𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Shabana Mahmood has refused to rule out paying migrants up to £30,000 to leave the UK voluntarily. The Home Secretary said more “generous” offers would incentivise people to leave, as she confirmed Labour will hike payments – but refused to reveal the figure that will be paid. Foreign criminals, failed asylum seekers and immigration offenders currently receive up to £3,000.

Ms Mahmood, speaking in Denmark which has enacted policies that Labour modelled its own on, refused to rule out a ten-fold increase, insisting only that “I haven’t made any final decisions on what the right sum is”. She said a massive increase in payments to encourage migrants to leave could be worth it in the long run, because the UK would no longer have to pay for their housing and living expenses.

Ms Mahmood said: “I know it sort of sticks in your craw, basically, to think that you’re going to pay people who’ve come to your country illegally to leave and go back to their home country.

“What I would say to people, though, is when you look at the numbers, to house somebody in asylum accommodation, in a hotel, it costs £53,000 pounds a year per person every year, which is a huge sum of money that is going to waste at the moment.

“I think paying more than what we currently do is still going to be considerably less than what we’re spending on these people.

“I haven’t made any final decisions on what the right sum and the right sort of package will be for our country.

“It will be more than what we currently offer. And what I’ve seen here in Denmark is a more generous offer to get people to incentivise people to leave the country does work, because 95% of the returns that you see from Denmark are voluntary and people do make use of that incentivised package.

“It means that they do leave the country, and that’s very important.

“If we can get them out quickly and save a bunch of money in the process, I think it’s the right thing to do.”

Denmark is willing to pay up to 20,000 euros to convince migrants to leave the country voluntarily.

Migrants are also offered £2,258 if they withdraw their asylum claim within two weeks of arrival.

And Ms Mahmood, during a visit to Denmark, revealed migrants’ right to permanent asylum will be scrapped.

Instead, they will be offered temporary status, which will be reviewed every 30 months.

If their country is deemed safe enough for them to return, they will be sent back. Only children who arrive in the UK unaccompanied will be exempt.

Until now, successful asylum seekers have been granted refugee status for five years and allowed to bring their families to the UK. They then got almost automatic fee-free permanent settlement with continued access to benefits and housing.

Refugees will also be required to “earn” their settlement rights by working and contributing to society.

They will have to wait up to 20 years before they can apply to settle in the UK – and up to 30 years if they arrived illegally via small boats across the Channel or by claiming asylum after overstaying work, student or visitor visas.

The right of refugees to bring over their families has been halted until a new system is introduced.

The policies have been modelled on those introduced by Denmark.

But she will not introduce plans to prevent “ghettos” forming in the UK.

Copenhagen, in a move seen as controversial by left-wingers, restricts areas of Denmark to no more than 50 per cent of the population being non-‘Western’.

People have been forced to leave areas in a bid to force people to integrate better.

Ms Mahmood: “We’re not the sort of country where we’re going to start passing laws about where particular kinds of people can and should not live.

“I don’t think that the success of integration comes from counting the number of brown faces or white faces or black faces in a particular street or in a particular neighbourhood.

“That’s not the success of integration. The success of integration comes from whether our people are all able to speak English, access the labour market, have the right skills and are making a contribution.

“That I think is what ultimately holds the country together.”

But Danish immigration minister, Rasmas Stoklund, said “so far the work has been successful” and they were working to ensure there were “no parallel societies” in the country.

He added: “It is important that kids, when they go to school in the morning that they see that the adults in the neighbourhood go to work, that they don’t just hang around in this neighbourhood, and that they also experience what is the majority culture like, that they don’t grow up in a part of Denmark which could have been part of the greater Middle East.

“We need to live together here in Denmark.”

He added: “That is that we don’t want parallel societies. We won’t accept them and we won’t accept the norms of imams or anyone else trying to dominate areas of Denmark.”