He now says that he expects deportation flights to take off to the east African country in 10-12 weeks’ time.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is facing yet more humiliation after breaking yet another pledge, which he insisted he was on track to meet just two weeks ago.
Rishi Sunak had promised that flights removing asylum seekers to Rwanda, who had arrived via illegal routes, would be taking off in the Spring, despite the legislation being hit by a number of delays and setbacks.
He now says that he expects deportation flights to take off to the east African country in 10-12 weeks’ time.
Sunak’s press conference at Downing Street this morning came as his flagship Rwanda bill undergoes the Parliamentary ‘ping-pong’ stage between the Lords and the Commons, with both Houses of Parliament scheduled to sit late into the night today to get the bill passed.
Disclosure, calculated on basis of 300 deportations, called ‘staggering’ by chair of home affairs committee
Rishi Sunak’s flagship plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda will cost taxpayers £1.8m for each of the first 300 people the government deports to Kigali, Whitehall’s official spending watchdog has disclosed.
The overall cost of the scheme stands at more than half a billion pounds, according to the figures released to the National Audit Office. Even if the UK sends nobody to the central African state, Sunak has signed up to pay £370m from the public purse over the five-year deal.
The disclosures follow nearly three years of refusals by prime ministers, home secretaries and senior Home Office staff to explain the full costs of the deal, citing “commercial confidentiality”.
So far, no asylum seeker has been sent to Rwanda, because of repeated challenges to the scheme under European and UK laws.
Water price hikes: we need a mass movement for public ownership
UNITE’S Sharon Graham calls the water industry “a symbol of the failure of privatisation writ large.”
She is right. The only reaction to water bosses’ announcement that they will raise prices above inflation from April should be a mass campaign for renationalisation now.
Water suppliers claim they need to raise bills because they are planning big investments to cut down on leaks. How dare they?
Since privatisation these crooks have paid out over £70 billion in dividends to shareholders, loaded the sector — debt-free when privatised — with over £50bn in debt and raised bills by over 40 per cent.
While milking the system for everything it’s worth they have neglected basic maintenance and repairs. In London and the south-east alone, water regulator Ofwat calculated last year that 600 million litres, equivalent to 270 Olympic swimming pools, are leaked from pipes every single day.
They have behaved with utter contempt for the environment, discharging untreated sewage into our waterways thousands of times. They have continued to pay executives millions even when fined for their illegal ecological vandalism.
THE director of public prosecutions is appealing to the Supreme Court to overturn the acquittal of two peaceful protesters for insulting Iain Duncan Smith.
Ruth Wood and Radical Haslam were charged over an incident in Manchester during the October 2021 Conservative Party conference at which both called the former work and pensions secretary “Tory scum” and Ms Wood added “F*** off out of Manchester.”
That their case even reached the High Court should have set alarm bells ringing over the creeping restriction of free speech in Britain. That court’s not guilty verdict was welcome, though its consideration of their motives for insulting Mr Duncan Smith was surely unnecessary: rudeness to a politician should not be considered criminal, end of.
A view of the Bibby Stockholm migrant accommodation barge following the death of an asylum seeker on board, December 12, 2023
THE tragic human cost of the Bibby Stockholm barge was revealed by MPs today as the Tories’ overspend on asylum accommodation landed taxpayers with an extra £2.6 billion bill.
Dame Diana Johnson said asylum-seekers were facing “claustrophobic” conditions that could amount to a breach of human rights after the home affairs select committee visited the Portland vessel.
The committee chairwoman wrote to illegal migration minister Michael Tomlinson to set out serious concerns about the wellbeing of asylum-seekers on the barge.
She said it was “disheartened to see some of the living conditions on the Bibby Stockholm” after finding “many individuals having to share small, cramped cabins (originally designed for one person), often with people (up to six) they do not know (some of whom spoke a different language to them).”
“These crowded conditions were clearly contributing to a decline in mental health for some of the residents, and they could amount to violations of the human rights of asylum-seekers,” she added.
The committee complained of “discrepancies” between the accounts of officials and asylum-seekers themselves, noting MPs received “inconsistent” information regarding access to GP services for those on board.
Mayor of North of Tyne, Jamie Driscoll, speaking at the Convention of the North, January 25, 2023
AN ELECTED Labour mayor who was barred by the party from standing in May’s mayoral election has launched his election campaign standing as an independent.
North of Tyne Mayor Jamie Driscoll attacked Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer in a packed community hall in Sunderland on Thursday night asking: “What if – it’s a general election year – Keir Starmer says, ‘here’s my 10 pledges’ – would you trust him to keep them?”
He criticised Labour MPs and other politicians who changed their positions each time a policy was altered by the leadership.
“The day I left the Labour Party was the day Labour said they would adopt the Conservative policy of the two-child benefit cap — a policy that plunged 250,000 kids into poverty at a stroke,” he said.
“And all those Labour frontbenchers – and Labour mayoral candidates – who’d said that policy was ‘heinous’ and ‘cruel’ changed their tune, and said, ‘ah, well, you know, public finances,’ and meekly swallowed the party line that it’s OK to keep children in poverty.
Rishi Sunak has staked his political future on getting the Rwanda scheme off the ground. Under the proposals, asylum seekers who arrive in the UK other than through an existing asylum scheme would be deported to Rwanda where their claim would then be processed.
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Polling from YouGov found that if Labour were to win the next election, 40% of voters would want Keir Starmer to scrap the plan. That compares to 34% who think it should be kept.
Asking a slightly different question, YouGov more recently found that just one in five voters think the Rwanda scheme should be pushed through in its current form. Again, 40% of the public think it should be scrapped altogether.
Government criticised for spending £400m on Rwanda scheme while more than 1.2m wait for social housing
A housing charity accused the government of “pandering to dog-whistle politics” with the deal. Getty Images
The government could have increased the number of social homes built across England last year by more than a fifth using the money it has committed to its Rwanda asylum scheme.
Home secretary James Cleverly confirmed on Wednesday that the government’s agreement to deport asylum seekers who enter the UK irregularly to the African country will have cost almost £400m by 2027.
The total sum would be enough to completely fund an estimated 2,131 new social homes, which is more than 22% of the 9,561 completed in England in the year to April 2023. The average government grant required to build a new home for social rent in England is £183,000, according to estimates by the National Housing Federation.
More than 1.2 million households were waiting for social housing in England as of March 2023, statistics published by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) show.
The figures also show 7,620 social homes were completed in the year to April 2022, but a much higher number, 27,849, either sold or demolished – a net loss of more than 20,000. No figures have yet been published for social homes lost in the most recent year.
The government gave £140m to Rwanda in 2022 as part of its deal with the county and last week the Home Office’s most senior civil servant confirmed that a further £100m was given to the country in 2023. They added that a further payment of £50m is “anticipated” in 2024.
Cleverly, this week, told Parliament that the UK plans to give a further £50m to Rwanda annually in 2026 and 2027.
The overall costs of the Rwanda scheme could reach far higher that the £390m already committed by the government. An earlier economic impact assessment of the Illegal Migration Bill said that it would cost £63,000 more to remove a person to a third country, such as Rwanda, than having their asylum claim processed in the UK.
Rishi Sunak claimed in November that the policy “will literally save us billions in the long run”, but has not provided any figures to back this up.
On Tuesday, the National Audit Office confirmed that it would publish a report assessing the costs of the Rwanda scheme in 2024.
The inquiry was prompted by criticism from Labour MPs Meg Hillier and Diana Johnson, the chairs of the Public Accounts Committee and the Home Office Select Committee respectively, who said that there has been a “lack of clarity around value for money”.
Robina Qureshi, the CEO of Positive Action in Housing, said openDemocracy’s findings show that the government has put “pandering to dog-whistle politics” and “giving asylum contractors huge profits” over people’s futures.
“They haven’t been providing for society,” she said. “Instead they are sitting on their social media accounts trying to promote their own careers, and giving multi-million-pound contracts to asylum contractors. But nothing’s been done to help anyone that really needs it.
“When you build social homes, it increases the pool of houses that are available for anyone who’s in need.”
