My hon. Friend is absolutely right. If the amount of time and energy that has been wasted on this madcap Bill, which is also a constitutional outrage, unaffordable, unlawful and unworkable, had been put into addressing some of the challenges that we face in a pragmatic way, just think where we could have got to by today.
Finally, Lords amendment 6, in the name of the noble Baroness Chakrabarti, allows Government Ministers, officials and courts to consider whether Rwanda is safe on a case-by-case basis. Given that the Government have accepted that some appeals will be allowed, we see no reason for them to reject that amendment.
4.45 pm
After 14 years of incompetent and negligent governance, our asylum system is in a mess. The Conservatives have presided over a backlog of 130,000 asylum seekers, despite Ministers’ attempts to pull the wool over the public’s eyes through administrative withdrawals and various other ruses. There are still 46,000 asylum seekers in taxpayer-funded hotels, contributing to an asylum system that now costs 10 times what it did under Labour, at an eyewatering £5.4 billion. Only last week, we discovered that there were major problems with a broken immigration IT system, which has mixed up details of applicants, affecting a staggering 76,000 people.
However, this con of a Bill is not the way to fix the problems that the Conservative Government have created. The highest Court in our land has ruled unanimously that Rwanda is not a safe country, and no amount of ludicrous legislation such as this Bill can change that fact. The Government may well wish to say that the sky is green and the grass is blue, but introducing an Act of Parliament will never make it so. Even Conservative Members recognise that the Bill is on a hiding to nothing. Indeed,
a former Home Secretary has stated that it is highly unlikely to work, and the former Immigration Minister, the right hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick), has described the Government’s aim as being to get a few
“symbolic half-filled flights taking off this spring”
rather than a plan that is a genuine attempt to tackle the dangerous channel crossings.
It is probably no surprise, then, that Ministers are finally turning to plan B: paying people a reported £3,000 per head to go to Rwanda instead. Can that really be true, and if so, will the Minister take the opportunity to enlighten the House on some of the details? Would that £3,000 per head come on top of the £570 million costs that we already know about? Will there be another treaty between the UK and Rwanda to implement it, and if so will he publish it? Has the National Audit Office done an assessment of those additional costs? Will the House be able to vote on the new plan that has been briefed? I await the Minister’s responses with interest.
This Bill is a con. The treaty is a con. The whole Rwanda plan is a con. It is quite simply a headline-chasing gimmick, as unworkable as it is unaffordable. The country knows it, this House knows it, the Home Secretary knows it and the Minister knows it: at £2 million per head, the Rwanda scheme is the worst value-for-money policy in history. However, the amendments that I have spoken to today will not stop flights taking off. We expect those flights to happen this spring, as the Prime Minister has repeatedly promised the country. The amendments would simply insert into the Bill what Ministers have promised, so I encourage Members on both sides of the House to join me in the Division Lobby later to support them.