£3.9BN RWANDA COST
Soaring bill for asylum flights plan predicted
THE cost of Tory plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda could balloon to £3.9billion for the first 20,000 people, a report warns.
The study comes as Rishi Sunak faces a Commons showdown today over his desperate bid to revive the scheme.
The UK will hand over £370million to Kigali over five years – plus a one-off £120m payment once 300 people are handed one-way tickets, and further £20,000 payments for each individual.
The full cost per asylum seeker could be as high as compared to £55,000 in the preRwanda system, the report found.
The IPPR think-tank said the bill could spiral depending on how long people stay in the country. It said if all 20,000 left straight away, it would cost around £1.1bn, but it would rise to £3.9bn if they stayed for five years.
The IPPR’s Marley Morris said: “Aside from the ethical, legal and practical objections, the Rwanda scheme is exceptionally poor value for money.
“For it to break even, it will need to show a strong deterrent effect.
“The only winner from this scheme appears to be the Rwandan govern£230,000, ment itself, which has already secured hundreds of millions without doing much at all.”
A Home Office spokesman said: “The report makes a number of assumptions and modelling calculations that we do not recognise.
‘Without innovative solutions, the cost of housing asylum seekers could reach up to £11bn per year by 2026. Illegal migration costs lives and perpetuates human trafficking, and it is therefore right we fund solutions to break this unsustainable cycle.”
It comes as Transport Secretary Mark Harper yesterday failed to guarantee the flagship plan would get off the ground before the election.
He told Sky News: “We are going to work very hard to make sure that we can get those flights away as quickly as we can. That is our intention.”