Government Posts £15 Million Contract for Illegal Immigrant Reintegration Programme

A Border Force vessel brings in a group of illegal migrants following a small boat incident in the English Channel in Dover, Kent, on Feb. 25, 2024. Gareth Fuller/PA Media

The government has posted a £15 million contract notice for a returns programme for illegal immigrants being sent home.

Successful bidders will be supporting the Home Office in its key priorities of tackling illegal immigration and removals by providing “reintegration support” for those being sent back home, including coordinating temporary accommodation and helping them find work.

The destinations listed are Albania, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Iraq, Jamaica, Nigeria, Pakistan, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe.

The Home Office said the project is suitable for those in the voluntary and community sector, and will be inviting bids from charitable and non-profiting making organisations across the UK and overseas.

The contract start date is April 1, 2025, and is to run for three financial years, each year budgeted at £5,000,000.

The notice was published days after Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said her office would be increasing removals of failed asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, after announcing that the new Border Security Command was “gearing up” to tackle illegal immigration.

Reintegration Support

Some of the tasks successful bidders will be expected to undertake include coordinating “cash assistance” to meet returnees’ immediate needs, as well as providing care and food packs, arranging residential accommodation for up to five nights upon arrival, and in-country transportation to an onward destination.

Contractors will also be helping returnees with their long-term reintegration in their home country, including support with official documentation and family reunification services.

Returnees will also get help finding a job, accessing training or further education, and even support in setting up a business.

The Home Office also says service providers will be engaged in the “monitoring and evaluation of the returning individual’s reintegration outcomes.”

On Thursday, Home Office figures showed that more than 20,000 illegal immigrants have arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel so far this year.

Some 614 people made the journey in 10 boats on Wednesday, taking the provisional total for 2024 to 20,433, which is 3 percent higher than at the same time in 2023, when 19,801 had arrived but 18 percent lower than 2022 when the figure was 25,065.

A Home Office spokesman said: “We all want to see an end to dangerous small boat crossings, which are undermining border security and putting lives at risk.

“The new Government is taking steps to boost our border security, setting up a new Border Security Command which will bring together our intelligence and enforcement agencies, equipped with new counter-terror-style powers and hundreds of personnel stationed in the UK and overseas, to smash the criminal smuggling gangs making millions in profit.”

Increasing Detentions and Deportations

On August 21, the Home Office announced new measures to boost border security as well as pledging a “major surge in immigration enforcement and returns activity,” including increasing detention capacity at Immigration Removal Centres and increasing returns flights.

The government said it had already conducted nine successful returns flights in the previous six weeks and was redeploying personnel and resources to support further repatriation activities, aiming to increase deportations to their highest level since 2018.

Commenting last week, Peter Walsh, a senior researcher at Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, cast doubt on whether this would be much of an achievement.

Walsh told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme: “If we look at enforced removals, last year there were 6,000 and in 2018 there were 9,000—so this would require 3,000 more, a 50 percent increase, which sounds achievable.

“The other thing to point out is that 2018 is not a particularly high bar, apart from the pandemic that was the lowest number of enforced removals in 20 years.”

Rwanda Scheme

Before the election, Sir Keir Starmer pledged he would establish a Border Security Command and after winning in the July 4 election, scrapped the Conservatives’ Rwanda scheme, which would have seen asylum seekers who entered the country illegally—including those arriving by boat across the Channel—be sent to the African nation.

During the previous parliament, legal challenges against the measures caused delays in implementing the plans, resulting in not one flight taking off for Rwanda with illegal immigrants on board, bar four individuals who went voluntarily. According to Cooper, the scheme cost £700 million.

Shadow home secretary and Conservative Party leadership contender James Cleverly has criticised the new Labour government for saying it would get illegal immigration under control, while boats full of asylum seekers continue to land on Britain’s shores.

Cleverly posted to social media platform X on Wednesday: “At the election Labour promised to smash the people smuggling gangs.

“Two months into Government and almost 6,000 arrivals later, they’ve proved they were never serious about tackling illegal migration.”

The former home secretary has previously criticised Labour for scrapping the Rwanda scheme, saying it removed a deterrent to people smuggling and illegal immigration.

PA Media contributed to this report.