The Rwanda deportation scheme cost Britain £700 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.
And she warned that high levels of small boat journeys in the English Channel are likely to persist over the summer, blaming weak border control she said Labour had “inherited” from the previous administration.
“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.
Home Office staff are already being redeployed from the scheme to immigration enforcement and returns, she added.
The minister said she is 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”.
“Making this one simple change will save the taxpayer an estimated £7 billion over the next 10 years,” Ms Cooper told the Commons.
Shadow home secretary James Cleverly has accused her of using “made-up numbers” and accused the UK Government of showing “discourtesy” towards the Rwandan government.
“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.
“And the level of discourtesy, directed towards the people and government of Rwanda is quite breathtaking.
“To have them 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.”
Some 1,499 people made the journey in 27 boats from July 15 to 21, while the French coastguard confirmed two people died amid rescue operations off the northern French coast.
The maritime prefecture also said on Sunday that a further 71 migrants were saved in the Channel, but that some travellers on the boat who were not requesting assistance were allowed to continue the journey.
