Illegal migrants facing deportation ‘are given art classes and IT lessons… at a cost to the taxpayer’

Migrants awaiting deportation are allegedly being given art classes and IT lessons at a cost to the taxpayer, as soon as they arrive at removal centres.

Prisoners and those having their immigration status decided at Brook House and Tinsley House, near Gatwick Airport, will apparently have access to a range of luxuries including ‘welfare buddies’, board games and free gym access.

They will allegedly also be able to pick from a collection of library books, attend English classes, and even order fresh produce and items of their choosing from the local store. 

These are the terms of a lucrative £260m contract for public services company Serco to operate the centres just 200 metres from the runway at the airport for eight years, The Sun reports.

They are currently housing migrants getting ready for deportation or awaiting a decision on their immigration status.

Some foreign prisoners are also transferred to the centres so they can serve a chunk of their sentence before being returned home.

And, according to The Sun, a 65-page document shows the wealth of provisions offered to migrants in the establishments as they wait to be deported.

Further details of the in-depth art classes show that they involve sketching, crafts and acrylic painting and are conducted in ‘comfortable and pleasant’ craft rooms.

Migrants awaiting deportation at Brook House, pictured, near Gatwick Airport, are allegedly being given art classes and IT lessons at a cost to the taxpayer

Migrants can make requests for food, including fresh produce, they would like from the shops.

Back at the centre, it is written into the contract that those staying there need to have means of preparing a hot beverage available around the clock.

Migrants can make a free international phone call and are afforded access to newspapers in different languages, religious texts and e-books.

They receive a further £5 per week of spending money and area able to earn £1 an hour to do work, including serving food, cleaning and managing the on-site gym.

Diversity and equality committee meetings must be held each month, while the centres are required to appoint a diversity and equality advisor and issue annual race relations reports.

Offensive posters must be taken down and removed from view.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said: ‘Illegal immigrants should be on the first plane out, not getting art classes. Taxpayers’ money is being wasted on this nonsense.

‘The Conservatives plan to come out of the European Convention on Human Rights to enable the urgent deportation of 150,000 illegal immigrants and foreign criminals each year.

Prisoners and those having their immigration status decided at Brook House, pictured, as well as Tinsley House will have access to ‘welfare buddies’, board games and free gym access

‘The Government must stop messing around with woke nonsense and concentrate on deporting those with no right to be here.’

Opened in 2009, Brook House has roughly 450 beds and houses adult men. It boasts table tennis and pool tables, gym equipment, and IT access.

Tinsley House is smaller, housing around 160 men, including some groups in six-bed rooms. 

The Daily Mail has approached Serco for comment.

It comes after footage revealed what happens onboard a deportation flight for foreign criminals – with some seen being handed bank cards pre-loaded with £2,000.

Clips showed the group of serious offenders, including killers, thieves and sexual abusers, being returned to Romania having served part of their prison sentences.

As many as six staff were seen accompanying every passenger up the stairs to the plane to avoid them attempting to flee – while others had to be put in restraints to stop them lashing out.

The footage – filmed by ITV News – was the first time journalists were allowed onboard a deportation flight for foreign national offenders (FNOs).

A total of 47 people were deported, most of them men with half a dozen women, in an operation requiring almost a hundred staff that would have cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The FNOs onboard originally came to the UK legally, before forfeiting their right to remain by committing a serious crime.

Those handed cards pre-loaded with cash as part of the Facilitated Return Scheme, which hands criminals up to £2,000 to encourage them to volunteer to be returned.

They were told to withdraw the cash after landing and use it to aid their resettlement in Romania.

The ITV film began in a deportation centre near Heathrow, where a journalist began quizzing some of the migrants.

‘Do you want to go home?’ he asked one.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’ve been living here ten years.’

The journalist asked a second man what crime he had committed, but he refused to say.

It comes after footage revealed what happens onboard a deportation flight for foreign criminals – with some seen being handed bank cards pre-loaded with £2,000 

One particularly aggressive deportee had to be fitted with arm restraints 

Several deportation flights leave Britain every week heading to a variety of different countries, with 5,000 FNOs sent home last year.

More than 10,000 inmates in the country’s seriously overcrowded jails are foreigners, and removing them is a government priority.

The deportation flights take place in the dead of night to avoid being disrupted by protests, with every FNO accompanied by three staff, while the most violent require half a dozen and are driven to the airport in their own individual van.

The Home Office did not disclose the airline that was used for the flight or the airport it was heading to.

Three migrants who were meant to be onboard avoided the flight by mounting legal claims.

Commenting on the footage, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood admitted the sight of criminals being handed £2,000 in taxpayer cash ‘doesn’t look good’.

But she said: ‘A voluntary removal is actually cheaper for the British taxpayer.

‘It has long been the case that we do offer financial packages as an incentive to people to drop their claims and drop the attempts they make to stay in our country, and to board a flight and leave.’

Once they arrive in Romania, the criminals are free to go.

One said he was ‘very happy’ and would ‘never come back to London’ after spending four months in an immigration centre.