But it ended up spending an average of £2.6 billion per year.
Failed migrants will receive free accommodation and help in getting a job as part of the UK Home Office’s £15 million plan to “reintegrate” them back into their home countries.
The contract for the ‘Home Office Reintegration Programme’ would run from April 1, 2025, to March 31, 2028.
This support would include “cash assistance”, “provision of care and food packs”, five days of accommodation upon arrival and help in getting a job.
The 11 nations it wants to deliver the support to are Albania, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Iraq, Jamaica, Nigeria, Pakistan, Vietnam and Zimbabwe.
It comes as a new report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) criticised overspending on the asylum system by the Tories and accused Labour of repeating their mistakes by submitting figures it “knows to be insufficient”.
Between 2021/22 and 2023/24, plans by the Home Office budgeted an average of £110 million a year for asylum operations.
But it ended up spending an average of £2.6 billion per year.
The IFS report claims that the “woeful way” the Home Office and HM Treasury have budgeted for asylum costs lies at the heart of the recent disagreement between Chancellor Rachel Reeves and her predecessor Jeremy Hunt.
In a financial audit, spending pressures relating to asylum and illegal migration were one of the largest items identified amounting to an estimated £6.4billion in 2024/25.
Mr Hunt replied that this contradicted the budgets signed off by civil servants and presented to parliament just weeks before.
The IFS said both the current and former chancellors have a point – but only because the Home Office and HM Treasury are continuing the “poor budgeting practice” of recent years.
Since Labour came to power, the number of Channel small boat arrivals has now passed 6,000.
Home Office figures revealed that 526 migrants reached the UK from northern France on August 27, 2024.
It brought the total since the start of the year to 19,820.
One of Labour’s first acts in office was getting rid of the Conservative Party’s Rwanda asylum scheme.
Labour’s plan to deal with the migration crisis involves creating a new Border Security Command, which will bring together existing immigration units and equip them with new “counter-terrorism style” powers and new returns agreements with other countries.
It recently emerged that the number of Channel migrants getting permission to remain indefinitely in Britain has quadrupled, while efforts to increase deportations have stalled.
Over 25,300 people who arrived in the UK by small boat were granted asylum or another type of humanitarian protection in the year to June 2024.
It compared with about 6,600 in the previous 12 months.
Across all types of asylum claims, the number granted in 2023 hit an all-time high of 76,176, – more than triple the previous year’s figure.
The increases were due to a backlog-clearing exercise launched by ex-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak which aimed to eliminate “legacy” asylum claims by the end of 2023.
At the same time, just three per cent of the total number of small boat migrants who arrived in the UK since the start of the Channel crisis have been removed.
The data showed that of the 127,834 migrants who have reached Britain since 2018, only 3,788 have been sent home.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “As the Home Secretary announced last week, the Government is planning to deliver a major surge in immigration enforcement and returns activity to remove people with no right to be in the UK and ensure the rules are respected and enforced.
“Continued international cooperation with partner nations plays a critical role in this, and we will be working closely with a number of countries across the globe as part of the mission to end irregular migration.”
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