The Conservative government spent £700m of taxpayers’ money on the failed Rwanda deportation scheme, which has proved to be a “costly con”, the home secretary has said.
Yvette Cooper described the policy, which was introduced two-and-a-half years ago and sought to send UK asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing, as “the biggest waste of taxpayer money I have ever seen”.
She told the Commons that over the course of six years ministers had intended to spend £10bn on the policy, but they never divulged this figure to parliament.
The home secretary said she had formally notified the Rwandan government that the partnership was over and thanked them for working with the UK “in good faith”.
“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,” she said.
Under the Conservatives, the Home Office refused to set out the full cost of the scheme, though an official letter last year stated it had reached £290m. In a report last spring the National Audit Office estimated that the cost of the policy had surpassed £500m.
Ultimately, just four people travelled to Rwanda voluntarily under the scheme, Cooper told the Commons. “We had often warned that it would frankly be cheaper to put them up in the Paris Ritz – frankly now it turns out it would actually be cheaper to buy the Paris Ritz,” she said.
Cooper said the £700m cost included £290m payments to Rwanda, chartering flights that never took off, detaining people and then releasing them, and paying more than 1,000 civil servants to work on the policy.
Labour confirmed it was scrapping the scheme immediately after it won the election on 4 July. Cooper has announced the formation of a border security command bringing together police, intelligence agencies and immigration enforcement to try to stop people smugglers.
Under the government’s plans, new offences will be created to allow enforcement agencies to treat people smugglers like terrorists and to penalise social media companies that fail to remove advertisements for small boat crossings.
In her statement in the Commons, Cooper blasted the Conservative government’s “unworkable” Illegal Migration Act, which was introduced in March 2023 and cost the taxpayer billions by putting asylum seekers who arrived in the UK in a state of limbo.
She said “legal contradictions” in the act created a situation akin to “Hotel California – people arrive in the asylum system and they never leave”, because no decisions could be taken on the cases of asylum seekers who arrived after March 2023 and met certain conditions.
The home secretary said she had been “shocked to discover that the Home Office has effectively stopped making the majority of asylum decisions” and said it was “effectively an amnesty and that is the wrong thing to do”.
She warned that the cost of the “indefinitely rising” asylum backlog in hotel and accommodation support bills was “astronomical”, telling MPs: “The potential costs of asylum support over the next four years, if we continue down this track, could be an eye-watering £30bn to £40bn – that is double the annual police budget for England and Wales.”
She said that Labour had inherited a situation in which criminal gangs were “operating with impunity” and that high levels of small boat crossings across the Channel were “likely to persist through the summer”.
James Cleverly, the shadow home secretary, accused Cooper of “hyperbole and made-up numbers” and said Labour had “scrapped the Rwanda partnership on ideological grounds”.
“The reality is everybody knows, including the people smugglers, that the small boat problem is going to get worse, indeed has already got worse under Labour because they have no deterrent,” the shadow home secretary told MPs.
Kit Malthouse, a Conservative MP, challenged Cooper on whether she would resign if the number of small boat crossings was higher next summer than this one.
Richard Foord, the Liberal Democrat defence spokesperson, called for the creation of a resettlement scheme to create a safe and legal route and disincentivise asylum seekers from travelling to the UK before they have made an application.
