£1M REPATRIATION PLAN SEES JUST ONE FAMILY GO

Critics say it shows again how the Government’s asylum system is “shambolic and failed” because of Labour “mismanaging it from start to finish”.

Tory immigration spokesman Damian Green said: “This piece of incompetence by the Government has managed to combine being unfair to the British taxpayer with being inhumane to children.

“The Home Office spent a lot of our money on this project and didn’t only waste that money but wasted the opportunity.

“Finding alternatives to detention so you’re not locking up children for weeks on end is a good idea. They just messed it up.” The scheme was a response to criticism of the Government for locking up some 2,000 children a year with their families in detention centres before their forcible removal from the UK.

It relied on a “softly softly” approach of sending families to an open unit, where they could come and go and their children would attend local schools while they got help from a charity to organise a voluntary return home.

Some 240 families who had exhausted the appeals process were expected to go through the centre, a former old people’s home in Ashford, Kent, but it housed just 13 and only one family left.