Cooper said the £700m cost included £290m payments to Rwanda, chartering flights that never took off, detaining people and then releasing them, and paying more than 1,000 civil servants to work on the policy.
I’d be interested in a full breakdown of where the money went, because I wouldn’t be surprised to find Tory chums creaming off millions.
If we could get a chunk of that back along with the PPE rip-offs then that’d help the bottom line.
They will waste money on anything besides solving the issue…
How much housing would 700m built? If it is affordable? 2k?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Yvette Cooper described the policy, which was introduced two-and-a-half years ago and sought to send UK asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing, as “the biggest waste of taxpayer money I have ever seen”.
Cooper said the £700m cost included £290m payments to Rwanda, chartering flights that never took off, detaining people and then releasing them, and paying more than 1,000 civil servants to work on the policy.
Under the government’s plans, new offences will be created to allow enforcement agencies to treat people smugglers like terrorists and to penalise social media companies that fail to remove advertisements for small boat crossings.
In her statement in the Commons, Cooper blasted the Conservative government’s “unworkable” Illegal Migration Act, which was introduced in March 2023 and cost the taxpayer billions by putting asylum seekers who arrived in the UK in a state of limbo.
James Cleverly, the shadow home secretary, accused Cooper of “hyperbole and made-up numbers” and said Labour had “scrapped the Rwanda partnership on ideological grounds”.
Richard Foord, the Liberal Democrat defence spokesperson, called for the creation of a resettlement scheme to create a safe and legal route and disincentivise asylum seekers from travelling to the UK before they have made an application.
The original article contains 687 words, the summary contains 202 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
U.S. American here. Does the UK have a particular glut of Rwandan refugees/immigrants? If so, why?
No, we don’t. We have a trickle of illegal immigrants and until this month a batshit plan to fly the ones that got caught to Rwanda if they tried to claim asylum.
Wait, all illegal immigrants would be sent to Rwanda, or just the Rwandans? Seems like that plan would give them a great reason to “lose” their passport.
The plan rather blurred “illegal immigrant” and “legitimate asylum seeker”.
Yeah, we’ve had some of that over here too.
The government plan was struck down by the high courts here because Rwanda was not a suitable destination according to the ECHR.
The (previous) government’s response was (a) to pass a law declaring that it was a safe destination; (b) to look to limit the ability of the courts to rule on the legality of government policy.
They really were unconscionably unpleasant fuckers.
All. A truly barbaric proposal.
The humans they traded like political chips should all get to go to Braverman’s house and piss on her doormat.
That’s awful.
Here in this side, we have the governors of Texas and Florida spending millions in public money to fly and bus asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants to more liberal cities/states to cause a burden there. Primarily they do this as a political cudgel, petty punishment for Democrats recommending leniency in some circumstances.
The people being trafficked are sent thousands of miles away from the courts in which their cases are to be held, which all but guarantees that they will fail to show up and will face further punishment.
It’s inhumane.
