Yvette Cooper reveals Sunak’s failed Rwanda scheme has cost taxpayers £700 million – London Business News | Londonlovesbusiness.com

The Home Secretary has said that Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda scheme has cost British taxpayers £700 million and just four people were sent to Kigali.

Cooper said that Conservative government’s policy is the “most shocking waste of taxpayer money I have ever seen.”

Cooper told MP’s that the Conservative government over six years were planning to spend more than £10 billion on the Migration and Economic Development Partnership (MEDP).

The Home Secretary then said that due to weak border controls that they have “inherited” from Sunak’s government the small boats crossing the English Channel will likely continue over the summer months.

The Home Secretary said, “Two-and-a-half years after the previous government launched it [Rwanda scheme], I can report (the Migration and Economic Development Partnership) has already cost the British taxpayer £700 million in order to send just four volunteers.

“Over the six years of the (MEDP) forecast, the previous government had planned to spend over £10 billion of taxpayers’ money on the scheme. They did not tell Parliament that.”

Cooper told MPs that the costs include £290 million which was paid to Kigali, “chartering flights that never took off” then “detaining hundreds of people and then releasing them.”

The Home Secretary said co-operation with EU police forces is “too limited” and more has to be done to tackle people smuggling.

Cooper added, “I’m extremely concerned that high levels of dangerous crossings we have inherited are likely to persist through the summer.”

She then raised serious concerns of the Illegal Migration Act and the “legal contradictions” that essentially leaved “no decision” can be take on a person case if arrived in the UK after March 2023.

Cooper told MPs, “It is the most extraordinary policy that I’ve ever seen.

“We have inherited asylum Hotel California – people arrive in the asylum system and they never leave. The previous government’s policy was effectively an amnesty and that is the wrong thing to do.”

Shadow home secretary James Cleverly has accused her of using “made-up numbers.”

Cleverly said, “The Labour Party and indeed the Home Secretary in her statement likes to talk tough on border security, but today’s statement, despite all the hyperbole and the made-up numbers, is basically an admission of what we knew all along.

“That the Labour Party have scrapped the Rwanda partnership on ideological grounds, removed a deterrent, a deterrent, which the National Crime Agency said that we needed.

“And the level of discourtesy, directed towards the people and government of Rwanda is quite breathtaking.

“To have them read about this decision in the papers before anyone from Government had the good grace to formally notify them, I think, is an error, and no-one in this House believes for a moment that that level of discourtesy would have happened had this partnership been with a European country.”