AT least 18 foreign prisoners are suing the Home Office for compensation because they claim that keeping them in jail while they await deportation after serving their sentences breaches their human rights.

John Reid, the home secretary, will admit in the Commons this week that their legal bills — running to thousands of pounds each — will be paid from the public purse.

Earlier this year Charles Clarke, then the home secretary, admitted that more than 1,000 foreign prisoners who should have been deported had instead been released. The affair cost Clarke his job and Tony Blair promised that in future all foreign inmates would be “automatically” deported.

A huge backlog at the Home Office means, according to the National Association of Probation Officers, that as many as 1,200 are being held beyond their jail terms.

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: “John Reid’s incompetence is descending into farce. First, his department failed to act on court orders to deport foreign offenders. Then he announced plans to pay foreign offenders to convince them to go home voluntarily. Yet now we discover that a number of these very same offenders are seeking financial compensation precisely because they haven’t been deported.”

Reid said: “No conclusions can be drawn at this stage about the outcome of these cases although we will seek to contest all claims robustly.”

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