A SCHEME to pay Afghan refuges to return home has resulted in the repatriation of just 39 people, the Home Office said last night.

The announcement will be a huge embarrassment to David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, who had pledged to help refugees return to their home countries when they were safe.

The Home Office launched the repatriation scheme in August last year with initial funding of £800,000. It hoped that 1,000 would take up the offer in the first six months of the scheme. Mr Blunkett hoped that many of 26,000 Afghans who have claimed asylum in Britain over the past decade would take the opportunity to return to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taleban and help to rebuild their country.

Critics of the scheme will argue that the response does not bode well for the Home Office’s chances with Iraqi asylum seekers once the new regime is in place.

A Home Office spokeswoman said the 39 Afghans who have returned home was just the beginning of a wider scheme to repatriate Afghans. “Our voluntary return scheme was a precursor to the enforced return scheme which is due to begin this month,” she said. The scheme offered families £2,500 plus free flights home and a single person £600 and an air ticket.

Of the 26,000 Afghans who have claimed asylum in the past ten years only one in ten has won the legal right to stay here indefinitely. A further six in ten have been given temporary leave to stay and the rest have remained in Britain despite the failure of their claims.

One major problem contributing toward the lack of success of this scheme is that asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Iraq have usually paid people-smuggling gangs thousands of pounds to get here.

This makes them reluctant to forget their asylum claim and return to a country which is still comparatively unstable with a lower standard of living.

Shortly after the launch of the scheme, Mr Blunkett admitted that anyone who claimed asylum in Britain had a 90 per cent chance of remaining, whatever the outcome of their claim.

He said he had “no sympathy” for the able-bodied men who make up the vast majority of the Afghan asylum seekers in Britain who wanted to remain as asylum seekers instead of returning to rebuild their “liberated” homelands.

Last summer the Home Office announced that Afghans would no longer win “exceptional leave” automatically.

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