Fury as Home Office pays 9,000 migrants up to £3k to go home after visas expire
The Home Office has come under renewed political criticism after figures reported in September 2026 showed that almost 9,000 Brazilian nationals had received financial assistance to leave the UK after becoming eligible for the Government’s voluntary returns programme.
The figures, reported by The Sun, show that 8,901 Brazilian nationals were among 20,365 people of all nationalities who left Britain through the assisted returns scheme over the two-year period from July 2024 to March 2026. The scheme can provide travel assistance and financial support to people who no longer have the right to remain in the UK.
The maximum payment available under the scheme is reported to be £3,000, although not everyone receives that amount. The reported average payment for those returning was approximately £1,964 per person.
The figures have prompted criticism from opponents of the Government’s immigration policy, who argue that taxpayers should not be providing financial incentives to people who have overstayed visas or otherwise have no legal right to remain.
The Government, however, argues that voluntary returns can be substantially cheaper than enforced removal and can reduce the costs associated with accommodating people who have no right to stay.
Nearly 9,000 Brazilian nationals
The scale of the Brazilian figure has attracted particular attention.
According to the figures reported this month, 8,901 Brazilian nationals used the assisted returns programme during the period examined. A further 3,629 Indian nationals were reported to have returned under the scheme, alongside 746 Colombians and 468 Hondurans.
The numbers do not mean that all of these people were in exactly the same immigration situation.
The assisted returns programme is available to people who may have overstayed a visa, failed an asylum claim or otherwise have no permission to remain in Britain. The scheme is therefore broader than a programme specifically designed for asylum seekers.
That distinction is important because the headline description of “migrants being paid to go home” covers several different categories of people.
Some may have entered the UK legally on a visa before their permission expired. Others may have exhausted immigration or asylum processes.
The common factor is that they are eligible for assistance to leave voluntarily.
How much money is involved?
The reported Home Office expenditure for the period from July 2024 to March 2026 was around £35 million.
The newspaper report said the overall cost had subsequently risen, with estimates putting the total at more than £40 million as the programme continued.
The maximum individual payment of £3,000 is not automatically given to every participant.
According to the reporting, the higher level of support is generally associated with families and vulnerable people, while the average payment across participants was considerably lower.
The financial support can include travel and living expenses intended to help people establish themselves after returning to their country of origin.
For the Government, the calculation is relatively straightforward: providing assistance to someone who agrees to leave voluntarily can cost less than locating, detaining and forcibly removing that person.
Why the Government defends voluntary returns
The Home Office has defended the policy on value-for-money grounds.
It says voluntary returns are cheaper than forced removals and can save taxpayers money, particularly where individuals would otherwise remain in accommodation funded by the state.
The Government has also said that returns of people with no right to remain in the UK have increased substantially.
This is part of a broader strategy to increase the number of people leaving Britain after their immigration permission has ended or after they have exhausted relevant legal routes.
A voluntary departure also avoids some of the practical difficulties associated with enforced removal.
There may be no need for detention, escorting or lengthy enforcement procedures, while the individual can make arrangements to travel voluntarily.
The Government therefore regards assisted returns as one component of immigration enforcement rather than an alternative to enforcement altogether.
Critics question the incentives
Opposition politicians have taken a different view.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp criticised the payments, arguing that the policy amounts to paying people who should instead have been prevented from remaining in the country illegally.
The criticism reflects a wider political disagreement about whether financial assistance encourages people to comply with immigration enforcement or instead creates an incentive for people to remain in the UK until they are offered money to leave.
That question is difficult to answer from the headline figures alone.
A person accepting assisted return may have been facing removal proceedings anyway. In such circumstances, the payment may simply make an already-planned departure easier and cheaper for the Government.
But critics argue that the existence of financial assistance could affect behaviour at the margin.
The effectiveness of the policy therefore depends not simply on how many people take the money, but on whether the scheme increases the number of people who actually leave the UK compared with what would have happened without financial assistance.
The Brazil figures and the Channel crossings debate
Another point of controversy concerns the nationality of people using the scheme.
The figures show a very large number of Brazilians taking assisted returns, while relatively few people from some of the nationalities most strongly associated with recent small-boat arrivals have used the programme.
The reporting cited only seven Eritrean nationals, 11 Sudanese nationals, 14 Afghans, three Somalis and 77 Iranians among those accepting assistance during the period.
This has led critics to argue that the programme does little to address the Channel-crossing problem.
But the two issues should not be treated as identical.
The assisted returns programme covers people with different immigration histories, while Channel crossings represent a particular method of irregular entry into the UK.
Someone who overstays a work, study or visitor visa is in a different legal and factual situation from someone who arrives irregularly and subsequently claims asylum.
Consequently, the number of Brazilians receiving assisted returns does not by itself measure the Government’s success or failure in dealing with small-boat crossings.
A separate issue: failed asylum seekers
The Government’s voluntary-return policy has also become more significant because ministers have been exploring additional financial incentives for people whose asylum claims have failed.
A new pilot reported in September 2026 offers some failed asylum seekers and their families financial support of up to £40,000 if they agree to return voluntarily, according to The Sun.
That proposal is considerably larger than the standard £3,000 maximum associated with the assisted returns figures discussed above.
The two schemes should therefore not be confused.
The £3,000 figure relates to the established assisted voluntary returns programme, while the much larger sum concerns a separate pilot aimed at encouraging certain failed asylum seekers to leave.
The Government’s argument is that a larger voluntary-return payment can still represent value for money if it avoids lengthy accommodation and enforcement costs.
The cost of forced removal
Enforced removal is considerably more complicated than simply purchasing an airline ticket.
It can involve locating individuals, detention, legal proceedings, escorts, travel arrangements and coordination with the receiving country.
The Home Office has argued that these costs can make voluntary departure financially preferable where an individual is willing to cooperate.
The newspaper report cited a potential cost of up to £48,000 for a forced removal, although the cost of individual cases can vary substantially depending on circumstances.
This is at the heart of the Government’s economic argument.
A payment of several thousand pounds can appear expensive in isolation. But if it prevents a substantially more expensive enforcement process, ministers argue that taxpayers may ultimately save money.
Critics, meanwhile, question whether such calculations adequately account for the deterrence effect of enforcement and the principle that people without permission to remain should leave without receiving financial incentives.
What the figures actually show
The latest figures provide a snapshot of how the UK’s voluntary returns system is being used, but they do not by themselves settle the wider argument over immigration policy.
They show that thousands of people have accepted assistance to leave Britain and that Brazilian nationals make up a particularly large share of those departures.
They also demonstrate that the Government is willing to spend public money to encourage voluntary departure.
What the figures do not establish is whether the payments encourage illegal immigration, discourage it, or have little effect on people’s decisions to enter or remain in the UK.
That would require evidence comparing the behaviour of people offered assisted returns with comparable groups who were not offered financial assistance.
A continuing political battle
The dispute over the payments is likely to continue as the Government attempts to increase the number of people leaving the UK who have no legal right to remain.
For ministers, voluntary return offers a potentially faster and less costly route out of the immigration system.
For critics, the payments raise questions about fairness, deterrence and whether public money should be used to encourage people to comply with an obligation to leave.
The figures also highlight the complexity of Britain’s immigration system.
The nearly 9,000 Brazilian nationals who received assistance are not simply a single category of “illegal migrants”. The programme covers different circumstances, including visa overstayers and people who have exhausted asylum or immigration routes.
Ultimately, the debate will centre on whether assisted voluntary return delivers measurable value to the taxpayer and whether it contributes to the Government’s wider objective of increasing departures among people who have no right to remain.
For now, the figures show that the scheme is being used on a significant scale — with thousands accepting financial assistance to leave the UK voluntarily.
