Britain does not merely put illegal arrivals in hotels and hand them cash, clothing and phone credit. When the system finally sends one of them home, taxpayers can still be left covering the cost of a first-class ticket.
That is the picture that has emerged from a GB News investigation into a Bangladeshi overstayer and convicted criminal who spent more than a decade in the country, begged to leave, and was then issued a first-class seat from London to Doha on the first leg of his return.
GB News Chief Political Correspondent Katherine Forster has spent months on the case. After sources confirmed they had seen the ticket, the Home Office first denied it had happened, then changed its story.
‘I will continue trying to get this information, it’s astonishing.’
— GB News (@GBNEWS) August 28, 2026
GB News Chief Political Correspondent @forster_k exclusively reveals her investigation into an illegal migrant being deported back to Bangladesh, who was given a first-class ticket for his flight. pic.twitter.com/KpipVnmFWB
Full segment:
The man, identified only as Mr A, arrived legally in 2013 on a student visa to study International Business Management at Anglia Ruskin University. He failed to finish the course. Attempts to secure the right to remain collapsed in 2021. He stayed anyway, working cash-in-hand in a Southend pizza shop until the arrangement fell apart and he was put on the street.
By last autumn he was homeless, had a shoplifting conviction, and had been asking the Home Office to send him back to Bangladesh since March. His father, he said, was a heart patient who had suffered a stroke. Sitting down with GB News, he put the request in the simplest possible terms:
“Who would love to stay in the streets when they can live in their house in Bangladesh? If you tell me, my flight is ready? I can go now. I want to go now. I’m ready to go. I have nothing, no one to worry here. I got everything back home.”
Asked why his family could not buy the ticket themselves, he said they could not afford it. “My dad is a heart patient. He had a stroke because of me. Being in this kind of situation.”
Former Conservative MP Anna Firth, who had tried to help him leave, called the delay “an absolutely shocking situation” and added: “You really couldn’t make it up. Here we have an individual who is overstaying, who accepts that, who wants to go home. He has followed all the steps he was told to follow, yet the system has let both him and the taxpayer down.”
A Home Office spokesman told GB News at the time that he had been blocked from the Voluntary Returns Service because of an outstanding police investigation, including the August shoplifting conviction, and that once those matters were resolved he was “free to apply for the voluntary service again.”
The machine that can house tens of thousands in hotels at speed could not process a man who was asking to leave. Only after the original GB News reports did he finally go.
When he did leave, GB News says he was issued a first-class ticket from London to Doha, the first stop on the journey back to Bangladesh.
Forster went to the Home Office. Officials first told her it had not happened. She went back to her sources, obtained confirmation in writing and spoke to them by phone. They then said they had seen the ticket and that he had been sent first class to Doha.
The department admitted: “The ticket said first – which was an administrative error in the printing of the ticket.”
It now insists that “despite a First Class ticket being issued, Mr A departed in economy.”
The public is asked to accept that the seat itself was never used, that the upgrade existed only on paper, and that no further explanation is required. Forster has submitted multiple Freedom of Information requests for the cost of removal flights and for how many illegal migrants may have been booked first or business class since the start of the year. Those requests have been rejected on cost grounds.
The department that can lose a willing deportee for months cannot, apparently, produce a simple spreadsheet of ticket classes without it being too expensive to answer.
The ticket would be a curiosity if it stood alone. It does not. It sits on top of a welfare-and-logistics operation that already treats illegal arrival as an all-inclusive package.
Home Office figures put the average cost of hotel accommodation at £144 a night per person, against £23.25 in cheaper dispersal housing. Independent estimates for 2024/25 have put the hotel figure closer to £170 a night. A year in a hotel can run past £50,000. The government itself has said asylum accommodation and support cost £4 billion last year.
Subsistence payments still go out at between £9.95 and £49.18 a week. Contractors Clearsprings, Serco and Mears run the housing estate under deals now forecast to cost £15.3 billion over ten years, more than triple the original estimate.
That is the “free money and hotels” layer. The extras sit on top of it.
Care4Calais has distributed more than 162,000 items to nearly 30,000 people, including 2,221 Vodafone SIM cards loaded with six months of data, thousands of hoodies and joggers, Ramadan food packs and “new arrival packs” for people reaching the South Coast.
Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf accused Vodafone of “facilitating the invasion of Britain” and told the company’s chief executive that customers “will no doubt be astounded to hear that a British company of generally good repute is helping to facilitate the invasion of Britain by unvetted, military-age men.”
Vodafone’s answer was that the SIMs go to registered charities “for distribution to vulnerable people in the UK” and that the programme would continue.
While one overstayer waited on the streets of Southend for a flight he was asking for, the government has been advertising the opposite message to the next wave: get here, and the whole country will absorb you.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said “all parts of the country need to play their part,” a formula that means leafy villages and middle-class districts can no longer sit outside the dispersal map.
In Piddington, Oxfordshire, a community of roughly 400 faces plans for up to 1,250 single adult male asylum seekers on a former military site beside a children’s playing field. Residents staged a symbolic independence referendum. Ninety-six percent voted to leave the United Kingdom. Children wrote to the Prime Minister begging him not to take the only home they had known.
Burnham told GB News he understood the concerns of “the good people of Piddington,” then repeated the policy: “We cannot have a situation where it’s only the poorest communities in the country that receive all of the dispersal of refugees and asylum seekers. I do believe all parts of the country need to work, to play their part.”
Borders minister Anna Turley has defended the same approach as a “more fair and equitable system.” The Centre for Migration Control’s response was the one Whitehall prefers not to hear: telling people that breaking into Britain can mean housing in Kensington or the Cotswolds is not a deterrent. It is a brochure.
The same pattern has already hit Gronant in Wales, Crowborough in East Sussex and the proposed use of RAF Linton-on-Ouse in North Yorkshire, where a village of about 600 was looking at around 1,200 single adult males. Local councillor Malcolm Taylor called it a “hand grenade.”
Spread the load. Keep the route open. Upgrade the destination. Then act surprised when the boats get bigger.
The character of the intake is not a mystery to the Home Office. In August the department issued asylum seekers a nine-page guide, Understanding Behaviours and Expectations in the UK, spelling out that rape is illegal, that sex with anyone under 16 is a crime “even if they say yes,” that women do not need a man’s permission to work or travel, and that female genital mutilation is forbidden.
Officials concede that “laws and customs here may be different from your home country.” GB News presenter Martin Daubney said it was “very rare a story comes in that completely takes my breath away, but this is it.”
Yusuf called it “a handy guide for illegal migrants on how not to be a rapist, not to be a paedophile, how not to beat women and how to leave babies alone.” Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said the priority should be deportation rather than “trying to train these mainly young, male illegal immigrants [to] behave in a civilised way towards women.”
The money does not stop at the hotel door. The Voluntary Returns Service can put up to £3,000 on a card for people leaving, on top of a free flight. Labour has spent close to £40 million on assisted returns since taking office, with more than 17,000 people taking the offer up to March. The Home Office says an assisted return averages about £4,000 including flights, against roughly £48,000 for an enforced removal.
There is now an enhanced pilot offering up to £10,000 a person, and up to £40,000 a family, for failed asylum families still sitting in hotels. Foreign national offenders have separately been filmed leaving with pre-loaded cards of up to £2,000. Shabana Mahmood has admitted that paying criminals to board the plane “doesn’t look good,” while arguing that voluntary removal is cheaper than keeping them.
Detention and movement have their own meter running. Between June 2025 and May 2026 the Home Office spent £185.5 million transporting and housing people in immigration detention and Border Force custody — more than £500,000 a day.
Escorts inside the UK accounted for £137.1 million. Overseas escorting, including scheduled and chartered deportation flights, cost another £48.5 million. Philp called it “a catastrophic waste of taxpayers’ hard-earned money.”
Almost 1.3 million migrants were on Universal Credit by May 2026. Centre for Migration Control analysis has shown the number of refugees on that benefit jumping 44 percent in a year.
The immigrant in this latest case was not a Channel arrival in a dinghy. He was a student-visa overstayer who became a shoplifter and then a willing deportee. That makes the delay worse, not better. If this is how the system treats a man who is asking to go, the people who have no intention of going have very little to fear.
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