The UK taxpayer is reported to have spent over £38,000 ($46,000) on takeaway pizza for illegal boat migrants who crossed the English Channel.
Taxpayers in Britain have reportedly funded the purchase of takeaway pizza to the tune of over $46,000 for migrants who arrived in the country illegally via the English Channel, a report has claimed.
The country has been inundated by tens of thousands of migrants making the crossing in recent years, with it recently being reported that migrant criminals previously deported by the UK are returning to the country via the route.
According to a report by The Sun, government officials charged with looking after migrants at the now-closed Tug Haven holding centre spent £38,962 (~$46,188) at a single branch of Domino’s Pizza using government credit cards within five months.
The largest of these orders is reported to have consisted of 200 pizzas in one go, with staff at the branch reported by the publication as saying that they were “rushed off their feet” each time a fresh wave of migrants arrived.
Purchases of the pies have now reportedly ceased, with a catering company taking over the role of feeding the migrants as of December last year.
The revelation that such fast food was being supplied for illegal migrants comes shortly after government authorities confirmed that criminals previously deported by Britain were using the migrant crisis to re-enter the UK.
According to Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, at least one criminal migrant who was deemed to pose a “medium risk of harm” to others had returned to the UK via the channel, after being deported in the wake of him receiving a jail sentence of over 12 months.
“The safeguarding processes weren’t good enough to make sure [criminals] weren’t filtering out and making sure that people like that won’t be held in the same facility as women, children and families,” Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of the UK body is reported as saying.
He is also reported as conceding that facilities housing migrants are not up to standard, with the infrastructure currently in place insufficient to properly deal with the tens of thousands of migrants landing illegally in Britain each year.
“I remain very concerned about the haphazard arrangements in place for those who have crossed the Channel in small boats,” Taylor said. “Promised facilities in Dover had not materialised when we inspected in November 2021, and we found that some families were sleeping on the floor in flimsy tents with inadequate bedding or crammed into facilities where some basic safeguards were not in place.”
To make matters worse, the government’s current plan to outsource some of the asylum claims of the migrants who entered Britain illegally to Rwanda has been delayed until a new Prime Minister is put into power.
Such a Prime Minister could — in theory — then decide to amend or even scrap the migrant plan, though the country’s Home Office has affirmed that it remains committed to sending illegals to Rwanda.