Rishi Sunak admits there is no firm date for his pledge to ‘stop the boats’

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Rishi Sunak has admitted he does not know when he will be able to “stop the boats”, insisting there is no “firm date” on the promise he made.

The PM made stopping migrant crossings in the English Channel one of his five key pledges in January, but has so far failed to deliver on it and three other promises.

Grilleds by parliament’s powerful liaison committee, Mr Sunak said he does not have “a precise date” for when the crossings will stop. “We will keep going until we do [stop the boats],” he insisted.

The Tory leader also refused to tell the senior MPs if any airline had agreed to Rwanda deportation flights, amid reports the government is struggling to find a partner.

In an often tense exchanges with the heads of select committee heads on Tuesday, Mr Sunak defended his beleaguered Rwanda policy, the key plank of his efforts to stop the crossings.

The PM said he remains “highly confident” he will be able to deport asylum seekers to the east African nation under the scheme.

And he stressed that the “deterrence” effect of the policy, which would see those arriving across the channel put on one-way flights to Rwanda, will work to cut arrivals.

Home affairs committee chairman Diana Johnson grilled Mr Sunak over the plans, saying: “I understand that no airline is willing to actually contract with the government to remove people to Rwanda because of reputational damage. Is that correct?”

Mr Sunak said he would not comment on “commercial conversations”, but stressed he is “highly confident that we can operationalise the [Rwanda] bill in all its aspects”.

The PM also refused to provide further details of how much will be spent on the scheme, which has seen zero asylum seekers deported since being unveiled by Boris Johnson last April.

Mr Sunak again stressed that details of the government’s deal with Rwanda are “commercially sensitive”, insisting that disclosing the cost yearly to parliament offered “the appropriate level of transparency”.

Labour attacked the PM’s inability to say when he would fulfil the stop the boats pledge.

Shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock said: “A year on from making his public pledge, Rishi Sunak has just admitted there is ‘no firm date’ by which he will meet his target to ‘stop the boats’.

The Labour frontbencher added: “He also promised to clear 91,000 old asylum claims by end of this year, but he is set to fall far short of this target too.”

Mr Sunak was also unable to say when he would clear the backlog of asylum claims, which stood at 109,442 cases at the end of November.

He pledged to clear the backlog of “legacy” cases made before June 28 2022 by the end of 2023 and by November it had fallen by nearly three quarters to 18,366.

Asked whether he would meet his pledge, Mr Sunak said: “We’re not at the end of the year yet, so the final statistics haven’t been published, but we are making very good progress.”

But the rest of the backlog, applications made on or after June 28 2022, continues to rise, reaching 91,076 at the end of November.

Asked when the overall backlog would be cleared, the PM refused to offer a date, saying: “We haven’t set a target for that publicly but obviously the priority was clearing the initial legacy asylum backlog.”

Launching a defence of his record on small boat crossings, Mr Sunak said: “The first thing to say is we have made progress and that is that the numbers this year are down by a third, which is considerable progress.”

He added: “We will keep going until we [stop the boats]. This isn’t one of these things when there’s a precise date estimate on it, this is something where before I took this job they had only ever gone up, now they’re down by a third.”

Stopping the boats was just one of five pledges Mr Sunak set out at the beginning of the year, asking voters to judge him on “the results we achieve”.

Aside from overseeing a halving in the rate of inflation, the PM ends the year having failed on all the other measures; reducing national debt, cutting NHS waiting lists and growing the economy.