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Open Stop pilot scheme giving up to £40,000 to failed asylum seeker families

Created by Alison Dean-Norman
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The UK government should stop its pilot scheme offering failed asylum seekers our hard earned money for them to leave the UK.

We feel it is not fair to the UK people to provide our money to failed asylum seekers to get them to leave.

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  • Government responded to this petition

    An enhanced family returns pilot started on 5 March with the application period closing on 11 June. Only families who were contacted directly by the Home Office were eligible for the offer.

    Read the response in full

    Family returns are, by their nature, different to returning a single adult. They require a different approach, with specific statutory safeguarding responsibilities, family dynamics, limitations on the physical handling of children and detention adding complexities.

    The focus for the pilot was to offer eligible families up to £10,000 per person to leave the UK, capped at £40,000 per family, and backed by enforced removal where families refuse to comply.

    Keeping families in hotels can cost up to £158,000 a year for a family of three and a recent estimate placed the cost of an enforced removal for a single person at an average of £48,800. Supporting a quicker, voluntary departure enables families to have more control over how they leave the UK and is far cheaper for the public purse.

    The offer matches the strategic and time-limited approach seen in Denmark, where voluntary return is prioritised and families are offered payments up to the equivalent of £30,000 to expedite departures. This has contributed to them halving the number of people awaiting deportation, including rejected asylum seekers and foreign criminals more broadly.

    Alongside this pilot, we ran a targeted consultation with a range of expert and interested stakeholders on reforms to the family returns process. The consultation closed on Friday 5 June 2026, and work is now underway to analyse the responses. Any reform will restore fairness and credibility to the asylum system by enforcing a clear endpoint once claims are exhausted.

    The Home Office intends to publish a response setting out the consultation’s findings in due course.

    Every family leaving the UK delivers a direct saving to the taxpayer and another step towards ending hotel use for good, and the Government is acting urgently to deliver exactly that.

    Home Office

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  • Petition published

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    If this petition gets 10,000 signatures, government will respond to it.

    If this petition gets 100,000 signatures, it will be considered for debate in Parliament.

    This petition will stay open until 10 October 2026.