Shabana Mahmood said she was considering “a big increase” in payments for migrants to return voluntarily to their home countries, insisting that the policy represents “value for money”.
The home secretary said she had directed officials to “pilot a small programme” of increased payments, “just to see how it changes behaviour”, as part of a wider overhaul of the asylum system.
The UK currently offers payments of up to £3,000 to some people who have no right to remain in the country and who agree to return home.
Announcing sweeping reforms to the asylum system on Monday, Ms Mahmood confirmed that the offer of financial packages to assist with voluntary returns would continue – but has since said the figures involved could actually increase.
“I haven’t alighted on the full sums involved yet, but I am willing to consider a big increase on what we currently pay,” she told the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast. “I know it sticks in the craw of many people and they don’t like it, but it is value for money, it does work, and a voluntary return is often the very best way to get people to return to their home country as quickly as possible.”
The government faced criticism after it emerged that a migrant sex offender who was mistakenly released from prison was paid £500 to leave the UK last month. Hadush Kebatu, who was forcibly sent back to Ethiopia with a team of five escorts, was given the payment after threatening to disrupt his deportation flight.
In June, The Independent revealed that the UK had paid migrants a total of £53m to leave the country over the past four years.
Labour backbenchers have strongly criticised Ms Mahmood’s wide-ranging reforms, which are aimed at deterring migrants from seeking asylum in the UK and making it easier to remove people with no right to be in the country.
The Home Office has billed the reforms, inspired by a strict approach taken by Denmark, as the “biggest changes to the asylum system in modern times”.
But they have been praised by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who posted on social media: “The Overton window has been obliterated, well done patriots.”
The “Overton window” refers to the range of political ideas considered acceptable by the mainstream at a particular time.
Asked about Mr Robinson’s comments, Ms Mahmood said she would not “have any truck with anything that an individual like that has to say” but insisted that the government could not cede discussion of migration issues to the far right.
She said: “If mainstream politics cannot have a discussion about secure borders, and the rules by which people enter this country and the rules by which they must leave; if we cede that territory to the far right; if we show that we are either unable, unwilling or simply don’t have the capacity to even think about the issue properly ... then we have let our country down.”
The home secretary also said she found it “deeply offensive” when MPs quoted Mr Robinson at her in the Commons.
“I find it so offensive, actually, in the chamber, when people were quoting that particular person at me. This is a person who hates me because I’m a Muslim, who thinks that I’m a lesser kind of human being because I’m a Muslim... so it’s deeply offensive,” she said.
Following comments by Reform UK politicians suggesting she was emulating their language, Ms Mahmood said party leader Nigel Farage was “not looking to fix this problem”.
She said: “They’re making mischief, but it’s me that’s living now rent-free in their heads because I’m a politician that’s willing to both acknowledge a problem and have the solutions that are needed to fix it. They just need an issue to exploit.”
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