I will advise the other place to do what it is doing, as a revising Chamber: standing up for its constitutional obligations to look at every piece of legislation that we send to it from this place and take the measures that it feels strongly about. This set of amendments in no way prevents this policy from being enacted or flights from taking off; what we are seeing is simply those Members in the other place doing their constitutional duty.
The plan is not only completely unworkable, but shockingly unaffordable. It is likely to cost an astonishing £2 million per deportee. To add insult to injury, it puts the tens of thousands of asylum seekers who are deemed inadmissible and yet cannot be sent to Rwanda, because of the lack of capacity there, into limbo, in expensive hotels, stuck in a perma-backlog at a staggering cost to the taxpayer. This is a dreadful policy and it is shameful politics.
When the Bill was first introduced, the Prime Minister described it as “emergency legislation”, yet the Government’s management of the parliamentary timetable would suggest that the opposite is the case. Ministers had ample opportunity to schedule debates and votes on 25 and 26 March, before the Easter recess, but they chose not to do so. Indeed, there was plenty of scope to accelerate the process last week. People could be forgiven for concluding that the truth of the matter is that Ministers have been deliberately stringing this out for two reasons: first, because they thought they could make some grubby political capital from the delay; and, secondly, because they have been scrambling to organise a flight and all the other logistics that are not in place. The Prime Minister, in his somewhat whinging and buck-passing press conference this morning, admitted that the first flight to Rwanda will not take off until—checks notes—July.
Today is 22 April. We were initially told that this was “emergency legislation”, yet we are now being told that there will be a 10 to 12-week delay in getting the first flight off the ground. I do not know what your definition of an emergency is, Madam Deputy Speaker, but a 10 to 12-week response time seems a bit of a stretch. Given that none of the amendments to the Bill could be seen as wrecking amendments by any stretch of the
imagination, it is difficult to see why those on the Government Benches could not just accept the amendments and get on with it. The fundamental point is that not one of the amendments that have been coming to us from the other place would prevent planes from getting into the air.
Turning first to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord Hope, this amendment simply reflects what the Government have already said: that court judgments are taken at a moment in time and that a country may well be safe at a given point, but not at another. If the Bill passes unamended, this House will, in essence, be asserting that Rwanda will be a safe country for ever more. Surely the indisputable lesson of recent times is that we live in a dangerous and turbulent world, where authoritarians are on the march and the rules-based order is under threat. Who knows what might happen in Rwanda in the future, or in any other country for that matter?