Saturday, March 23, 2024
Whither Rwanda?
The Guardian reports that new figures show that sending ministers and officials to Rwanda has cost the government more than £400,000 before a single deportation flight has taken off.
The paper has calculated that ministers have spent a total of £413,541 on travel in the two years since the policy to send asylum seekers to Kigali started to be developed. The total is based on government transparency releases. It includes trips by senior government officials and a succession of ministers and home secretaries including James Cleverly, Suella Braverman and Priti Patel.
They add that this week it emerged that Cleverly spent £165,561 on chartering a private jet for a one-day trip to sign a new treaty with Rwanda in December. The cost of the flight was published in a transparency document on Thursday:
Cleverly’s flight to Rwanda in December was to sign a new treaty that established a new appeal body, to be made up of judges with asylum expertise from a range of countries, to hear individual cases.
The flights alone of the home secretary’s 24-hour trip cost more than four times the total cost of Braverman’s last visit in March 2023. Her trip cost just over £40,000, with flights at £35,041, hotels £4,301, transport £248 and “engagement” £2,056, the Daily Mirror reported last year.
The government said Rwanda’s asylum system would be monitored by an independent committee, whose powers to enforce the treaty would be beefed up. The committee would develop a system to enable relocated people and their lawyers to lodge complaints.
The government was criticised earlier this month for planning to spend £1.8m on each of the first 300 asylum seekers it plans to send to Rwanda. The overall cost of the scheme stands at more than half a billion pounds, according to the figures released to the National Audit Office.
Perhaps they should spend this money instead on processing claims and putting in place an effective and humane immigration system.
The paper has calculated that ministers have spent a total of £413,541 on travel in the two years since the policy to send asylum seekers to Kigali started to be developed. The total is based on government transparency releases. It includes trips by senior government officials and a succession of ministers and home secretaries including James Cleverly, Suella Braverman and Priti Patel.
They add that this week it emerged that Cleverly spent £165,561 on chartering a private jet for a one-day trip to sign a new treaty with Rwanda in December. The cost of the flight was published in a transparency document on Thursday:
Cleverly’s flight to Rwanda in December was to sign a new treaty that established a new appeal body, to be made up of judges with asylum expertise from a range of countries, to hear individual cases.
The flights alone of the home secretary’s 24-hour trip cost more than four times the total cost of Braverman’s last visit in March 2023. Her trip cost just over £40,000, with flights at £35,041, hotels £4,301, transport £248 and “engagement” £2,056, the Daily Mirror reported last year.
The government said Rwanda’s asylum system would be monitored by an independent committee, whose powers to enforce the treaty would be beefed up. The committee would develop a system to enable relocated people and their lawyers to lodge complaints.
The government was criticised earlier this month for planning to spend £1.8m on each of the first 300 asylum seekers it plans to send to Rwanda. The overall cost of the scheme stands at more than half a billion pounds, according to the figures released to the National Audit Office.
Perhaps they should spend this money instead on processing claims and putting in place an effective and humane immigration system.
