Britain spent £700 million on the Rwanda deportation scheme despite only sending four people, voluntarily, to the east African nation, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said on Monday.
She branded the policy the “most shocking waste of taxpayer money I have ever seen” when she addressed the House of Commons, accusing the last Tory government of creating “asylum Hotel California” where immigrants could arrive as they pleased, but then never left.
She claimed the Conservatives had planned to spend more than £10 billion over six years on the Migration and Economic Development Partnership (MEDP) and warned that large numbers of small boat journeys in the English Channel are likely to persist over the summer.
She blamed this on the “weak border control” Labour had “inherited” from the last Tory administration.
Ms. Cooper told the house: “Two-and-a-half years after the previous government launched it, I can report [the MEDP] has already cost the British taxpayer £700 million in order to send just four volunteers.
“Over the six years of the [MEDP] forecast, the previous government had planned to spend over £10 billion of taxpayers’ money on the scheme. They did not tell Parliament that.”
According to the home secretary, those costs include £290 million paid to Rwanda, “chartering flights that never took off,” and “detaining hundreds of people and then releasing them.”
She further claimed that cooperation with European nations was “too limited” and more had to be done to tackle people traffickers before the boats reached northern France.
“I’m extremely concerned that high levels of dangerous crossings we have inherited are likely to persist through the summer,” she said.
Ms. Cooper also said “legal contradictions” in the Illegal Migration Act meant “no decision” could be taken on an individual’s case if they arrived in the UK after March 2023, labelling the bill the “most extraordinary policy that I’ve ever seen. ”
She added: “We have inherited asylum Hotel California—people arrive in the asylum system and they never leave. The previous government’s policy was effectively an amnesty and that is the wrong thing to do.”
Ms. Cooper said scrapping the Rwanda partnership would “immediately” save £750 million and some of the funds would be invested into Labour’s new Border Security Command.
She also said that Home Office staff were being redeployed from the scheme to immigration enforcement and returns.
The home secretary said she would be laying a statutory instrument to end the “retrospective nature” of the Illegal Migration Act provisions to ensure that the Home Office can “immediately start clearing cases from after March 2023.”
She claimed this change would save taxpayers “an estimated £7 billion over the next 10 years.”
‘Scrapped on Ideological Grounds’
The shadow home secretary, James Cleverly, accused Ms. Cooper of using “made-up numbers” and ending the Rwanda plan on “ideological grounds.”He said: “The Labour Party and indeed the home secretary in her statement likes to talk tough on border security, but today’s statement, despite all the hyperbole and the made-up numbers, is basically an admission of what we knew all along.
“That the Labour Party have scrapped the Rwanda partnership on ideological grounds, removed a deterrent, a deterrent which the National Crime Agency said that we needed.”
He went on to accuse the new government of “breathtaking discourtesy” towards the people and government of Rwanda, saying they would never have treated a European country in such a fashion.
Mr. Cleverly added, “To have them [Rwanda] read about this decision in the papers before anyone from government had the good grace to formally notify them, I think, is an error, and no-one in this House believes for a moment that that level of discourtesy would have happened had this partnership been with a European country.”
