Britain to pay migrants 'more than £3k' to leave UK as Home Secretary faces 40-strong MP migration rebellion

The Home Secretary refused to rule out paying up to £30,000 for families to leave willingly as an incentive, in a bid to save the taxpayer money.

LBC joined the Home Secretary on a trip to Denmark to find out how their asylum system works, and what lessons Britain can learn.

Last year she revealed radical changes to the system - which will be brought forwards to MPs this week.

And from Monday, new rules will come in which will mean refugee status will become temporary, and migrants will have that reviewed every two and a half years, rather than last five years.

It means that if a country is deemed to have become safe, people will have to leave Britain and return home - even to more dangerous nations like Syria and Afghanistan.

The changes will apply to adults and accompanied children claiming asylum from Monday - but officials are expected to exempt lone children from the new rules while they seek a longer term solution.

Refugees who wish to stay in Britain after that will be able to apply for new work and study visas, helping them integrate with and contribute to society, according to the Home Office.

Ms Mahmood told LBC that she will be going "full steam ahead" with reforms - despite facing a rebellion of up to 40 MPs from the government's backbenches.

In a sit-down interview with us, she:

• Defended changes coming in retrospectively to migrants who are already are in the UK - saying the situation has changed
• Vowed to stare down Labour rebels, saying most people support her changes to the system and fixing a broken model
• Warned MPs thinking of trying to unseat Sir Keir Starmer that Labour governments "don't come along very often"
• Insisted Labour needs a "strong coalition" to win the next election - amid calls from MPs to tack to the left after the Gorton and Denton by-election loss to the Greens

LBC accompanied the Home Secretary to Copenhagen last week, where we saw first hand how their system deals with asylum seekers.

And we spoke with their immigration minister, Rasmus Stoklund, who said his country had seen success in helping to end so-called parallel societies within Denmark.

But with a nation of just six million and just over 1,900 asylum applications in 2025, many critics see the two nations as incomparable.

Ms Mahmood and LBC were shown the Sandholm arrivals centre, which is where everyone entering the country to make a claim is first taken.

They are run by their version of the Red Cross, and stay for up to a month in basic accommodation before being moved on.

And we also saw a deportation and returns facility where people are taken before they leave the country.

Ms Mahmood said the government here has "managed to restore order and control to their borders" and that "asylum claims here are at a 40 year low".

She added: "They've obviously had huge success with the changes that they, they've made. And I've been able to look in detail at some of the detail of those changes as well.

"I'm very clear that the radical package of reforms that I've already announced is the right package.

"I've seen some elements of that package at play here in Denmark and it works here in Denmark. I believe it can work back at home.

"I want to make it less attractive for illegal migrants to come to Britain, whilst also making sure that we are able to provide sanctuary to those who are fleeing genuine peril, who are leaving war zones and so on.

"But we have to proceed in a way that is fair for our communities, that acknowledges the pressure on our communities and is able to restore order and control."

Read more: Mahmood to warn against Labour turning left after by-election defeat as she launches new asylum overhaul

Read more: Children born in UK to refugees will be deported under Home Secretary's sweeping immigration reforms

And in defence of her reforms, which some in her party are opposed to, she says that Britain has failed to "keep pace" with the asylum system worldwide.

She explained: "Today, people go through multiple safe countries before they come to Britain to seek asylum. So it isn't a case any longer of people seeking sanctuary in the first safe country they can get to once they're, you know, leaving their own country because they're no longer safe because the war has broken out or whatever. So that pattern has completely changed and the rules that we have at the moment haven't kept pace with that."

Her message to MPs thinking of voting down her changes was that her plan is "the right one" and she is "progressing full steam ahead".

She added: "I do accept that some people are not comfortable with all of these reforms or don't agree.

"Disagreement in politics is a very normal, a normal thing. But I do believe that the totality of the package that I've already announced that I'm now implementing has broad support across the country, and is the right answer to the problems that the country faces.

"We've got a broken asylum system and we have a legal migration system that's been open to unacceptable levels of abuse."

Allies of the Home Secretary say that without radical reforms, Britain risks falling further towards the "fairy tale" politics of the Greens, or the "pulling up the drawbridge" from Reform's Nigel Farage.

One idea she's keen to take from the Danish model is the idea of paying failed asylum seekers more money to leave the country quickly.

At the moment Britain pays people up to £3,000 in order to leave - but the Home Secretary wants that to be more on the condition that they cooperate with the system.

Currently, the sum is the same regardless of whether they choose to comply, which she says means many people choose to stay as long as they can in taxpayer funded hotels.

Ms Mahmood refused to rule out paying families as much as £30,000 - the amount the Danish government pay up to - in order to comply with the system and leave earlier, in a move which she is convinced will save money.

Officials have yet to decide on the final sum, but the Home Secretary was clear she wanted to increase that incentive to people in order to speed up their removals.

But the move risks sparking a backlash, similar to which was sparked when it was revealed that the government paid sex offender Habush Kabatu £500 in order to leave the country in October last year.

Ms Mahmood told LBC: "I know it sort of sticks in your craw, basically, to think that you're going to pay people who've come to your country illegally to leave and go back to their home country.

"What I would say to people, though, is when you look at the numbers, to house somebody in asylum, accommodation, in a hotel, it costs £53,000 pounds a year per person every year, which is a huge sum of money that is going to waste at the moment.

"I think paying more than what we currently do is still going to be considerably less than what we're spending on these people.

"I haven't made any final decisions on what the right sum and the right sort of package will be for our country. It will be more than what we currently offer. And what I've seen here in Denmark is a more generous offer to get people to incentivize people to leave the country does work, because 95% of the returns that you see from Denmark are voluntary and people do take use of that incentivized package. It means that they do leave the country, and that's very important.

"If we can get them out quickly and save a bunch of money in the process, I think it's the right thing to do."

Another idea the Danes have implemented is a radical so -called 'de-ghettoisation' policy. This restricts areas of Denmark to no more than 50 per cent of the population being non 'Western'.

People have been forced to leave areas in a bid to force people to integrate better.

The Danish immigration minister, Mr Stoklund, told us that "so far the work has been successful" and they were working to ensure there were "no parallel societies" in the country.

He added: "It is important that kids, when they go to school in the morning that they see that the adults in the neighbourhood go to work, that they don't just hang around in this neighbourhood, and that they also experience what is the majority culture like, that they don't grow up in a part of Denmark which might as well could have been part of the greater Middle East.

"We need to live together here in Denmark."

He added: "That is that we don't want parallel societies. We won't accept them and we won't accept that norms of imams or anyone else try to dominate areas of Denmark."

But the Home Secretary told LBC she did not support such a radical policy in the UK adding: "not every bit of the Danish model I think translates to what we need to do back at home. This is one part of the package I don't agree with."

She said: "We're not the sort of country where we're going to start passing laws about where particular kinds of people can and should not live.

"I don't think that the success of integration comes from counting the number of brown faces or white faces or black faces in a particular street or in a particular neighbourhood.

"That's not the success of integration. The success of integration comes from whether our people are all able to speak English, access the labour market, have the right skills and are making a contribution.

"That I think is what ultimately holds the country together."