Britain is to spend £500 million on forcibly sending thousands of failed asylum seekers and illegal immigrants back home.
The sum includes £200 million for airline tickets as well as charter flights to return large groups.
Among those flown home will be foreign offenders who have served their sentences, migrants who have overstayed their visas and asylum seekers whose claims have been turned down.
The figures were included in a Home Office tender for private sector companies to bid for a contract for “escort and travel services” for enforced removals.
It said: “The total contract value for Escorting and Travel Services is estimated at £500m including travel ticket costs of approximately £200m.”
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Whitehall sources said any contract was likely to be for five years and would be based on estimated future numbers of migrants who will be forcibly removed from the country.
British taxpayers will also help to pay for migrants at Calais to be flown to their home countries under a deal that Theresa May, the home secretary, signed with her French counterpart.
Ministers are bracing themselves for the publication today of the latest net migration figure. This could exceed the previous record of 320,000 despite the prime minister’s promise to reduce the number to below 100,000 by May last year.
A liberal Conservative think tank, Bright Blue, has called on David Cameron to abandon the target in favour of a new one of gross non-EU migration.
Last year 12,460 people — more than 4,000 failed asylum seekers and more than 8,200 illegal immigrants and foreign criminals — were forcibly removed from the country. This compares with 21,000 a decade earlier.
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Keith Vaz, chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee, said that the £500 million figure was “an enormous amount of money and demonstrates the lack of more robust policies to stop people arriving in the first place”.
Alp Mehmet, vice-chairman of Migration Watch UK, which campaigns for lower immigration, said: “I would expect in return a significant increase in the number of enforced removals. If that happens it will be money well spent. Time will tell.”
A Home Office spokesman said: “Those with no right to be in the UK should return home. We expect people to leave the country voluntarily but, where they do not, we will seek to enforce their departure.”