Scrapping Rwanda scheme while switching migrants to asylum system ‘will save £7bn’
Scrapping the Rwanda scheme and processing tens of thousands of asylum claims instead will save the taxpayer more than £7 billion, Home Office officials have suggested.
Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, laid legislation on Wednesday to legally end planned deportations to the African nation and clear a backlog of 126,106 migrants through the asylum system.
A Home Office impact assessment estimates it will cost nearly £3.6 billion to process the asylum claims.
However, the report said it would have cost the Government £11 billion to stick with Rishi Sunak’s Illegal Migration Act and the Rwanda scheme.
The analysis suggests the legislation will provide a net “value for money” saving of £7.68 billion over 10 years, according to a central projection, with estimates ranging from a low of £4.7 billion to a high of £16.9 billion.
The assessment does not take into account the potential future impact of the Rwanda scheme and whether sufficient numbers of migrants would have been deported to deter further small boat arrivals across the Channel.
Labour is to use the money saved from scrapping deportations to the country to create a new Border Security Command with hundreds of extra police officers and investigators from the National Crime Agency (NCA), MI5 and Border Force deployed across Europe to crack down on people-smuggling gangs.
It is also setting up a 1,000-strong enforcement and returns unit to remove failed asylum seekers and migrants who have no right to remain in the UK and send them back to their home countries.
Labour said its plans would be more effective in tackling the small boats crisis by combating the problem at its source, intercepting migrants, boats and other equipment used in the dangerous Channel crossings.
Ms Cooper said on Monday that the Rwanda scheme had cost taxpayers £700 million to date, despite only four failed asylum seekers voluntarily being sent to Kigali.
The figure includes £290 million in up-front payments to Rwanda, as well as the costs of chartering flights that never took off, detaining hundreds of migrants and then releasing them, and paying for 1,000 civil servants to work on the scheme.
The first scheduled flight to Rwanda has been repurposed to return some 55 migrants to Vietnam.
It will be the first time a flight has returned failed asylum seekers to the country since 2021.
In the first quarter of 2024, almost one in five registered arrivals on small boats were from Vietnam - more than from any other country.