A serial paedophile who has spent a total of 14 years in jail for offences against boys as young as 13 will arrive in London today after being deported from Australia.

Raymond Kenneth Horne, 61, will be handed to police by Australian immigration officials, who accompanied him on a flight at midday yesterday.He was released from a Brisbane jail after serving a 12-year sentence for 14 child sex offences committed after he lured two homeless boys to his apartment while volunteering for a charity.

Once in Britain, he will go on the sex offenders register for life. Australian authorities had planned to keep Horne in custody indefinitely, but immigration officials decided this month to cancel his visa.

He left behind a 43-year criminal history in Queensland, where he arrived from Britain as a boy of 5 with his family in 1952. He never took Australian citizenship. The Immigration Department has not explained why Horne was not deported decades ago, after his first two-month prison sentence for child sex offences in 1968.

By the time he turned 21 that year, he already had convictions for assault, drug and sexual offences. Horne was jailed again in 1992 for indecent dealing with boys aged under 14 and was paroled the following year. He reoffended within a month. He was returned to custody in May 1993 and paroled in November 1994.

Months later, while volunteering for a Brisbane charity, he offered food and a place to sleep separately to two boys, aged 13 and 15. Both were subjected to sex acts including sodomy and were indecently photographed. He was convicted and jailed in 1996.

Judy Spence, Queensland’s police minister, said after the decision to deport Horne that he should be closely watched and that Australia “would be well rid of him”.

“If he wasn’t being thrown out of the country we would have applied to the court to have him kept in jail,” she said. “I’m told UK authorities know he’s coming. My advice to them is to keep him under close supervision.”

A Home Office spokeswoman said: “Where it is known that a sex offender convicted in another country is to be deported to the UK, he is met at the port of entry by the police, who interview him and pass any relevant information to the police in the area in which the offender is proposing to live.”

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