A deportation flight from the UK to Jamaica left with just four people on board, the Home Office has said.
Several last-minute legal challenges meant 33 people did not board Wednesday morning’s flight as planned.
Some of them were guilty of crimes such as murder and child sexual offences, Home Secretary Priti Patel said, adding it was “absolutely galling” they had been stopped from being deported.
Lawyers for some of those due to be on board said it wasted taxpayers’ money.
According to the Home Office, 13 of the 33 legal challenges were made in the 24 hours before the flight left the UK.
The sentences of the four people on board the flight totalled more than 16 years, the Home Office said.
Ms Patel said she made “no apology for removing foreign national offenders”.
The Home Office said extensive checks have been carried out to ensure none of the people deported were British citizens, British nationals or members of the Windrush generation.
A Movement for Justice survey of 17 Jamaicans detained for the flight found that 10 of them had lived in the UK since they were children.
Wednesday’s flight was reportedly the subject of protests by activists called “Stop the Plane”.
The plane, an Airbus A350-900 which has a maximum capacity of 350 passengers, departed Birmingham Airport at 01:20 GMT.
The Home Office said a new plan for immigration to change the law will make it easier to remove foreign national offenders and prevent them from taking taking advantage of what it calls a “broken system”.
The government regularly uses charter flights to deport people with serious criminal convictions or those who’ve received a custodial sentence of at least 12 months.
On average, a deportation flight costs around £200,000.
Since April 2020, 75 charter flights have returned people to other countries including Albania, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Nigeria, Poland, Romania and Spain.
There were more than 5000 enforced returns in the year ending June 2020 and around half of these were to EU countries.
Jamaica represented 1% of the government’s overall enforced returns in 2020.
