The Rwanda deportation scheme cost Britain £700 million (€830 million) despite only four volunteers being sent to Kigali, Yvette Cooper has said, branding the policy the “most shocking waste of taxpayer money I have ever seen”.
The home secretary accused the previous Conservative government of creating an “asylum Hotel California”, where people arrived in the system but never left.
In a statement to MPs on Monday, Ms Cooper said the Tories had planned to spend more than £10 billion over six years on the Migration and Economic Development Partnership (MEDP).
And she warned that high levels of small boat journeys in the English Channel were likely to persist over the summer, blaming weak border control which, she said, Labour had “inherited” from the previous administration.
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Prime minister Keir Starmer has confirmed his administration is axing the scheme, which he and the home secretary have said is a “gimmick” but the Tories insist it served to deter crossings.
“Two-and-a-half years after the previous government launched it, I can report [the Migration and Economic Development Partnership] has already cost the British taxpayer £700 million in order to send just four volunteers,” Ms Cooper said.
“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.”
Those costs include £290 million paid to Rwanda, “chartering flights that never took off” and “detaining hundreds of people and then releasing them”, she said.
Ms Cooper warned that co-operation with European police forces was “too limited” and more needed to be done to tackle people-smuggling “upstream”, long before the boats reached the French coast.
The home secretary raised concerns over “legal contradictions” in the Illegal Migration Act and said “no decision” could be taken on an individual’s case if they arrived in the UK after March 2023 and met key conditions in the legislation.
“It is the most extraordinary policy that I’ve ever seen. 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,” she told MPs.
Ending the partnership would “immediately” save £750 million earmarked for the scheme this year, Ms Cooper said, with some of the money invested into Labour’s new border security command.
Shadow UK home secretary James Cleverly has accused her of using “made-up numbers” and the UK government of showing “discourtesy” towards the Rwandan government.
UK Home Office figures showed nearly 1,500 migrants had arrived in the UK on small boats across the Channel in one week.
Some 1,499 people made the journey in 27 boats from July 15th to 21st, while the French coastguard confirmed two people died amid rescue operations off the northern French coast. - PA