Rwanda a ‘costly (£700m) con’. Make Suella Braverman pay
The Home Secretary Yvette Cooper had this to say on the Tories failed Rwanda scheme in the Commons on 22nd July. I’m far from a fan of Ms Cooper but she did at least say asylum claims would be speeded up rather than people being left in limbo. When asylum claims were still actually being processed the vast majority were found to be appropriate.Hopefully this will go in hand with safe passages for refugees which currently do not exist. Cooper doesn’t actually say that
The person who promoted the Rwanda scheme when she was Home Secretary before being sacked (again) in November 2023 was Suella Braverman. Perhaps she should be sent the bill, or at the very least called to account for her actions while in Office..
Let me turn to the Rwanda migration and economic development partnership. Two and a half years after the previous Government launched it, I can report that it has already cost the British taxpayer £700 million—in order to send just four volunteers. That includes £290 million on payments to Rwanda and the costs of chartering flights that never took off, detaining hundreds of people and then releasing them, and paying for more than 1,000 civil servants to work on the scheme—for a scheme to send four people. It is the most shocking waste of taxpayers’ money I have ever seen.
Looking forward, the costs are set to get worse. Even if the scheme had ever got going, it is clear that it would have covered only a minority of arrivals, yet a substantial portion of future costs were fixed costs—for example, the annual direct payments to Rwanda, the contracts for escorts, the staffing in the Home Office, the detention and reception centres, and more. The taxpayer would have still had to pay out, no matter how few people were relocated. Most shockingly of all, over the six years of the migration and economic development partnership forecast, the previous Government had planned to spend over £10 billion of taxpayers’ money on the scheme. They did not tell Parliament that. I thank the Rwandan Government for working with the UK in good faith, because the failure of this policy lies with the previous UK Government. It has been a costly con, and the taxpayer has had to pay the price.
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