Rwanda Plan Cost and Asylum System

Katherine Fletcher Excerpts

Tuesday 9th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Tom Pursglove]

The policy platform that the hon. Gentleman is standing on would do absolutely nothing to reduce the flow of people coming illegally to this country, all of whom are leaving safe countries in order to make perilous journeys across the channel, with all the risk to human life that that presents.

[Katherine Fletcher (South Ribble) (Con)]

Let us look at the issue over a 20-year time span. Under the Blair Government, people were trying to come here illegally under lorries; we did a load of work, we put in X-ray scanners and we stopped that criminal trade. They are now trying to come by boat, so we are putting the work in and trying to stop that. Does the Minister agree that Labour did not solve the original problem and has no plans to solve the current one?

[Tom Pursglove]

I agree with my hon. Friend on both fronts. It is important to recognise that this is one of biggest issues of our time. The British people want it dealt with once and for all, and so do this Government. Our position is clear. That is why we have put in place one of the most comprehensive plans for tackling illegal migration anywhere in the world, and it is why this endeavour is, and will remain, a priority for myself, my right hon. Friends the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister, and the Home Office more generally.

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[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

I will focus my remarks on the cost of the Rwanda plan, whether it is going to be effective and whether it is value for money. Nearly 18 months ago the Select Committee on Home Affairs stated in our report on channel crossings:

“The Home Office must provide more detailed costings for its Migration and Economic Development Partnership with Rwanda, including estimates of the likely cost within the current financial year of relocations and probable costs of relocations during the full five years of the programme.”

We made those recommendations all those months ago in part because we learned that the then Home Secretary had been required to issue a ministerial direction to the Home Office permanent secretary to implement the Rwanda scheme as he felt there was insufficient evidence of deterrent to enable him to guarantee the policy’s value for money, which, as the accounting officer, he is responsible for, and to date he has not changed his view.

That issue and the use of public money for this controversial plan have been a source of contention for many from the get-go, which is why we believed transparency about the costs involved was vital for proper scrutiny and public trust in this policy, yet here we are with what limited information we do have about the scheme’s costs having dribbled out slowly and most recently accidentally via the International Monetary Fund’s board papers. That is despite questions about the costs being repeatedly put by myself and other Committees including the Public Accounts Committee over the last 18 months.

The most recent substantive update on costs came in a late-night letter from the permanent secretary to myself and the Chair of the PAC my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier) following that inadvertent disclosure via IMF papers, and we learned that following the £140 million paid to Rwanda in ’22-’23 there has been an additional £100 million in April ’23 and a further £50 million would be paid in ’24-’25, but the deal with Rwanda is for five years and we are yet to discover what the Government have pledged to pay for the final two years of the scheme.

The justification, which I have heard again today, is about commercial sensitivity, yet apparently it is not so commercially sensitive that the costs cannot be disclosed retrospectively via the annual accounts. Clearly there is something here that does not add up and I know that the Chair of the PAC shares my view on this: that in other instances it has been possible to have regular updates on spending proposals and policies like this.

Question marks hang over not just the fixed cost of the scheme but the per-person costs of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda. We know the Government have pledged to pay Rwanda a certain amount for each asylum seeker sent there to have their claim processed, but again we do not know how much, although it is of interest that the Home Office estimate in the economic impact assessment of the Illegal Migration Act 2023 the cost of relocating a single individual asylum seeker to a third country at £169,000, which represents, we are told,

“additional costs incurred relative to processing an individual through…the current migration system.”

We understand that the cost of processing asylum claims here in the UK through the current migration system is around £12,000. As the Home Affairs Committee pointed out almost 18 months ago:

“Migration, including irregular migration across the English Channel, is an issue on which no magical single solution is possible and on which detailed, evidence-driven, properly costed and fully tested policy initiatives are by far most likely to achieve sustainable incremental change.”

[Katherine Fletcher]

Better get some then.

[Dame Diana Johnson]

I am going to carry on.

With a singular yet untested Rwanda scheme swallowing up so much Government time and resource it is vital that the Home Secretary is up front about the costs involved. This is about public money being paid to Rwanda by the UK on an issue of great concern to the British people; it is not private funds being exchanged between two companies, and as the Institute for Government points out,

“good scrutiny really can contribute to good government.”

Transparency is key to unlocking good public policy. It is therefore absolutely right that Parliament asks and gets detailed responses to questions concerning the cost of the Government’s Rwanda plan and administration of the asylum system. This is about Parliament being able to do its fundamental job of scrutiny, holding the Executive to account.

I do not have time to ask all the other questions I would like to raise which relate to the treaty that has been signed, the new appeals system, the right to legal advice for all asylum seekers sent to Rwanda, and whether additional moneys will be paid by the British Government for all of those, but I hope the Minister will come clean in his wind-up as to the exact costs of the scheme.

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[Andrew Western (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I am not sure whether the hon. Member for Bury North (James Daly) has read the motion, but it is about the cost of the scheme, and it restricts itself entirely to that. Essentially, it comes down to one issue: transparency. Do we believe that our constituents deserve to know how much of their money the Government plan to spend on their shambolic Rwanda scheme, and do we believe that they deserve to see the full details of the asylum backlog clearance programme so that they can understand how it is possible for the Home Office to have lost track of thousands of asylum seekers?

[Katherine Fletcher]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Andrew Western]

No, I will not. I apologise, but time does not allow me to do so.

Ministers need to be held to account for an expensive shambles that has sent more Home Secretaries than asylum seekers to Rwanda. Meanwhile, our borders remain in a state of chaos and desperate people suffer enormously at the hands of people smugglers, but here we have a Government ducking transparency yet again when it comes to the cost of the scheme.

What we do know is that £240 million has been sent to Rwanda already, with £50 million more scheduled for this spring. We know too that the Home Office has admitted that at least two further payments are planned for the next two years, but it will not confirm how much these payments will be. Why not?

We also know that Ministers have promised extra payments for every individual asylum seeker sent, but again they have refused to say how much—why on earth not? Presumably they have told their Rwandan counterparts how much they are paying them, so if the Minister is still refusing to disclose those costs in this place, perhaps he can answer why he thinks the Rwandan Government should know more about how British taxpayers’ money is spent than British taxpayers themselves.

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[Katherine Fletcher (South Ribble) (Con)]

We are having an interesting and important debate, set in the global context of increasingly large numbers of people on the move. Climate change is driving them forward. The entrepreneurial among them are looking for economic opportunity, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (James Daly) mentioned, but I think it is worth dwelling on what our Rwanda scheme seeks to stop.

What is actually happening to some of the most vulnerable people in the world? They have criminal gangsters coming up to them, in countries in Asia, the far east and Africa, getting hold of them, maybe even coercing them slightly, and saying, “You know what? Sell granny’s farm, because the streets of the UK are absolutely paved with gold. You give us five, eight, 10 grand, sell granny’s farm to mortgage it, and you’ll be able to make a fortune and look after her.” Only when they are on a beach in Calais, with a gangster pointing a gun at them, telling them to get in an overcrowded and dangerous boat, do they understand what we are trying to stop. They are being sold a pup by criminals.

Today’s debate is not about point scoring and policy, although you would not believe it from listening to some of the stuff the Opposition say. We are taking action to tackle it. We are saying that if someone comes to this country illegally, they cannot stay here illegally, because otherwise we would be opening the window to a demand model for gangsters who were strapping kids under lorries under Tony Blair and are now strapping young men, teenagers, women and children to dangerous boats across the channel.

So we are working with France, and with Albania. The Home Office is taking a lot of steps to tackle what happens further upstream, including where the boats are bought from. We have got a treaty with another country, we are sorting out accommodation, and we are sorting out the backlogs. We are getting involved, putting more staff in.

What do the Opposition offer us? They offer us a highly moralising case. If this has not been clear from my remarks, there is a moral case to take every action we can possibly take to stop people getting done by criminals. So what do Labour Members do? They vote against it—is it 76 times, 73 times, 83 times? Goodness knows.

[Tim Loughton]

Eighty-six.

[Katherine Fletcher]

I defer to my hon. Friend’s knowledge.

Government Members are putting practical ideas in place, and what is the Labour party doing? Changing its mind. It has no plan and no ideas. Its soundbites are so brittle that its Members cannot take interventions from Conservative Members.

We have a worked-through plan that is trying something different to make sure we handle this in a global context. Everybody is facing this problem and, with channel crossings already down by a third, a nascent deterrent effect is occurring. We are working with the social media firms to make sure these—rude word—gangsters cannot sell absolute nonsense on TikTok and Facebook to kids who just dream of a better life. That is the action we are taking, and what are Labour Members doing? They are tabling process motions and asking for details but, crucially, they will not tell us their plan, because they do not have one.