Tory leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick says he would bring back the controversial Rwanda deportation project, in spite of its eye-watering cost.
The former Immigration Minister didn’t deny Labour’s claim that the deal with the African nation would cost £10billion – but said he’d go ahead anyway. The new Government scrapped the Rwanda project as one of its first acts following the General Election, pledging to spend the huge sums of cash on catching smuggling gangs instead.
Quizzed on LBC whether he’d resurrect the doomed plan, which critics dismissed as a “gimmick”, Mr Jenrick said: “Yes, I would. I want a stronger version of the Rwanda plan.” He hit out at fellow Conservatives who refused to support his efforts to beef up Rishi Sunak’s controversial Safety of Rwanda Bill.
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The former minister said: “That’s what I proposed at the turn of the year, one which would enable us to detain people upon arrival and then remove them within hours or days rather than weeks and months. I believe that’s possible. It would have been possible if the Government at the time had accepted the amendments that I put down with around 60 other Conservative MPs.”
Last month there were gasps in the Commons as Home Secretary Yvette Cooper revealed that the previous Government secretly planned to spend £10billion on the project. Challenged over the figure, former cabinet member Mr Jenrick refused to say it wasn’t true.
He said: “I don’t know exactly which figures she’s quoting, but the scheme was costly, but so is illegal migration. I mean, illegal migration is costing several billion pounds in this country every year. Those costs are rising, I don’t see that they’re going to fall any time soon.”
Asked how much it would cost, he said: “It depends how many people were sent, because there are there are both fixed costs and costs per illegal migrants sent to Rwanda. But the broader point is this – the cost of illegal migration is very high.
“And there’s not a price that you can easily put on securing the borders of our country. A country without borders is not really a country at all.” Pressed whether the £10billion figure was wrong, Mr Jenrick said: “Well, I just don’t know what that number relates to. But what I do know is that they are bandying around numbers both on the public finances and on illegal migration, to justify political choices.“
On his first full day in No10 last month Keir Starmer declared the Conservatives’ scheme, which has already cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds despite no one being sent to the east African nation, as “dead and buried”. The PM said: “It’s never acted as a deterrent. Almost the opposite.”
So far, Ms Cooper told the Commons last month, £700million has been ploughed into the Rwanda deal – despite only four volunteers agreeing to go. This included £290million handed to the African nation, as well as “chartering flights that never took off” and detaining hundreds of people who were later released.
Ms Cooper said: “It’s the most shocking waste of taxpayers’ money I’ve ever seen.” She said that over the next six years, the Tories were set to spend a massive £10billion on the agreement with the African nation. The Labour frontbencher said: “Most shocking of all, over the next six years of the migration and economic development forecast the previous Government had planned to spend over £10billion of taxpayers’ money on the scheme. They didn’t tell Parliament that.”