A failed Conservative plan to send people seeking asylum to Rwanda spent £50m on flights that never took off, new figures disclose.
The Home Office has also revealed that the scheme – which ran under Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak’s administrations – spent £715m over two years on the plan – £15m more than previously claimed.
The disclosures were made as the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, faced criticism from MPs on Monday after the number of people crossing the Channel topped 20,000 since Keir Starmer was elected.
Data shows that ministers authorised the payment of £30m in 2023-24 to secure flights and trained escorts for detainees, prepare airfields and provide money to pay for police who helped to secure the airfield. A further £20m was spent on flight-related costs up to June 2024.
The Rwandan government has received payments of £290m after Johnson signed a deal with Paul Kagame’s regime, the document showed. Another £280m was spent on “other fixed costs” such as the development of digital IT and data systems, legal costs and staff costs.
The extra £95m was spent on detention centres to hold people before they could be sent to Rwanda.
Johnson’s Rwanda plan was supposed to act as a deterrent after a rise in the number of small boat arrivals. The plan was to deport “tens of thousands” of new arrivals so they could apply for asylum there.
“In the two years the partnership was in place, just four volunteers were sent to Rwanda at a cost of £700m,” Cooper told MPs. “The result of that massive commitment of time and money was 84,000 [who] crossed the Channel from the day the deal was signed to the day it was scrapped.
“This so-called deterrent did not result in a single deportation or stop a single boat crossing the Channel.”
It comes after Home Office figures showed 122 people made the journey on Sunday in two boats, which means 20,110 crossings have been recorded since Labour won the general election. Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, urged ministers to introduce a hard limit on migrant numbers.
He said: “Behind all the bluster and all the chat about previous governments, we see [Cooper’s] record and her government’s record. A 64% increase in small boat crossings since the same period before the election, 6,000 extra people in hotels, the asylum backlog up by 11,000, all since 4 July.”
Labour sources said the weather played a “significant part” in the numbers, citing Home Office analysis they claimed showed that 11 October to 10 November saw the “highest ever ratio” of so-called red days in a month-long period – when weather conditions are considered to make crossings probable or highly probable.
The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, has said an “effective deterrent for illegal migration” – such as the Rwanda plan – are among the ideas her party are considering as they set out a “new approach” on migration.
