The Home Office has spent a quarter of a million pounds on charter flights to deport people in the last three months without a single plane leaving the runway in that period, it has been revealed.
About 12,000 migrants are forcibly removed from the UK each year with another 20,000 removed through the voluntary returns route. Approximately 2,000 of those forcibly removed are put on planes privately chartered by the Home Office.
The government has used charter flights regularly since 2001, removing people to countries including Albania, Ghana, Nigeria and Pakistan. After a pause following the Windrush scandal, charter flights to Jamaica controversially resumed in February this year.
Between October 2016 and May 2018 more than 80 charter flights took off. According to research by Corporate Watch, Mitie has a 10-year £524m contract to provide security guards for Home Office charter flights.
In March this year, the Home Office was forced to suspend the use of charter flights for the first time following the launch of a high court challenge by the charity Medical Justice. The charity argued that the Home Office’s policy of not informing people of exactly when they would be removed was unlawful because it failed to give people time to instruct lawyers and gather new evidence which might prevent their removal.
At a preliminary high court hearing about this case in March 2019, Mr Justice Walker issued an injunction ordering the Home Office to suspend its policy of removing migrants from the UK without adequate warning until the policy could be fully considered by the court.
He said: “There appears to be grounds for real concern about access to justice.” The injunction required the Home Office to give 72 hours notice and full flight details. A full hearing was held in June 2019 and judgment is awaited.
It is understood that the Home Office’s use of charter flights resumed on 11 July.
The three-month suspension of the flights has been revealed in Freedom of Information requests obtained by the organisation No Deportations.
In the response, the Home Office confirmed that £268,463.44 has been spent on charter flights in April, May and June of this year, although no flights have taken off during that period.
The response states that this figure does not include escorting costs. The Home Office declined to confirm to the Guardian whether those costs were for penalties for charter flights booked but not used.
A spokeswoman for End Deportations said: “Any pause is welcome in the process of secretive and brutal mass deportation flights. While it’s shocking that the Home Office was spending hundreds of thousands of pounds when the flights were not running, it’s even more shocking that this controversial and inhumane practice is still happening at all.”
John O, spokesman for No Deportations said: “No Deportations has been monitoring deportation charter flights since the Home Office began these operations in 2001. This is the first time that the Home Office has gone three months – April, May, June – without a single charter flight. We were aware that there were charter flights scheduled for April which were cancelled at short notice.”
A Home Office spokeswoman said: “The Home Office makes enforced returns by both charter flights and regular scheduled flights. Charters are an important means to return foreign national offenders and immigration offenders where there are limited scheduled routes or where returnees may be disruptive.”
