LONDON (AP) — A scrapped plan by the former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to send out some migrants one way trip to Rwanda was the “most shocking waste of taxpayers’ money I have ever seen,” Britain’s new home secretary said on Monday, estimating the cost at £700 million ($904 million) of public money.
Sunak’s successor Keir Starmer speckled the widely criticized plan since the Labour government came to power this month. Sunak had made “stopping the boats” a key policy as his Conservative government struggled to stem the flow of asylum seekers across the English Channel from France, even as human rights groups protested.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told parliament the Conservative government planned to spend more than £10 billion on the policy. She said the cost of the failed plan included £290 million in payments to Rwanda, plus “chartering flights that never took off, detaining hundreds of people and then releasing them, and paying more than a thousand civil servants to work on the plan.”
The Rwandan government has said it is not obliged to repay the money.
The interior minister said the high number of risky small boat crossings was likely to continue until the summer, when weather conditions were more favourable. She also acknowledged that more needed to be done to tackle people smuggling “upstream”, but gave no details.
Sunak’s plan was intended to tackle the growing number of migrants from around the world – which peaked at 46,000 in 2022 – who crossing the English Channel. Most who arrive this way claim asylum, and in the past many have been granted it. The Conservative government argued that these migrants should not be treated as genuine refugees because they had not claimed asylum in another safe country where they first arrived.
Human rights groups and other critics of the plan called it impractical and unethical to send migrants to a country 4,000 miles away where they have no desire to live.
The plan was challenged in the British courts and no flights departed for Rwanda.
Britain High Council ruled in November that the policy was unlawful because Rwanda is not a safe third country to which migrants can be sent. Five judges unanimously agreed that “removing the claimants to Rwanda would expose them to a real risk of ill-treatment” because they could be sent back to the countries from which they had fled.
