Britain Pays Pakistan Twice. Once In Aid. Then Again At Home.
Pakistan refuses to accept a convicted child rapist, its nationals now account for more asylum claims than any other nationality, and removals lag far behind refusals. Westminster's response is another £153 million in aid.
Pakistan Says Shabir Ahmed Is Britain's Problem
Shabir Ahmed served fourteen years of a twenty-two year sentence for thirty child rape offences against girls as young as twelve. He was stripped of his British citizenship years ago. Pakistan won't take him back, and has told the world he is Britain's problem because he was raised and, in their words, spoiled here.
I've spent eight years documenting what happens when institutions decide a fact is too dangerous to say out loud. This is that pattern again, on a bigger stage, with your money attached.
Britain Is Spending Another £153 Million In Pakistan
The Foreign Office confirmed another £153 million for aid programmes in Pakistan, spread over three years, during the same fortnight MPs demanded to know why Ahmed is still here. Ministers insist the money is not paid directly to Pakistan's government. That's a form of words, not an answer. British taxpayers are still financing programmes inside a country whose government refuses to cooperate over Ahmed's return, and no amount of careful phrasing from a minister's despatch box changes what that looks like.
Pakistan is not a country without means. It holds its own nuclear weapons. It runs its own space programme. Its military budget dwarfs the aid Britain sends back the other way, and has done for years. This isn't a case of a poor nation with no alternative. It's a nuclear-armed state with its own defence and space capability, still being treated as a dependency requiring British subsidy, at the same time as its government won't take back a man it convicted of nothing less than the rape of children.
Pakistan Is Now Britain's Largest Source Of Asylum Claims
In the year to March 2026, Pakistan became the single largest source nationality for asylum claims into this country, ahead of Eritrea, Iran, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, at 10% of all claims. Claims rose 58% in a single year, from 7,003 to 11,048. Sit with that number for a second. This is not principally a small-boats story. Almost nine out of ten arrived with permission, then claimed asylum once they were safely inside Britain. Nobody in Westminster wants to say that plainly, so I will.
Refusal Does Not Mean Removal
The Home Office refused 10,853 Pakistani asylum claims last year. During the same period, only 445 Pakistani nationals were removed.
I will give you the honest caveat before anyone uses it to dodge the argument. These are not the same group of people. Some of those refused will appeal. Some may receive leave on another basis. Others will remain trapped in the system while lawyers, tribunals and Home Office officials argue over what happens next. The 445 removals may include people whose claims were refused years earlier. These figures cannot be divided to produce an exact removal rate.
But that caveat exposes a deeper failure. The Government should be able to tell us what ultimately happened to the 10,853 people it refused. How many appealed successfully? How many were granted leave on another basis? How many left voluntarily? How many were forcibly removed? How many are still here, and how much is their continued accommodation and support costing?
It does not publish that answer as a clear, matched figure. Instead, the public is given one number for refusals and another for removals, with no reliable way of following refused claimants through to the final outcome.
I do not need to inflate the numbers. The visible gulf is disturbing enough. The Government’s inability, or unwillingness, to account clearly for what lies inside it is worse. That failure has survived governments of every colour.
So has the aid.
Pakistan's Leverage Is Already Inside Westminster
Britain's relationship with Pakistan is not conducted at a safe diplomatic distance. It runs through some of the most electorally sensitive towns in the country, and I happen to live in one of them. According to the 2021 Census, 1.66 million people in England and Wales identified as Pakistani. In Bradford, Birmingham, Oldham, Kirklees, Luton and parts of Greater Manchester, that population is concentrated enough to shape parliamentary selections, council control and the political survival of individual MPs.
That does not make British Pakistanis responsible for the conduct of Pakistan. Say that twice if you need to, because somebody will accuse me of saying the opposite. What it does explain is why the relationship is politically sensitive in a way the raw figures alone cannot capture. Successive governments have treated the Pakistani state with a deference its record of cooperation does not justify.
I've watched officials do this exact dance on the ground. Grooming-gang inquiries repeatedly found officials avoiding the ethnicity of offenders because they feared community tension and accusations of racism. Baroness Casey called it institutional obfuscation.
I call it what I've always called it, cowardice dressed up as community relations.
This is not evidence that British Pakistanis are responsible for Pakistan's refusal to accept deportees. It is evidence that British institutions retreat whenever facts involving Pakistan or Pakistani heritage become politically dangerous.
That retreat has consequences. Pakistan can refuse Ahmed because Britain has never made cooperation the price of the relationship. At home, institutions have concealed patterns because confronting them carried a political cost. In both cases, the public is expected to absorb the result without being allowed an honest accounting of it.
First They Failed To Record It. Then They Used The Missing Data To Deny It.
Sajid Javid, as Home Secretary in 2018, ordered a Home Office review into the specific characteristics of grooming gang offenders, after saying those convicted in recent high-profile cases had been disproportionately from a Pakistani background. David Lammy accused him at the time of pandering to the far right for saying so. A minister asked a factual question and was accused of racism for it. The Home Office paper was eventually published in December 2020, and its headline finding was that group-based child sexual exploitation offenders were most commonly white.
Baroness Casey's 2025 national audit demolished the evidential basis on which that claim had been allowed to stand. She found that ethnicity was missing in approximately two-thirds of cases nationally. The available data, she concluded, was "not good enough to support any statements about the ethnicity of group-based child sexual exploitation offenders." I was saying that in 2019, and so were plenty of others nobody in Westminster wanted to hear from.
Where usable local data did exist, the picture was starkly different. In Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire, Casey found clear over-representation of Asian and Pakistani-heritage men among suspects. She later described opening an archived child's file and finding the word "Pakistani" physically covered with correction fluid. Somebody, in an official capacity, took a bottle of correction fluid to a child's abuse file and removed the one word that mattered.
Then They Put The Evidence At Risk
Casey's audit called for relevant records to be preserved ahead of the new statutory inquiry. Robbie Moore, the Conservative MP for Keighley and Ilkley, discovered that Bradford's own authorities had not been instructed to hold onto records, and established that it took seven months for government to issue that direction at all. He warned that data could have been lost or shredded in the interim.
In the same period, David Lammy's Ministry of Justice was preparing to terminate the arrangement under which Courtsdesk held its searchable archive of court reports. The company was required to delete the data by 9 February. That archive allowed journalists, people doing my job, to identify prosecution patterns that official statistics concealed. The department reversed course only after the proposed destruction became public, not before anyone had raised the alarm.
Andy Burnham is days from Downing Street. In that time he has not issued a single statement on Operation Hexagon, the operation that hunted the whistleblowers who tried to expose grooming gangs in Oldham and not the men who were gang raping little White girls.
This is not an oversight.
It is the same pattern Burnham has run since the beginning when he commissioned the Assurance Review that buried Oldham's cover up rather than expose it. He knows what silence buys him. It bought him three years of narrative control last time. It secures him a premiership now.
You will have seen it for yourself. Nobody in the press pack chasing his every word has asked him a single question about Operation Hexagon. Not the BBC. Not GB News. Not The Guardian or the Telegraph.
Before it became something they could no longer avoid, it was the same with the Pakistani Rape Gangs. In the end, they reported on it because they had to. Likewise, the same with the post office scandal. They reported on it because ordinary people would not go away. No matter what they did to them.
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No Cooperation. No Aid.
Westminster wants to suspend aid until Pakistan accepts Shabir Ahmed. That reduces a broken relationship to one revolting man, and I won't let it be reduced that easily.
Pakistan is now the largest source nationality for asylum claims in Britain. Thousands of Pakistani claims are refused every year while removals remain a fraction of that number. Its government can disown a convicted child rapist, declare him Britain's problem and still watch another £153 million in British aid flow into Pakistan.
The deeper failure lies here. Whenever the facts become politically dangerous, the British state retreats. Pakistan refuses. Britain absorbs the consequences. British institutions fail to record the evidence, place what remains at risk and then tell the public that no conclusion can be reached. The taxpayer is ordered to keep paying as though none of it matters. I've been told the same thing more times than I can count, by people with less to lose than the people they were meant to be protecting.
This is not aid based upon partnership. It is payment without obligation.
No country has an automatic entitlement to British taxpayers' money. Pakistan should receive none.
Our leaders should bot be discussing a temporary suspension as a bargaining chip to force Ahmed's return. We need to stop demanding that Pakistan behave better in exchange for the money continuing. Instead, they need to be brave enough to stand up and present the case for ending the money. Or would that be seen as being racist?
I’m Raja Miah MBE. For nearly eight years, I have led a campaign that exposed how senior Labour politicians helped protect Pakistani rape gangs. The people of my town helped force the national inquiry.
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