What could £700m cost of Rwanda scheme have paid for instead?

The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, has revealed the Conservatives’ Rwanda scheme cost taxpayers £700m , calling it the “most shocking waste of taxpayers’ money I have ever seen”.

Here we take a look at what £700m could and could not be used for:

Boosting junior doctors’ pay?

The British Medical Association (BMA) says that between 2008-09 and 2021-22 junior doctors had a 26% real-terms pay cut factoring in RPI inflation, and would need a 35% uplift to reverse this.

The BMA estimates £1bn a year would be needed to cover a 35% hike. The BMA’s estimate is for the net cost of pay restoration – which tries to take into account how much income tax and national insurance the Treasury would receive from the rise, and gives an indication of what the overall impact on public finances would be.

Obviously, £700m is not enough to cover that bill, but the Labour government has ruled out increasing pay by 35%, so it could at least go some way to covering junior doctors’ pay rises, if only for a year.

Keeping Britain safe?

An experienced Border Force officer is paid about about £32,000 so – excluding pensions and recruitments costs – with £700m the Home Office could pay the salaries of about 21,000 extra Border Force officers for a year.

There has been pressure to increase spending on UK armed forces in light of threats presented by Russia, Iran and North Korea. A new recruit to the British army is paid £18,687 a year – £700m would cover the base salaries of about 38,000 soldiers for a year.

Back in 2019, Boris Johnson (remember him?) pledged to recruit 20,000 additional police officers with a price tag of £750m for the first full year of the recruitment drive.

Bolstering children’s education?

Labour pledged to recruit 6,500 teachers and increase training for teachers and headteachers. In its manifesto, the cost of recruitment and the training came to £720m.

Elsewhere in the manifesto, the Labour party puts the cost of introducing its free breakfast clubs at £300m.

Scrapping controversial welfare policies?

The two-child benefit cap is already proving to be a thorn in the side of Labour’s welfare policy. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates scrapping it would cost about £3.4bn, so £700m would only go some way in covering the cost of the controversial policy.

Getting to net zero?

The energy provider EDF, citing industry experts, states that the average cost of building a solar farm in the UK is around £1m a megawatt (MW) of capacity. This means that a 50MW solar farm, a fairly typical size in the UK, would cost about £50m to build. So with £700m, 14 solar farms could be constructed.

Likewise, windfarms can cost anywhere from £40m to £8bn. With £700m, a number of smaller projects could be developed.

Just splashing the cash on luxury items

The Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s yacht Koru is reportedly worth $500m (£380m), while the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Hawaii compound is reported to cost about £210m.

An entire island could be an option – Richard Branson’s Necker Island is now thought to be worth about £120m. Private jets can cost up to $30 (£23m) plus about £1m a year to run.