A deportation flight from the UK to Jamaica left with just four people on board, the Home Office has said. Several last-minute legal challenges meant 33 people did not board the flight as planned.
Home Secretary Priti Patel claimed that some of them were guilty of crimes such as murder and child sexual offences, adding: “It’s absolutely galling that they had been stopped from being deported. Lawyers for some of those due to be on board said it wasted taxpayers' money.
According to the Home Office, 13 of the 33 legal challenges were made in the 24 hours before the flight left the UK – adding that the sentences of the four people on board the flight totalled more than 16 years. Ms Patel said that she made no apology for removing foreign national offenders.
The Home Office said extensive checks have been carried out to ensure none of the people deported were British citizens, British nationals or members of the Windrush generation. A Movement for Justice survey of 17 Jamaicans detained for the flight found that 10 of them had lived in the UK since they were children – the flight was subjected to protests by ‘Stop the Plane’ activists.
The Airbus A350-900 plane - with a maximum capacity of 432 passengers - departed from Birmingham Airport.
The Home Office said a new plan for immigration to change the law will make it easier to remove foreign national offenders. The government regularly uses charter flights to deport people with serious criminal convictions or those who've received a custodial sentence of at least 12 months – the average cost of a deportation flight is around £200,000.
Since April 2020, 75 charter flights have returned people to other countries including Albania, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Nigeria, Poland, Romania and Spain. There were more than 5,000 enforced returns in the year ending June 2020 and around half of these were to EU countries.
Those who have been returned is a term that refers to all types of removals from the United Kingdom, with Jamaica representing 1% of the government's overall enforced returns in 2020.
