Sending ministers and officials to Rwanda has cost the government more than £400,000 before a single deportation flight has taken off, figures show.
Ministers have spent a total of £413,541 on travel in the two years since the policy to send asylum seekers to Kigali started to be developed.
The total, calculated by the Labour party, is based on government transparency releases. It includes trips by senior government officials and a succession of ministers and home secretaries including James Cleverly, Suella Braverman and Priti Patel.
This week it emerged that Cleverly spent £165,561 on chartering a private jet for a one-day trip to sign a new treaty with Rwanda in December. The cost of the flight was published in a transparency document on Thursday.
The shadow immigration minister, Stephen Kinnock, said: “Having clearly decided that committing £600m of taxpayers’ money to the Rwandan government for just 300 refugees wasn’t insulting enough, it now emerges that three home secretaries have blown hundreds of thousands of pounds on their various publicity stunts in Rwanda. This government’s enthusiasm for wasting taxpayers’ money knows no bounds.
“Labour would redirect the cash set aside for Rwanda into a cross-border police unit and security partnership to smash the criminal smuggler gangs at source, and introduce a new returns unit to quickly remove those with no right to be here.”
A succession of legal challenges have prevented the Rwanda policy, which would send asylum seekers who arrive in the UK on small boats to the east African country for processing, from being implemented.
The plan was first announced by Boris Johnson in April 2022 but is yet to become operational two years later.
The government insists that flights to Rwanda will take off this spring, after a bill intended to overcome legal hurdles to the policy becomes law.
However, ministers have delayed the passage of the bill until after Easter, with the final votes on it expected to take place in mid-April. The government has yet to find an airline to operate the flight.
Asked why he was waiting another three weeks to push the legislation through, Rishi Sunak said his plan to stop Channel crossings “is working”.
“People should not be able to jump the queue, come here illegally, put pressure on local services, undermine our sense of fairness and ultimately put their lives at risk as they are exploited by gangs,” he told broadcasters. “That’s why I am determined to stop the boats. Our plan is working, the numbers last year were down by a third. That’s never happened before, that shows that we are making progress.”
He added that the UK needed Rwanda flights as a “deterrent” to “finish the job”.
Cleverly’s flight to Rwanda in December was to sign a new treaty that established a new appeal body, to be made up of judges with asylum expertise from a range of countries, to hear individual cases.
The flights alone of the home secretary’s 24-hour trip cost more than four times the total cost of Braverman’s last visit in March 2023. Her trip cost just over £40,000, with flights at £35,041, hotels £4,301, transport £248 and “engagement” £2,056, the Daily Mirror reported last year.
The government said Rwanda’s asylum system would be monitored by an independent committee, whose powers to enforce the treaty would be beefed up. The committee would develop a system to enable relocated people and their lawyers to lodge complaints.
The government was criticised earlier this month for planning to spend £1.8m on each of the first 300 asylum seekers it plans to send to Rwanda. The overall cost of the scheme stands at more than half a billion pounds, according to the figures released to the National Audit Office.
