May I first add my tributes to Tony Lloyd? He did such wonderful work in policing, as well as in this place.
What a farce. Today and yesterday have been more days of Tory chaos and carnage. We have a Prime Minister with no grip, while the British taxpayer is continually forced to pay the price. Former Tory Cabinet Ministers and deputy chairs from all sides have been queueing up to tell us it is a bad Bill. They say it will not work, it will not protect our borders, it will not comply with international law and it is fatally flawed. The only thing that the Tories all seem to agree on is that the scheme is failing and the law will not solve it. The Prime Minister is failing, too, and they know it.
We have a failing Rwanda scheme that is costing Britain £400 million, that sent more Home Secretaries than asylum seekers to Kigali and that will only apply to less than 1% of those arriving in the UK. This is the third Tory law on channel crossings in two years. It will get through tonight, just like the previous two Bills did—even though they failed. Just like the last two, it is a total con on the British people. This chaos leaves the Prime Minister’s authority in tatters. He is in office but not in power. No one agrees with him on his policy, and the real weakness is that he does not even agree with it himself. The Prime Minister is so weak that he has lost control of the asylum system, lost control of our borders and lost any control of the Tory party.
Sixty Tory MPs have voted against the Government, two deputy chairs were sacked, a Home Secretary and Immigration Minister have formerly been lost, and Cabinet Ministers have been briefing openly that they do not support the Bill. The Home Secretary himself thinks it is “batshit”, the Prime Minister tried to cancel it and yet is so weak that they are still going ahead.
Under the Tories, we have seen border security weakened while criminal gangs take hold, because they have not taken the action that we need. The backlogs soar; the budget bust. Criminal smuggler convictions have dropped by 30%, and returns have halved. That is instead of the practical plans that Labour set out to set up the new returns and enforcement unit to stop the Home Office from just losing thousands of people that it cannot keep track of, to stop the halving of the returns unit, to set up the new security powers to go after the criminal gangs and stop the 30% drop in criminal gang smuggler convictions, and to have the additional cross-border police unit that we could be investing in if we were not spending so much money on this failing Rwanda scheme.
Four hundred million pounds of taxpayers’ money is going to Rwanda, all without a single person being sent. That is all in addition to the Government’s whopping multibillion-pound hotel bill. Of course, if they get flights off, it will probably cost another £10 million to £20 million for every 100 people they actually manage to send. President Kagame made an astonishing intervention this afternoon. He said that he is happy for the scheme to be scrapped and may be offering to refund the money. Think what we could do with £400 million—that is more than a third of the budget of the National Crime Agency.
The Kigali Government have clarified the position this afternoon—and it is even worse. They said:
“Under the terms of the agreement, Rwanda has no obligation to return any of the funds paid…if no migrants come to Rwanda under the scheme, and the UK government wishes to request a refund of the portion of the funding allocated to support…we will consider this request.
Unbelievable. The Government signed a deal and a whole series of cheques to send hundreds of millions of pounds of British taxpayers’ money to Rwanda for a scheme that they were warned would not work, might be unlawful, would not work as a deterrent, would be unenforceable and would be at high risk of fraud. They signed it because they do not give a damn about taxpayers’ money. Now they want to pass the Bill and spend even more taxpayers’ money on this failing scheme.
The scheme is likely to cover less than 1% of the people who arrived in the country last year. More than 90,000 people applied for asylum, and the Court of Appeal said that Rwanda had capacity for only 100 people. The Immigration Minister admitted that it is just a few hundred, and not any time soon. If the Government ever finally implement the Illegal Migration Act 2023, that will immediately create a list of 35,000 people the Home Secretary is supposed to send immediately to Rwanda. At this rate, it will take the Government 100 years to implement their own failing policy.
To be honest, it is probably even worse than that, because they cannot even find most of the 5,000 people they put on the initial Rwanda list. It is totally unbelievable: in the space of about 18 months, the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary have literally lost 4,200 people they planned to send to Rwanda. I bet the Prime Minister wishes he could lose a few of those Home Secretaries he managed to send.