Britain in April struck up a £120 million ($148 million) deal with Kigali to send some migrants, who had reached the U.K. illegally by crossing the Channel in small boats from Europe, to live in Rwanda.
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Britain’s previous government had planned to spend 10 billion pounds ($12.9 billion) on a now-scrapped plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda and it has already cost taxpayers 700 million pounds, new Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said on Monday.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s new Labour government scrapped the controversial plan to fly thousands of asylum seekers from Britain to Rwanda in its first major policy announcement after winning a commanding election victory earlier this month.
Cooper said the costs include money for chartering flights that never took off, paying for the work of government officials and 290 million pounds in payment to the Rwanda government.
“It is the most shocking waste of taxpayers’ money that I have ever seen,” she told parliament.
The previous Conservative government first announced the plan in 2022 to send migrants who arrived in Britain without permission to the East African nation, saying it would put an end to asylum seekers arriving on small boats.
But legal challenges have meant no one has been sent to Rwanda except for four individuals who went under a voluntary scheme.
Cooper also said tens of thousands of asylum seekers left in limbo as they were threatened with deportation to Rwanda will now have their asylum claims processed.
She said the government would also reverse a provision in the Illegal Migration Act that has barred anyone arriving illegally since March last year from being granted asylum.
Instead, the government promised to process their claims, end the costly use of hotels to accommodate asylum seekers and clear a backlog of claims.
The shift in policy would save taxpayers an estimated 7 billion pounds over the next 10 years, Cooper said.
“We have inherited asylum Hotel California: people arrive in the asylum system and they never leave,” she added.