The move by the British government to force its taxpayers provide £1million for the building of a comfortable jail in Nigeria to take convicts whose crimes were committed in the UK might have hit a brick-wall following criticism of the plan by some British lawmakers.
But Matthew Elliott of the ‘Taxpayers’ Alliance, said: “It’s an absolute scandal that British taxpayers may foot the bill for a Nigerian prison.”
The prison was meant to house 400 Nigerian inmates incarcerated in Britains own packed prisons who cannot be forcibly sent home to complete their punishments.
Jails in Nigeria are considered so rough that any prisoner the UK tried to deport could oppose their removal on human rights grounds.
But the government hopes that by spending as much as £1million to rehabilitate a rundown Nigerian prison into something approaching British standards, the convicts could be repatriated.
Lin Homer, the chief executive of the UK Border Agency, told MPs yesterday in London that the deal would save taxpayers’ money, because the UK would no longer have to pay the £30,000-a-year cost of keeping inmates in UK jails.
Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister, said: “This should not mean in the long-term we build prisons all around the world instead of sorting out our own deportation processes.”
Ministers have been frantically searching for a solution to the UK’s chronic prisoner overcrowding crisis since 2005, when the number of foreign criminals soared past 11,000 – the equivalent of more than one in every eight inmates.