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Home secretary Yvette Cooper has claimed that Rishi Sunak’s government have already spent £700m on their 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.
The amount already spent on the Rwanda scheme includes a £290m payment to Rwanda, “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.
Ms Cooper revealed that four migrants had been paid to volunteer to go to the East African country. She said that the Home Office had predicted the 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 deparment before the election, accused Ms Cooper of using “made up numbers” and criticised the government’s “discourtesy” to the Rwandan government.
Ms Cooper also 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 that 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.
“Thousands of asylum caseworkers cannot do their proper jobs and as a result the backlog of asylum cases are now going up,” she said. Housing these people in tax-payer funded hotels would cost £30-40bn over the next four years, according to Home Office projections, she said.
She told MPs that she has directed the Home Office to start retaking these asylum decisions. She said she would redirect the savings made through not pursuing the Rwanda scheme on the new border security command.
Ms Cooper said she wanted to prioritise returning migrants to safe countries and had tasked the immigration enforcement team with “intensifying enforcement activity this summer targeting illegal working across high-risk sectors”.
This is a breaking story. More to follow…
