Why was Hadush Kebatu paid £500 to leave Britain?

We don’t yet know what Rachel Reeves is planning to do with the welfare bill in her Budget. Will she propose more cuts to personal independence payments, or remove the two-child benefits limit? And what will she do about the new benefit which the Home Office has just invented? It is called – or at least I am calling it – Foreign Sex Offender Benefit, and it consists of a one-off payment of £500 in return for not complaining about being deported. That sum has just been made to Hadush Kebatu, the Epping sex offender who was jailed, accidentally released, captured and finally put on a plane back to Ethiopia today. I imagine the money will go quite a long way in Ethiopia, what with it being the equivalent of around three months’ average salary. Maybe Kebatu will put it aside for spending money next time he pops up in London. I would give that a few weeks.

The Home Office’s reasoning for the payment appears to be that if Kebatu had complained, it could have held up his deportation, which he could then have challenged at a migration tribunal. Given the reputation of asylum judges, they might have bought his argument that he couldn’t possibly be returned to Ethiopia because sex offenders are not terribly popular there. The government already has a returns scheme which offers payments of £1,500 to illegal migrants to return home, so no doubt officials thought a £500 bung was good value. But I suspect the public may well take a different view. If we are going to pay criminals to accept their punishment, then, by the same token, motorists caught breaking the speed limit can presumably now look forward to being paid £500 not to complain about being fined and having three points on their licence.

It rather shows how desperate the government was to be rid of Kebatu – and how frightened it is of asylum tribunals. Maybe ministers now think the problem will go away, and the protesters outside the now-notorious Bell Hotel in Epping will all go home. Then again, this £500 payment might just raise even more anger about the way that our migration system seems to be at the mercy of human rights lawyers. Kebatu had been convicted of a sexual offence. He had not raised a successful appeal against his sentence. So why on Earth should he be allowed a right to appeal against part of that sentence: deportation? If we cannot deport a convicted criminal without the matter being dragged through the courts – at public expense – then there is something seriously wrong with our human rights laws. Keir Starmer might try to congratulate himself on the government’s occasional victory against lawyers representing the interests of illegal migration, but he cannot relied upon to improve the situation. Human rights lawyers are his crowd; human rights charters his creed. He will do nothing to undermine them.