Was the Rwanda scheme a “shocking waste of taxpayers’ money”? As a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury under Gordon Brown, Yvette Cooper is well-qualified to know what she is talking about.
According to the Home Secretary, the newly cancelled partnership with Kigali was forecast to cost £10 billion over the next six years. Before being scrapped, it cost £700 million, she told MPs yesterday. This included £290 million in payments to Rwanda, chartered flights that never took off, more than 1,000 civil servants working on the scheme, and released detainees.
All of this to deport only four volunteers. How embarrassing. By contrast, Cooper hopes to save the taxpayers “an estimated seven billion pounds over the next ten years” by clearing the asylum backlog. Currently, the cost of keeping more than 35,000 migrants in hotels is a not-insubstantial £5 billion.
Labour plans to change the law to allow Home Office caseworkers to proceed with processing asylum claims from illegal arrivals of the last 18 months. Rishi Sunak’s Illegal Migration Act barred anyone arriving illegally since March last year from doing so, leaving around 101,000 migrants in limbo. The Tory plan was to detain and remove illegal arrivals. But the Rwanda plan did not take off.
By scrapping it, Labour have not only satisfied bien-pensant opinion, but suggested they can make the existing system work better. Cooper has redeployed 200 officials to a new Immigration Enforcement agency and plans to recruit 800 more. The Border Force has taken back a boat of migrants to France for the first time, just as Keir Starmer asked for a European asylum returns deal.
Does this suggest Labour might have a better chance of resolving our small boats crisis than the Tories? Not surprisingly, I’m unconvinced. I cavil to few on the right in my Rwanda-scepticism. But that’s because I thought it was not tough enough, rather than being cruel or too expensive.
A record 15,517 migrants have crossed the Channel this year. That is not only 50 per cent higher than last year, but 3 per cent higher than the previous record of 2022. 2,143 arrivals have taken place since Labour took power, alongside six tragic deaths. Removing any form of deterrent – however inadequate – and shuffling around a few Home Office desks will not suffice.
Labour plans to prioritise processing the claims of those coming from safer countries, like Albania and India. But the Refugee Council predicts that that will lead to 70,000 being granted asylum, based on last year’s figure of 62 per cent. James Cleverly, settling in as Shadow Home Secretary, says it could be 90,000, when he isn’t distracted by leadership speculation.
As Guy Dampier has tirelessly highlighted, levels of returns are at historic lows. Only 1.3 per cent of small boat arrivals between 2018 and June 2023 were returned between those periods. Unsuccessful asylum seekers have proved hard to shift. Only 10 per cent of unsuccessful 2020 claimants were removed. The cost of them living in the UK has risen to almost £4 billion.
Plans to bung a little more money to Eastern Europe or cosy up to Emmanuel Macron will not do much to shift the dial. A European-wide migration deal is highly unlikely, but even if we did sign up to an EU-wide scheme, one can imagine the immediate political backlash to taking arrivals from Greece.
Labour is unsure about how to treat migrants rejected for asylum from countries deemed unsafe. We know the challenge. Domestic and international law, including the European Convention on Human Rights and the United Nations Refugee Convention, prevent us from returning them home. The Rwanda plan was a flawed Conservative approach to this problem. Labour lacks even that.
As the number of arrivals ticks up, the inadequacies of the Cooper-Starmer approach will soon be demonstrated. Some in Labour were conscious pre-election that they could be humiliated if they tore up the Rwanda scheme, had nothing in its place, and the situation deteriorated. Examinations have been made of EU efforts to process claims outside of Europe, including in Africa.
The Rwandan government would be peeved if Labour signs a new agreement with one of its neighbours, of whatever kind. When we do it, it’s a despicable act by an international pariah. When Cooper does it, it is sensible and wise. Karl Williams has highlighted that a u-turn was made by Labor in Australia. As Fred Fossard suggests, the Overton Window has been suitably opened.
Even if Starmer can try and sweet talk his fellow human rights lawyers onside, one would expect any Rwanda 2.0 would buckle under the same thicket of lawfare that hobbled Sunak. Until the Gordian knot of the Human Rights Act, ECHR, et al is cut, the small boats crisis will continue.
With Reform UK having come second to Labour in 89 seats, Nigel Farage will be hoping to exploit the crossings to do to Starmer in 2029 what he tried to do to us earlier this month. As such, it’d be wise to ensure our Shadow Immigration Minister is someone knowledgeable about, and committed to, the measures required. Neil O’Brien and Nick Timothy spring immediately to mind.