Foreign inmates get more cash to go

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The improved package is being offered for the next five-and-a-half weeks as the Government tries to meet a target to remove 4,000 foreign prisoners by the end of the year, it has been revealed.

A Home Office spokesman said that ministers expected the target to be met, and said the facilitated return scheme was being enhanced because it had proved a "practical and cost-effective" means of persuading inmates to return home to complete their sentences.

The scheme was initially introduced in 2006 by then Home Secretary John Reid as a means of easing the prisons overcrowding crisis. Prisoners from outside the European Economic Area were offered a reintegration package of £800 to help with education, training, housing and resettlement on their return to their home country.

Now, changes introduced without fanfare mean that any prisoner applying before December 7 and leaving Britain before January 1 will be able to apply for help totalling £1,500.

Mark Leech, the editor of the Prisons Handbook, said that the move "gives totally the wrong impression", particularly as many of the 10,000-plus foreign prisoners in UK jails are poor people from Caribbean countries who sought to make money by acting as drugs "mules".

"What message are we sending out that you get convicted and then can receive a £1,500 package of help with training, education and resettlement on returning home? It is just wrong," he said.

Conservative justice spokesman Nick Herbert said: "Gordon Brown talked tough when he promised to remove all foreign criminals. Now it appears he is having to resort to larger bribes to beg them to leave.

"The suspicion is that the Government is desperate to meet a target for deportations, which in any case is only a fraction of the foreign national prison population."

A total of 2,784 foreign national prisoners were removed or deported between April 2006 and March 2007.