UK minister calls Rwanda migrant plan shocking waste

LONDON: Britain’s new interior minister on Monday branded the previous UK government’s plan to deport irregular migrants to Rwanda as the “most shocking waste of taxpayer money I have ever seen”.

Yvette Cooper, home secretary since Labour’s landslide election win over the Conservatives earlier this month, said the UK had spent £700 million ($900 million) on the controversial scheme.

But she said only four people were sent to the east African country before Labour scrapped the relocation programme -- and they went voluntarily. Cooper said ex-prime minister Rishi Sunak’s Tory government had planned to spend over £10 billion on the scheme in total. The costs included “£290 million payments to Rwanda, chartering flights that never took off, detaining hundreds of people and then releasing them, and paying for more than a 1,000 civil servants to work on the scheme”.

“A scheme to send four people, it is the most shocking waste of taxpayers’ money I have ever seen,” Cooper told parliament.Conservative home affairs spokesman James Cleverly, who touted the plan when he was home secretary, accused Cooper of citing “made up numbers” and criticised Labour’s “discourtesy” to the Rwandan government.

Sunak said the scheme would stop tens of thousands of migrants from risking their lives every year crossing the Channel in small boats from France to Britain’s south coast. “Stop the boats” was at the heart of his failed bid to win the July 4 election.

New Prime Minister Keir Starmer declared the scheme “dead and buried” on his first full day in office. Rwanda then said it was under no obligation to return any of the £240 million Britain had paid it.Labour has instead pledged to “smash the gangs” of people smugglers facilitating the crossings with a new border security command possessing enhanced “counter-terror powers”.

Cooper promised to speed up the removal of failed asylum seekers to reduce the backlog in cases that has driven up costs of accommodation. Almost 16,000 migrants have been detected in small boats this year, including some 1,500 in the past week -- a record for 2024.

Rwanda, home to 13 million people in Africa’s Great Lakes region, says it is one of the most stable countries on the continent and has drawn praise for its modern infrastructure. In November last year, the UK Supreme Court ruled the deportation programme was illegal under international law as Rwanda could not be considered safe for asylum seekers.