THE DITCHED Rwanda deportation scheme cost £700 million – but only four volunteers were sent to the African country, it has emerged.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told MPs that the previous government’s deterrent policy was “the most shocking” waste of taxpayers’ cash.
The new Labour government decided to scrap the scheme as soon as they got into power calling it an expensive “gimmick”.
She said: “We had often warned that it would frankly be cheaper to put them up in the Paris Ritz. It now turns out it would actually be cheaper to buy the Paris Ritz.”
Ms Cooper said: “Two and a half years after the previous Government launched it, I can report that it has already cost the British taxpayer a total of £700m. In order to send just four volunteers.
“Those costs include £290m payments to Rwanda, chartering flights that never took off, detaining hundreds of people and then releasing them, and paying for more than 1,000 civil servants to work on the scheme.
“A scheme to send four people. That is the most shocking waste of taxpayers money I have ever seen.
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“Looking forward, the costs are set to get worse. Even if the scheme had ever got going, it is clear it would only ever cover a minority of arrivals.”
She ran through a list of costs which included that the forecast of the schemes would be £10 billion over six years.
She said: “Over the six years of the Migration and Economic Development Partnership forecast, the previous Government had planned to spend over £10 billion pounds of taxpayers money on the scheme.”
But she warned that small boats crossing are likely to carry on during the coming months.
Ms Cooper told MPs: “I am extremely concerned that high levels of dangerous crossings we have inherited are likely to persist through the summer.”
She said she would take urgent action to start clearing the asylum backlog in “one simple change” that she said would “save the taxpayer an estimated seven billion pounds over the next 10 years”.
Shadow home secretary James Cleverly accused Ms Cooper of using “made up numbers” hitting out at the government’s “level of discourtesy” to the Rwandan government.
He told MPs: “The Labour Party and indeed the Home Secretary in her statement likes to talk tough on border security, but today’s statement, despite all the hyperbole and the made up numbers, is basically an admission of what we knew all along.
“That the Labour Party have scrapped the Rwanda partnership on ideological grounds, removed a deterrent, a deterrent, which the National Crime Agency said that we needed
“And the level of discourtesy, directed towards the people and government of Rwanda is quite breathtaking.
“To have them read about this decision in the papers before anyone from Government had the good grace to formally notify them, I think, is an error, and no one in this House believes for a moment that that level of discourtesy would have happened had this partnership been with the European country.”
