Home Office spent £6.3m on charters in 6 months
EACH asylum seeker flight to Rwanda will cost UK taxpayers hundreds of thousands of pounds.
The Home Office spent £6.3million on 38 charter flights to deport or “administratively remove” people from January 1 to July 28 last year – around £167,000 per flight.
But the cost of the Rwanda trips – which the Home Office has refused to disclose – will be much higher. A Freedom of Information response showed most of the 38 flights were to eastern Europe, while Kigali is more than eight hours by jet from London. The Home Office insists the asylum system costs £1.5bn a year by comparison, including £4.7m on hotel costs per day.
A Home Office source said: “Can people really put a price on the cost of saving human lives and securing our borders?.”
But the hotel costs cover 37,000 destitute migrants and people on resettlement schemes, an average of £127 per person per day. And the weekly cash allowance to asylum seekers in the UK to buy food, clothes and toiletries is just £40.58.
By comparison the removal flights in the first half of last year cost more than £8,000 per person. And the UK is paying £120million to Rwanda in exchange for accepting the deal.
The 38 planes in the first part of 2021 carried 750 people, an average of 20 per flight, one, to Lithuania, carried three.
Daniel Sohege, director of refugee consultancy Stand for All, said: “For the cost of today’s deportation flight alone you could fund more than 235 years’ worth of allowances.”
But, PM Boris Johnson’s official spokesman said:
“Doing nothing is not an option to this Government.”