Voluntary Returns Service offers illegal immigrants and overstayers free flights, amnesty and way out of UK

Illegal immigrants can take advantage of an incentive scheme to leave Britain under packages, including free flights, money to start up businesses and help with finding schools for their children.

The Home Office offers failed asylum seekers and those who overstay their visa an amnesty from arrest if they attend meetings to discuss their return.

Anyone who leaves voluntarily could be allowed back into the UK in as little as two years, while those who are arrested and deported face a 10 year ban.

The Daily Mail reports that a senior immigration official has appeared on a spiritual guru’s TV show to promote the Voluntary Returns Scheme. 

Richard Lederle, leader of the South-East England immigration compliance and enforcement team, recently appeared on a cable TV show called Spiritual Live to advertise the Home Office’s new stance.

He told guru Shri RajRajeshwar Guruji: ‘We’ve changed the approach over the past six to 12 months, where we are running these surgeries within the communities to give this free advice to those who find themselves in an increasingly difficult situation and here illegally.

‘What you get with the Voluntary Returns Service is a more tailored, bespoke package specific to the individual needs of that case. That would include potential medical assistance, certainly if there’s family, and in terms of potential reintegration, we’re looking at education costs, possible work placements on return to country of origin.’

Mr Lederle added: ‘There has to be a benefit. If you’re returned through the enforced route, you face almost inevitably a ten-year return ban. The benefits could be a reduction to as little as two years. You can talk face-to-face without fear of being arrested. Let’s be absolutely clear on that point, if they are willing to turn up to those surgeries, they will not be arrested.’

While some critics argue that the generous terms of the Voluntary Returns Scheme is a bribe that sends out the message that it is acceptable to be in the UK illegally, the Home Office has little choice but to offer incentives to the estimate 1 million visa overstayers and illegal immigrants currently living in the UK. Human rights appeals can add hundreds of thousands of pounds and even millions to the final bill.

It costs the taxpayer an average of £10,000 to find and deport an illegal immigrant according to the think tank, ippr, which a few years ago estimated that it will cost £5 billion and 20 years to deport 500,000 overstayers.

   Nurses needed in the UK

One category of migrant the UK does not want to send home is nurses. The NHS and private sector are recruiting nurses now and offering working visas to candidates with ILETS 7.00 in ALL bands (no exceptions) and initial NMC registration. for further information on the NMC process see -

Nurses needed in UK, Work Permits and UK Visas available

New Prime Minister Theresa May revises UK net migration target

So much has happened since The UK voted to leave the EU in the June referendum BREXIT that it’s difficult to know where to start. David Cameron resigned as Prime Minister and has been replaced by a woman, Mrs Theresa May - only the second time we've had a female leader since Margaret Thatcher in the 70’ and 80’s! Boris Johnson is the new Foreign Secretary and we have a new Home Secretary, Amber Rudd – a direct descendant of King Charles II and his mistress, Barbara Palmer.

Amber Rudd, who appeared in the movie, Four Weddings and a Funeral, has a fascinating ‘blue blood’ lineage. King Charles acknowledged five of Palmer’s children as his, including Ms Rudd’s ancestor Anne – and Henry FitzRoy, whose descendants include the late Diana, Princess of Wales, and therefore Princes William and Harry too. Other descendants of Palmer include Sarah, Duchess of York, the Mitford sisters, philosopher Bertrand Russell and former Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden.

Amber Rudd MP, Home Secretary

Photo By Government of UK - https://www.gov.uk/government/people/amber-rudd, OGL 3, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50153624

Theresa May was Home Secretary, in charge of the Home Office, during the Cameron governments when the coalition government introduced a target to slash net migration to the tens of thousands. Last year net migration was over 350,000 and one of the first things Theresa May did when she moved into 10 Downing Street was to quietly revise this seemingly unreachable target. The target is now for sustainable levels of net migration.

During her long reign as Home Secretary, Mrs May dramatically reduced immigration from outside of the European Union, which, unlike EU migration, she could control. Thousands of colleges were close down and tens of thousands of students lost their sponsorship and returned home.

There are still thousands of student visa overstayers, who could not afford to go back home after failing to obtain a working visa to stay in the UK.

Tough new rules were introduced on marriage and family migration, visa appeals, work permits, indefinite leave to remain and British citizenship, where work permit holders will in future need to earn at least £35,000. The figure, seen as discriminatory by migrant groups, is higher than the UK national average salary and had led to an online petition calling to end to the rule.

Overseas trained international Nurses will be exempt only as long as they remain on the official shortage occupation list, but other work permit holders could face deportation if they fail to make the grade. However, £35,000 is achievable by Nurses, Doctors and Managers. I have met Nurses earning over £50,000 five years ago.  

Student Nurses are finding it difficult to convert to a work permit from their visas as band 3 Nurses. Every week I receive enquiries from distressed nurses who have a UK degree but cannot quite get the required IELTS result, or have lost their visas because the Home Office has cancelled their employer’s Tier 2 sponsorship.

If you are still stuck or unable to migrate, have you considered working from home or setting up a home-based business? Anyone can now set up a home based Internet business working from home or selling goods online. Companies like Amazon, eBay and Upwork offer everyone an opportunity to earn a living and even make a fortune working from home and living the laptop lifestyle.

It has never been as easy as it is right now to set up an online business I work from home. In the past, you needed a lots of technical knowledge and skills to set up websites and marketing ability to work online. Now there are companies which doodle for you.

The internet has opened up a whole new world of learning, working, socialising and doing business. We no longer need to go back to school or university to learn new skills. We can work from home, start a business or find a new life partner all from the comfort of our home.

At the click of a mouse, you can now find everything from a short instructional video to a full degree course online. If you would like more information on a free course on how to survive and thrive in the digital revolution and discover the truth about making money online, click here.

See also:

Uber offering free English courses to migrant worker drivers 

Immigration Act 2016 - main highlights in a nutshell

Special Report

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UK visa overstayers still here despite £30 million Home Office illegal immigration crackdown

A new immigration report has slammed the Government and Home Office for failing to find and deport thousands of foreign nationals overstaying and living illegally in the UK.

The Home Office has been criticised for failing to crack down on the number of foreign nationals who have overstayed their visas in the UK.

The inspector of borders and immigration John Vine said the Government had failed to reduce the number of 'overstayers' despite a flagship Home Office scheme costing millions of pounds designed to reduce the number of illegal immigrants in the UK.

Mr Vine said the ‘immigration refusal pool’, or the numberof foreign nationals refused leave to remain in the UK after 2008, was 174,057 in June 2012.

That visa refusal figure was relatively unchanged in the same period this year and remained at 173,562.

Mr Vine said:

"Any failure to take action against foreign nationals who overstay their permission to be in the UK has the potential to undermine public confidence in immigration control."

The Home Office awarded a multi-million pound contract to outsourcing firm Capita in 2012 to review and, where possible, close the records of foreign nationals in the migration refusal pool.

But according to Mr Vine, Capita has not only failed to deliver on the Government's ambition to crack down on illegal 'overstayers' it has also overstated its successes.

The report highlights a sample of 57 migrant records closed by Capita after stating that the overstayer had left the country. Inspectors found that 16 – around one quarter - had been ‘closed in error’.

This would amount to 1,140 records in 2013/14, 25% of the 4,080 people Capita reported to have left the UK that year, may still be illegally staying in the country. 

"I was disappointed to find a high level of inaccuracy in the classification of MRP records, with more than a quarter of departures in my sample being incorrectly recorded," Mr Vine added.

"Considerable improvements in the Home Office's capability to monitor, progress, and prioritise the immigration enforcement caseload will be needed to deliver its strategy for reducing the level of irregular migration."

Immigration and Security Minister James Brokenshire defended the Home Office:

"We inherited an immigration system in complete disarray, which turned a blind eye to hundreds of thousands of people with no right to be here, and made no attempt to remove them or even to properly identify the scale of the problem.

"Under the UK Border Agency there was no systematic plan to deal with illegal migrants other than failed asylum seekers and foreign criminals. We scrapped the failing UK Border Agency and brought its work back under the control of ministers partly in order to sort out that mess."

The Government has introduced a new Immigration Act, which cuts the number of human rights type visa appeals blocking the deportation of an illegal immigrant from 17 to 4 

Immigration specialist Cynthia Barker said that the problem of visa overstayers will take years to solve:

"The UK still has no proper system to count people in and out of its borders, so nobody really knows how many overstayers and illegal immigrants there are in the UK. 

"Research by the think tank ippr, suggests that the illegal immigration figure is at least 500,000, which it estimates would take £5 billion and 20 years to deport and remove all of the overstayers.

"The longer an illegal migrants stays in the UK the more chance they have of staying, for instance due to right to a family life under article 8 or through a long stay concession or amnesty."

The failure of the campaign to remove overstaying migrants and students included the ‘go home’ vans and Capita’s bungled 40,000 text messages to so-called illegal immigrants and visa overstayers, asking them to leave the UK. Many of the messages were sent in error to British citizens.