How much do migrant returns flights actually cost?published at 10:59 British Summer Time
10:59 BST
Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify journalist
Image source, PA Media
Reform UK says it’s planning to run five migrant returns flights per day as part of its ambition to deport people who arrive in the UK illegally.
It says this and other measures in the plan will cost £10bn over five years but that money would be saved by not housing asylum seekers in hotels.
There’s not a huge amount of publicly available information about the cost of migrant return flights.
A recent Home Office assessment, external – which looked at the economic impact of the previous government’s Illegal Migration Bill – estimated that it would cost £22,000 per person being returned to a third country.
It said that this cost “includes their removal flight as well as the contract for resource to monitor and transport individuals from detention to any legal court sittings, from detention to the flight for removal, and onboard the flight to the recipient safe third country”.
We haven’t seen the full detail of Reform’s plan yet but the party has indicated people would be returned to their home countries and that third countries would also be considered.
In the first year of the current government, 66 chartered returns flights were recorded by the Home Office, external, up from 63 in the same period the year before.