Rwanda Scheme Has Cost Britain £700 million
Yvette Cooper (Parliament.tv)
3 min read
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has said the Rwanda Scheme legislated for by the previous Conservative government has already cost the taxpayer £700million.
The costs include £290 million in payments to the Kigali government, flights which did not take off, detaining hundreds of people and paying for more than 1,000 civil servants to work on the project. The Home Secretary confirmed only four people had volunteered to be sent to Rwanda as part of the scheme.
Cooper said the previous Conservative government had projected to spend £10 billion on the scheme and "did not tell Parliament."
"I am extremely concerned that high levels of dangerous crossings we have inherited are likely to persist through the summer," Cooper told the House of Commons.
"Looking forward, the costs are set to get worse. Even if the scheme had ever got going, it is clear it would only cover a minority of arrivals. Yet a substantial portion of future costs were fixed costs," she added.
"And most shocking of all, over the six years of the Migration and Economic Development Partnership forecast, the previous government has planned to spend over 10 billion pounds of taxpayers money on the scheme.
"The failure for this policy lies with the previous UK Government. It has been a costly con, and the taxpayer has had to pay the price."
At the dispatch box the Home Secretary claimed she was shocked to "discover" that the Home Office had "stopped making the majority of asylum decisions". Cooper said thousands of asylum seeker caseworkers could not do their job, which had exacerbated the backlog of asylum cases.
"It is the most extraordinary policy I have ever seen. We have inherited asylum Hotel California. People arrive in the asylum system and they never leave," she said.
"The previous government's policy was effectively an amnesty, and that is the wrong thing to do. And it isn't just bad policy. It's also completely unaffordable.
"The cost of this indefinitely rising asylum backlog in hotel and accommodation support bills is astronomical. The potential costs of asylum support over the next four years, if we continue down this track, could be an eye watering 30 to 40 billion pounds."
Cooper claimed this cost was double the annual police budget. The Home Secretary said the Government's new border security asylum immigration bill announced in the King's Speech last week will bring in "new arrangements" which will help fast track "decisions and returns to safe countries".
The Home Secretary said Britain would always help those "fleeing war and persecution" coupled with a system where migration and asylum laws are enforced.
"There are no quick fixes to the chaos created over the last 14 years, and it will take time to clear the asylum backlog, to bring costs down, to get new enforcement in place, to strengthen our borders and prevent dangerous boat crossings."
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