Now we can't even pay criminals to leave...

From the Daily Mail online.

Only 52 of the thousands of foreign prisoners clogging up Britain's jails have taken a £2,500 'bribe' offered by John Reid to return home.

The scheme's failure is a hammer blow to the Home Secretary's hopes of solving the prison overcrowding crisis.

It leaves courts under continued pressure to allow all bar the most dangerous convicts to go free because there is no room in jail.

Mr Reid - who compared the Home Office to a dilapidated house which he was decorating - introduced financial incentives for foreigners jailed for crimes committed in the UK last October.

**A dilapidated house is far to good a term to use with regards the Home Office, they cant even tell us how many people are in the country at any one point, yet alone do anything more. Still in the fine tradition of Blunkett and other previous post holders watch out for a swanky new catchphrase and some really cool soundbites...

Any convict from a country outside the EU economic area - up to 8,000 of the 80,000 criminals in jail - was offered a £2,500 package of healthcare and financial support if they agreed to serve their sentence back home, or left the country as soon as it was complete.

But internal Government figures passed to the Daily Mail reveal that only 52 offenders left the country during the first three months of the desperate initiative.

It represents only one in every 154 who are eligible. The rest remain behind bars while the courts, under instruction from Mr Reid, continue to give non-custodial sentences to home-grown paedophiles and other serious offenders.

**However elderly poll tax protesters can be assured of a place in prison, along with minor criminals and the mentally ill who should really be in health care places but alas they have all been closed down.

Critics said inmates were aware of the Government's woeful record for deporting foreign prisoners at the end of their sentence.

If they decline the bribe, they have a good chance of being allowed to stay in the UK once their jail sentence is complete.

**A good chance, no lets get that right. Every chance. After all they will add to the wide variety that is New Labours multicultural experiment.

Shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, said: "This is a pathetic scheme that has had a pathetic outcome.

"It was much heralded by the Home Secretary at the time. But, yet again, we have another example where the Home Secretary's promises of action have turned out to be spin, over substance."

Mr Reid endured yet another frantic day as he struggled to get a grip on the overcrowding crisis.

Today more chaos is expected as he prepares to take the Prison Officers Association to court in a bitter row over staffing of the new Kennet Prison, in Liverpool.

The jail - a conversion of a former mental hospital - is to provide 350 extra spaces by the Spring.

But the 200 guards needed to run the prison have yet to be recruited and trained, forcing the Home Office to ask staff from other prisons to run it until they are ready.

The POA, engaged in a row over pay, has instructed its members not to sign-up to an agreement to work extra hours, in order to cover for those needed to run the new prison.

It puts HMP Kennet's opening in jeopardy, prolonging the current crisis.

Mr Reid, whose relations with the union have hit rock-bottom, claims refusing to work the extra hours is illegal under a long-standing arrangement and is likely to ask the High Court for an injunction this afternoon.

He is also braced for the publication this morning of a critical annual report from Anne Owers, chief inspector of prisons.

She will say jails are so overcrowded that inmates cannot be properly rehabilitated - putting the public at risk of re-offending.

Mr Reid risked ridicule by comparing the shambolic department - also reeling from the overseas criminal conviction fiasco, and the loss of more than 300 sex offenders - to a rundown house, which he was decorating.

In an article for the Guardian newspaper, he wrote: 'If you renovate a house you start by taking the wallpaper off. It is only then that you discover more problems. That's what it is like in the Home Office.

'These problems don't leave me beleaguered. If we weren't discovering more we wouldn't be reforming the Home Office.'

He repeated the metaphor in a series of TV and radio interviews, including an appearance on Radio Four's Today programme with John Humphrys.

Mr Reid insisted he would not resign as Home Secretary, despite more crises being inevitable. He said: "I am not a quitter".

Then, in an apparent plea to Prime Minister-in waiting Gordon Brown to stay in the post, Mr Reid said it would take two-and-half years to sort out the mess.

In words which will be closely scrutinised, Mr Humphrys asked: "Will Gordon Brown keep you in the job when he is prime minister?"

Mr Reid replied: "I never guess the future, John, but I can tell you as late as last night I was discussing these matters with Gordon, and we continually discuss them".

"So obviously you are not going to run for the leadership, then? responded Humphrys, and Mr Reid replied: "John, I am going to be home secretary."

The Home Office denied the bribes offered to foreign prisoners had been a flop.

A spokesman said that, while only 52 had gone home, the total who have applied is 575.

She added: "We expect uptake of the scheme to increase in the up coming weeks."

**This will be followed by an announcement that the moon is made of cheese and pigs have sprouted wings and we shall all need to carry brollys from now on...

Those who take-up the £2,500 package receive their help in starting up a business, medical care, housing or education and training in their homeland.

British criminals are given a release grant of £47 when they leave prison, meaning foreign offenders will be given up to 50 times as much.

It applies to around 8,000 offenders from outside the European Economic Area, which comprises all EU states plus other countries including Norway and Iceland.

**Now there is bias for you even our home grown criminals are classed as second class by New Labour, they get a mere forty seven pound yet someone who should be hauled on a plane with top speed and given nothing is offered bribes by the retards in government, yet another social experiment that has blown up in Labours face.

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