soil over seven days.
There were no further arrivals on Tuesday, however, breaking the run.
The total number of arrivals under Labour now stands at 68,123 and, of those, 3,409 have come since the start of this year.
A Home Office spokesman said: ‘The Daily Mail have been told that the deadline given to failed asylum seekers to take up the scheme has not been passed – but they strangely went ahead and published this story anyway.
‘Once the deadline has been passed, the Government will be fully transparent and published the results in full.’
The Conservatives continued policies offering financial incentives to asylum seekers who agreed to leave, and Reform UK have proposed similar schemes.
