Rwanda plan costs soar to £500m – but will it ever work?

Immigration remains a major concern for voters, particularly those precious members of the electorate who opted to vote Conservative at the 2019 general election. Yet despite successive pledges, a procession of “tough” home secretaries, strong rhetoric, a constant flow of new laws, and the personal intervention of the prime minister, the news flow on the issue has rarely been favourable. The latest developments seem to be no different…

The latest figure squeezed out of the government by the National Audit Office, an independent watchdog doing crucial work, suggests that more than £500m will be spent on the scheme even before a single refugee is deported. The bulk of the money is irrecoverable; some £370m has been pledged to Rwanda under the terms of the Economic Transformation and Integration Fund, with no conditions on individuals being sent over.

Even if the 300 or so people projected to go were ever to land in Kigali it would amount to a cost of £1.8m each to see them off. It is also possible that, if some can’t be returned to a safe place and Rwanda doesn’t want them, they’ll be sent back to the UK; and refugees from Rwanda will still try to come to the UK.

All this is despite the fact that Rishi Sunak says it has to be in place to provide the deterrent effect to “stop the boats”, and redeem his promise to the electorate. It’s true that arrivals by small boat are down about a third, and the returns scheme to Albania is working well; but the PM promised that these crossings would have been ended by now, and they are still happening. One of his five key pledges to the British people must be judged broken.

It is in the balance. After the Supreme Court struck the last Rwanda treaty down as unlawful last November, the government is trying to pass a law that simply declares Rwanda to be a safe country for asylum, despite the Supreme Court saying otherwise and facts on the ground not changing much. The bill is encountering fierce resistance in the Lords, and may well be subject to yet more legal objections under the European Convention on Human Rights, which cannot be disregarded indefinitely. So it’s running out of time. Labour say they will abolish it.

Nothing in his official capacity as he’s just been sacked, having already been told that he wouldn’t be reappointed. David Neal, who had been in post since 2021, left behind some 13 reports into various failings in the border control and migration system that are finally being published. Neal found some highly disturbing shortcomings in the way the Home Office and its agencies went about their important work. For example, he found UK border protection is generally “neither effective nor efficient”, with unstaffed control posts at smaller airports and e-passport gates at airports manned by “distracted” officers who lacked basic equipment. The asylum system, Neal adds, is a “burning platform that requires radical action”. The details in his extensive work are scarcely more edifying. One particularly unpleasant episode that has caught media attention was a “game” set up by border inspectorate personnel where unaccompanied asylum-seeking children were made to guess who would be the next one to be placed in foster care. Almost needless to add, the agency workers employed to supervise children as young as nine had received “insufficient” background checks and training.

As he told MPs earlier this week, he was fired for “doing his job” and then speaking out as a whistleblower, a role supposedly under statutory protection… which didn’t stop home secretary James Cleverly from dismissing him a few weeks before his contract ran out.

More than a year ago, Neal was informed by senior Home Office civil servants that his reports were unduly negative about government performance. At that point, then home secretary Suella Braverman decommissioned his annual reporting routine on the effectiveness of Home Office practices and policies towards adults at risk in immigration detention. It must have been apparent to Neal then that his time was running out, and so it proved.

Neal’s story betrays a defensive Home Office and its political chiefs who know all too well that things have been going badly awry, and don’t want anyone else to find out. It certainly seems like an age since 2015 when Theresa May, as home secretary, set up the role of independent chief inspector for borders and immigration so that she might better keep tabs on how the system was working. As Neal himself put it in one of his unstinting accounts of bureaucratic underperformance, the Home Office has a “culture of defensiveness” and “will not change” if it does not want to. It doesn’t suggest that there are going to be some radical improvements ready in time for ministers to boast about them at the next election.

Probably nobody before the general election because of the time it will take to recruit a replacement. There will thus be fewer embarrassing headlines; but also more undetected failures to be discovered by whoever does eventually take on the role.

Over the last couple of years disillusioned Tories have tended to defect to Labour or opt out of voting next time. In recent months there’s been a stronger trend of ex-Tories turning to Reform UK, with the net effect of extending the Labour lead and taking Starmer’s likely majority into historic landslide territory.