Home secretary Yvette Cooper has revealed that Rishi Sunak’s government has already spent £700m on the plan to remove asylum seekers to Rwanda and had planned to spend a further £10bn.
In a stinging speech in the House of Commons, Ms Cooper said the Tory government has left an asylum backlog like “Hotel California” because it stopped processing thousands of cases.
Ms Cooper revealed that four migrants had been paid to volunteer to go to the east African country as she branded the policy the “most shocking waste of taxpayer money I have ever seen”.
The amount already spent on the Rwanda plan includes a £290m payment to Rwanda, as well as “chartering flights that never took off, detaining hundreds of people and then releasing them, and paying for more than a thousand civil servants to work on the scheme”, she said on Monday.
Ms Cooper said the Home Office had predicted the Tory government would spend over £10bn on the partnership with Rwanda in six years, adding: “They did not tell parliament that.”
Shadow home secretary James Cleverly, who presided over the department before the election, accused Ms Cooper of using “made up numbers” and criticised the government’s “discourtesy” to the Rwandan government.
Ms Cooper blamed the previous government for leaving her with an asylum “Hotel California” where “people arrive in the asylum system and they never leave”.
Ms Cooper told MPs civil servants had “effectively stopped making the majority of asylum decisions” due to the impact of the Illegal Migration Act, a piece of legislation brought in under the Tory government.
She said it was the “most extraordinary policy that I’ve ever seen”, adding: “Thousands of asylum caseworkers cannot do their proper jobs and, as a result, the backlog of asylum cases is now going up.”
Housing these people in taxpayer-funded hotels would cost £30-40bn over the next four years, according to Home Office projections, she said.
Ms Cooper told MPs she has directed the Home Office to restart making asylum decisions.
The home secretary will use legislation to end certain provisions in the Illegal Migration Act so that the Home Office can “immediately start clearing cases from after March 2023”.
She said she would redirect the savings from the abandoned Rwanda scheme to the new border security command. The home secretary warned that high levels of small boat crossings in the Channel are likely to persist through the summer.
Ms Cooper said she wanted to prioritise returning migrants to safe countries and said she has tasked the immigration enforcement team with “intensifying enforcement activity this summer targeting illegal working across high-risk sectors”.
Home Office staff have been redeployed from the Rwanda scheme and into returns and enforcement.
Responding to Ms Cooper, Mr Cleverly said the small boats problem would get worse under Labour because “they have no deterrent”, adding: “The initial decisions that her government has made have made this problem worse and not better.”
Enver Solomon, CEO of the Refugee Council, said Ms Cooper’s statement confirmed that “our warnings went unheeded, and that previous policies have left the system in meltdown”.
The British Red Cross welcomed the news that asylum cases would be processed.
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