Experts have cast doubt on new Labour plans to tackle the migrant crisis by asking taxpayers to shell out up to £40,000 per family to ask them to leave Britain. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood trumpeted the scheme, which would see up to four people in a failed asylum seeker family paid £10,000 each to leave the UK within seven days of receiving the taxpayer cash.

Ms Mahmood said the "incentive payments" were offered in a trial to 150 families living in taxpayer-funded accommodation. The Home Office said if the scheme was successful in that instance, it could save the Treasury £20 million a year. The larger payments are being trialled alongside the existing voluntary returns programme which offers failed asylum seekers a £3,000 payment to leave without a seven-day deadline. In 2025, around 80,000 migrants had their asylum applications rejected, but only 10,000 accepted the £3,000 handshake.

The Home Secretary said housing a family of three in asylum accommodation costs the taxpayer up to £158,000 a year and she said the "increased incentive payment" would bring a saving to the taxpayer and echo similar schemes set up in Denmark.

But now experts on the Danish system have warned Labour could be heading along a road to nowhere with their new £40K per family plan. Michelle Pace, visiting fellow at Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford and associate fellow at think-tank Chatham House, told the i Paper take-up of the Danish scheme remains "relatively small".

She told the paper the new British payment system "may facilitate return for a small number of migrants, but it is unlikely to transform migration patterns on its own".

And Sine Plambech, senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, said if Labour was presenting the new payment as a solution it was "not what we see here" in Denmark.

She claimed it was "not the money that makes people retun home" but rather the "condition" of the country they had come to Britain from.

Last year saw the second-highest annual total of people crossing the Channel, with 41,472 people arriving in the UK by small boat.

So far this year, some 3,863 people have arrived in the UK via small boat, according to official figures, including 144 people in two boats on Thursday.

Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said: "Keir Starmer and Shabana Mahmood are too weak to take the necessary action, such as coming out of the ECHR and deporting all illegal immigrants within a week of arrival.

"Labour's decision to cancel the Rwanda removals plan was a disaster. Since the election 67,000 illegal immigrants have crossed the channel - an increase of 45% compared to the same period before."