One utterly jaw-dropping policy introduced by the present government is to pay illegal immigrants to go home. An illegal immigrant can get as much as £4,000 in cash and hand-outs to finance their return. The government justifies this handout by telling us that it costs £10,000 to send an illegal immigrant home and £3,000 or £4,000 gives the tax payer good value for money. Ministers have also said that it costs £11,000 so they are not that sure about their figures. So what does this policy entail?

Let us put aside the morality or otherwise of paying someone who has broken the law to "go away". I would like to know how they come to the £10,000 (or £11,000) figure. But that information does not seem to be forthcoming. My guess is that they take the costs associated with running the Border and Immigration Agency and/or the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (both part of the Home Office) and divide it by the number of illegal immigrants that get repatriated. Or maybe they use the figure for a sub-department of the same agency. The obvious question that arises from that presumption is when someone is paid, say, £3,000 to leave the country, is that £3,000 removed from the cost of running the agency? The answer is, of course, no! The number of people engaged in removing illegal immigrants will not be reduced, the cost of the plane ticket will be the same. Nothing is saved. This is not good value for money and anyone who has half a gram of common sense would know that.

If we move on to the morality question, then this looks an even worse deal. How can it be morally right to pay people who must have, by their own admission, admitted to breaking the law, to stop breaking the law? If we are going to do this, surely the money would be much better spent giving the money to a mugger or a violent burglar? After all, they are hurting people. Most illegal immigrants do not commit violent crime. The obvious and rightful reaction to that suggestion would be to suggest that by paying thieves and muggers £3,000 we would be encouraging people to become thieves and muggers. Anyway, how could we know that those we had paid would stop being thuggish crooks? Of course, the same questions and issues apply when we pay illegal immigrants to stop being illegal immigrants. We encourage others to become illegal immigrants and we have no way of preventing those we have paid becoming illegal immigrants again.

The Times Online has an article entitled Take the Money and Run in which one of their reporters approaches the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) to determine how desperate the IOM and the Home Office are to give away tax payers' money. He poses as an illegal immigrant who has been in the country 11 years, has never paid tax, and has been drug-dealing as a living, and he asks for help setting up a business in India to bring other illegal immigrants to the UK. He is offered an assistance package from the British tax payer worth £4,000. If you wrote this as fiction, no-one would believe it!