UK planned to spend 10bn pounds on Rwanda deportation scheme: Home minister
Al JazeeraThe recently scrapped asylum scheme intended to send people who arrived in Britain without permission to Rwanda. Britain’s previous government had planned to spend 10 billion pounds on a now-scrapped plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, and it has already cost taxpayers 700 million pounds, new Home Secretary Yvette Cooper says. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government scrapped the plan to fly thousands of asylum seekers from Britain to Rwanda in its first major policy announcement after winning a commanding election victory this month. Conservative home affairs spokesman James Cleverly, who touted the plan when he was home secretary, accused Cooper of citing “made-up numbers” and criticised Labour’s “discourtesy” to the Rwandan government. The previous Conservative government first announced the Rwanda plan in 2022 to send people who arrived in Britain without permission to the East African nation, saying it would put an end to asylum seekers arriving on small boats.