UK's scrapped Rwanda migrant plan a 'shocking waste' of $904 million in public funds, minister says

LONDON -- A scrapped plan by former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to send some migrants on a one-way trip to Rwanda was the “most shocking waste of taxpayer money I have ever seen," the U.K.’s new home secretary said Monday as she put the cost at 700 million pounds ($904 million) in public funds.

Sunak's successor Keir Starmer spiked the controversial plan as soon as his Labour government came to power this month. Sunak had made “stopping the boats” a key policy as his Conservative government struggled to stem the flow of asylum-seekers across the English Channel from France, but his plans were stalled by legal challenges and were widely criticized by human rights groups.

Home Secretary Yvette Copper said the failed plan's costs included 290 million pounds in payments to Rwanda, plus “chartering flights that never took off, detaining hundreds of people and then releasing them and paying for more than a thousand civil servants to work on the scheme.”

Rwanda's government has said it was not obligated to refund the money.

“The previous government had planned to spend over 10 billion pounds of taxpayers money on the scheme, they did not tell Parliament that,” Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told lawmakers.

The home secretary said the high number of risky small boat crossings will likely persist through the summer, when weather conditions are more favorable. She also acknowledged that more needs to be done to tackle people-smuggling “upstream," but did not spell out details.

Official figures showed that nearly 1,500 migrants had arrived in the U.K. on small boats across the English Channel in the past week alone. The French coastguard said two people died amid rescue operations off the northern French coast.

Sunak's plan was meant to address the growing number of migrants from around the world — reaching a high of 46,000 in 2022 — who cross the English Channel. Most who arrive that way apply for asylum, and in the past many have received it. The Conservative government argued that these migrants should not be treated as genuine refugees because they did not claim asylum in another safe country they reached first.

The U.K. struck a deal with Rwanda in 2022 to send migrants who arrive in the U.K. as stowaways or in boats to the East African country, where their asylum claims would be processed and, if successful, they would stay.

Human rights groups and other critics of the plan called it unworkable and unethical to deport migrants to a country 4,000 miles (6,400 miles) away that they don’t want to live in.

The plan was challenged in U.K. courts, and no flights to Rwanda took off under it. Cooper said that just four people have been removed to Rwanda — and they did so voluntarily.

Britain’s Supreme Court in November ruled that the policy was unlawful because Rwanda is not a safe third country where migrants can be sent, with five justices unanimously saying that “the removal of the claimants to Rwanda would expose them to a real risk of ill-treatment” because they could be sent back to the home countries they had fled.