UK’s scrapped Rwanda migrant plan a ‘shocking waste’ of $904 million in public funds, minister says

LONDON — A scrapped plan by former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to send some migrants on a one-way trip to Rwanda was the “most shocking waste of taxpayer money I have ever seen,” the U.K.’s new home secretary said Monday as she put the cost at 700 million pounds ($904 million) in public funds.

Sunak’s successor Keir Starmer spiked the widely criticized plan as soon as the Labour government came to power this month. Sunak had made “stopping the boats” a key policy as his Conservative government struggled to stem the flow of asylum-seekers across the English Channel from France, even as human rights groups protested it.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told Parliament that the Conservative government had planned to spend more than 10 billion pounds on the policy. She said the failed plan’s costs included 290 million pounds in payments to Rwanda, plus “chartering flights that never took off, detaining hundreds of people and then releasing them and paying for more than a thousand civil servants to work on the scheme.”

Rwanda’s government has said it was not obligated to refund the money.

The home secretary said the high number of risky small boat crossings will likely persist through the summer, when weather conditions are more favorable. She also acknowledged that more needs to be done to tackle people-smuggling “upstream,” but did not spell out details.

Sunak’s plan was meant to address the growing number of migrants from around the world — reaching a high of 46,000 in 2022 — who cross the English Channel. Most who arrive that way apply for asylum, and in the past many have received it. The Conservative government argued that these migrants should not be treated as genuine refugees because they did not claim asylum in another safe country they reached first.

Human rights groups and other critics of the plan called it unworkable and unethical to send migrants to a country 4,000 miles (6,400 miles) away that they don’t want to live in.

The plan was challenged in U.K. courts, and no flights to Rwanda took off under it.

Britain’s Supreme Court in November ruled that the policy was unlawful because Rwanda is not a safe third country where migrants can be sent, with five justices unanimously saying that “the removal of the claimants to Rwanda would expose them to a real risk of ill-treatment” because they could be sent back to the home countries they had fled.