NIGEL FARAGE has said a Reform UK government would pay failed asylum seekers a maximum of £1,000 to return home voluntarily, a tenth of what the home secretary is offering under a new government pilot scheme. The amount is even lower than the party's own previous proposal.
Speaking at a press conference in Warwickshire, the Reform leader said the payment would cover the cost of a flight and leave a small sum for the migrant on arrival.
"It would be maximum £1,000, not the £40,000 per family that home secretary Shabana Mahmood is seeking to offer," he was quoted as saying. "You have to find a way of making this work, and I think that would work."
The figure marks a further reduction from the £2,500 Reform had suggested last August, and sits below the current government cap of £3,000 under its existing voluntary returns scheme.
Mahmood recently launched a pilot offering failed asylum seekers up to £10,000 each, or £40,000 per family, if they agreed to leave within seven days of their application being rejected.
Around 150 families are expected to take part in the trial. The Home Office argued the scheme makes financial sense: it currently costs around £53,000 a year to house a single failed asylum seeker, and around £158,000 for a family of three. Ministers said a successful rollout could save the taxpayer £20 million annually.
Farage added, "When I was told this, I thought it must be a joke," he said, arguing that large payouts would encourage people to game the system — entering Britain illegally, taking the money, and then returning.
"I play the round robin. This is an absolute farce," he noted. Reform's home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf went further, calling the pilot "an absolutely insane idea" and "a massive insult."
Farage pointed instead to the US, where he said a policy of offering migrants a flight home and a modest cash payment had led nearly one and a half million people to leave voluntarily over the past 18 months.
Labour accused Reform of being inconsistent, noting the party had now proposed at least two different figures. "While Reform tie themselves in knots chasing headlines, this Labour government is getting on with the job of restoring control of our borders and removing those with no right to be here," a party spokesman said.
Farage was joined at the event by Siobhan Whyte, whose daughter Rhiannon was murdered by an illegal migrant from Sudan in 2024.
Whyte told reporters her grandson had been left without a mother and called on the government to act before more families suffered the same loss. "Something needs to be done," she said. "When's the next murder, and a family having to go through what we're going through?"
