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 yesterday, Ms Cooper said the Tory government had left an asylum backlog like “Hotel California” because it stopped processing thousands of cases. She 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.
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.”
This story is from the July 23, 2024 edition of The Independent.
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This story is from the July 23, 2024 edition of The Independent.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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