Only four foreign criminals were on a deportation flight to Jamaica when it took off yesterday after 33 were removed following last-ditch human rights appeals.
Home Secretary Priti Patel described it as ‘absolutely galling’ that an airliner capable of seating 350 people chartered by the Home Office for as much as £300,000 was almost empty when it finally departed.
Last night Miss Patel pledged that the Government’s Nationality and Borders Bill would ‘make it easier to remove foreign criminals and prevent them from gaming the broken system’.
She said: ‘I make no apology for removing foreign national offenders. It is absolutely galling that, yet again, last-minute legal claims have stopped the removal of 33 people, including those guilty of abhorrent crimes such as murder and child sexual offences.’
Only four foreign criminals were on a deportation flight to Jamaica when it took off yesterday after 33 were removed following last-ditch human rights appeals - 13 in the last 24 hours
A total of 33 criminals who had between them served sentences totalling 127 years were removed as a result of ‘last-minute legal claims’ – 13 in the 24 hours prior to departure.
Additional would-be deportees are understood to have been removed from the flight list due to a Covid outbreak at Colnbrook, an immigration removal centre near Heathrow Airport where they had been held.
That meant just four remained when the Airbus A350 finally set off from Birmingham Airport in the early hours of yesterday morning.
They had served sentences totalling 16 years and 3 months for ‘serious crimes’.
While the exact cost of hiring yesterday’s charter plane has not been revealed, previous flights have cost around £300,000, meaning the cost to the taxpayer could have been as high as £75,000 per criminal.
After the previous deportation effort in August resulted in
