The UK government has reportedly paid over $4 million dollars to private firms to taxi migrants, a report has claimed.
A UK newspaper has reported that the UK Home Office has given contracts worth over $4 million to private taxi firms for the movement of illegal migrants and asylum seekers.
With hundreds of migrants arriving in the UK on average by small boat every week, authorities are now struggling to properly monitor, look after, and process new arrivals, with a significant number of migrants said to have been simply dumped on the streets of London after arriving in the country.
According to a report published by The Times on Monday, the UK Home Office is overall paying more than £3.7 million (~$4.24 million) on transporting migrants using private companies operating taxis, vans and buses.
The contracts reportedly cover “emergency transport” for migrants to and from various holding facilities — which can reportedly include hotels block-booked by the government to bolster housing for illegals — as well as the transport of underage migrants and asylum seekers to foster placements or other alternative accommodation.
Drivers reportedly say that they are paid around £2 (~$2.29) per mile by the Home Office to transport migrants, with the owner of one local taxi company reported as saying that he was paid £150 ($172) last month to drive two adult men from a migrant centre in Kent to London last month.
On another trip, the man says he ended up earning £570 ($654) after transporting a teenage migrant from a Holiday Inn to a location in Liverpool which the driver assumes was his foster home.
Not all migrants appear to be receiving housing, however, with a report emerging last week that a number of migrants were simply dumped by authorities at a major London station to fend for themselves.
While the UK Home Office has insisted that the migrants told officials that they had a place to stay, others have disputed this telling of events.
“I’ve been told by people with Home Office lanyards or wherever they are, just drop them in London, no one cares, it’s fine, King’s Cross Station’s okay, or Victoria Station,” one taxi driver, known as Rizwan, told LBC last week in regards to some migrants he had transported on government money.
The driver meanwhile said that he had spoken to a number of migrants from Afghanistan, who showed him papers saying that they had actually been declined permission to stay in Britain.
“On a couple of occasions there’ve been Afghans in the back of my car and we happen to have a common language… they showed me the paperwork, ‘It says I’ve been declined, I’ve got no basis to be in this country’ or whatever, but they’re being let go,” he said. “They don’t know where they’re going, they just know that they’ll sort themselves out.”
Rizwan also describes transporting Albanian migrants, who he says are often “whizzed off” in unknown vehicles.
“A lot of Albanians – what’s happened is I’ve had them dropped off and straight away they’ve been picked up by someone in a BMW and they are and they’ve whizzed off,” he remarked, also emphasising that many migrants easily have the ability to “disappear” from the system after being dropped off by him, with there being no checks on whether the migrants end up going where they say they will.
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