Afghan asylum-seekers to be paid £600 to go home

The Home Office is to offer Afghan asylum-seekers £600 each to go home, saying the war-ravaged nation is now safe.

Afghan families will be given up to £2,500. The Home Office said it would pay the money when the asylum-seekers were on their way home. It said it would be using fingerprint and iris records to prevent abuse of the scheme.

The Immigration minister Beverley Hughes said the payments would ensure that the return of the asylum-seekers was "sustainable and enable them to play a part in rebuilding their country". Refugee groups welcomed the support package but warned against placing undue pressure on asylum-seekers to return to a country that they said remained "very unsafe" for many people.

The return of Afghan asylum-seekers for the first time in seven years was predicted by The Independent earlier this year. Last year, Afghanistan was the chief source of asylum-seekers coming to Britain, with 9,190 applications.

The Government recently stopped routinely granting Afghan asylum claimants exceptional leave to remain.

Ms Hughes said yesterday: "We want to help those who want to go home voluntarily to do so in a dignified and sustainable manner."

She added: "And of course, helping people to return voluntarily is significantly cheaper than supporting them while their asylum claim is considered and then enforcing their return if their asylum claim is rejected."

The voluntary return package would begin "later in the summer" and would last for six months. Ms Hughes said: "The money will be paid to returnees during the course of their journey back to Afghanistan, with eligibility closely monitored and biometric [fingerprint and iris] data used to verify the identity of recipients to help eliminate fraud."

More than a million Afghan refugees have already returned to their country from Pakistan and other neighbouring states where they had been in camps.

In Britain, the Afghan community is more than 40,000-strong and has arrived in waves after a succession of political and religious upheavals.

All the main ethnic groups of Afghanistan – the Pashtuns, Hazaras, Uzbeks and Tajiks – are well represented in Britain. Most Afghans have settled in the western suburbs of London, although other communities exist in cities including Leeds, Birmingham and Glasgow.

Margaret Lally, the deputy chief executive of the Refugee Council, welcomed the support scheme for returnees but said asylum-seekers should be allowed to assess their options. She said: "Our experience shows that programmes limited to short periods can place undue pressure on refugees to go home before they are ready and when the situation in their home country, as is the case with Afghanistan, is very unstable and insecure. The absolute bottom line is that returns must be voluntary."

Ms Lally added that the complexities of Afghanistan meant that the country was still clearly unsafe for some individuals, particularly women and people from some ethnic groups.

In developing and operating the scheme, the Home Office said it was working in partnership with the UNHCR – the United Nations refugee organisation – the International Organisation for Migration, the Afghan embassy, non- government organisations and the Afghan communities in Britain.