Conservatives will campaign on deportation flights even though it’s clear none will take off.
Rishi Sunak said yesterday that deportation flights to Rwanda would not leave before the UK’s general election.
So what? Barring an electoral earthquake, this means
- as policy, the Rwanda scheme is dead;
- as politics, it’s alive and kicking for at least the next six weeks.
The idea of deporting asylum-seekers to East Africa was conceived in 2022 by Boris Johnson as proof of his border bona fides and to draw a sharp line between his party and Labour on immigration. Sunak has made the strategy as his own, even though in practical terms it’s doomed.
The smallprint. Refugees crossing the English Channel in small boats are liable in principle to be deported to Rwanda if they’ve already travelled through a safe third country.
Did the boats stop? No. Undeterred by the scheme, nearly 10,000 people have crossed the channel since the start of 2024, more than in the same period in each of the past four years.
Did the flights start? Also no, except for one failed asylum seeker who voluntarily took up a £3000 offer to be flown to Rwanda in May.
By the numbers
£290 million – paid already to the Rwandan government
£541 million – the scheme’s full five-year cost if 300 people were deported
4 – UK home secretaries since the scheme was announced in April 2022
5,700 – asylum seekers identified by the Home Office as eligible for removal to Rwanda
0 – asylum seekers forcibly deported
Vote Rwanda. Undeterred himself, Sunak is talking up the schedule he has set for a flight to Kigali to take off in July. He used his first interviews after calling the election to tell voters if he was re-elected “these flights will go”.
At the same time, Keir Starmer was telling people in Kent he didn’t think Sunak ever believed the scheme would work and that the election was called early to avoid headlines declaring flights this summer had been delayed (again).
Election limbo. As part of the Rwanda scheme, in the week of the May local elections, the Home Office launched a major operation to detain asylum seekers for relocation. Lawyers representing some of those waiting to be deported now say
- their clients can no longer be lawfully detained in the run-up to the election given no removal decision has been made;
- there is no real likelihood they will be on a flight to Rwanda in July anyway; and
- the election announcement has therefore only strengthened their case for bail.
Labour says it will scrap the Rwanda plan on day one. Its alternative is to set up a new Border Security Command to tackle people-smuggler gangs; commit to tackling the asylum backlog by increasing caseworker numbers; and put 1000 staff into a returns and enforcement unit to remove failed asylum seekers to unspecified foreign countries.
“Have some humanity”. According to Women for Refugee Women, a charity, eight women have received a Notice of Intent (NOI) from the Home Office, meaning they could be sent to Rwanda as a supposedly safe third country.
All are detained. Some are survivors of trafficking from countries including Iran, Iraq and Eritrea which typically have very high asylum recognition rates. One told Tortoise: “I am worried all the time in detention. I find it hard to sleep and eat. Every day we are asked why we don’t want to go to Rwanda, which makes me feel even worse.”
Two views. It’s a measure of Britain’s polarisation that Sunak’s campaign team remains convinced of the Rwanda scheme’s political value while Enver Solomon of the Refugee Council calls it “an Alice-in-Wonderland adventure that was both absurd and inhumane.”
And a third. Earlier this week the prime minister was in Vienna gathering support for the scheme from Austria’s chancellor and others, but in practical terms it’s hard not to conclude it’s been
- a waste of hundreds of millions of pounds;
- a distraction for a small army of civil servants and government lawyers;
- a blow to Britain’s reputation as a respecter of international law; and
- an abject policy failure.
What’s more… When Tortoise asked if pre-election sensitivity restrictions (purdah) would prevent further detentions, the Home Office said it was “still bottoming it out”.
