Anybody who is still trying to defend the Rwanda scheme (of which there still seems to be a few) needs to read this paper from March. They clearly must think the country just has bags and bags of money to fritter around.
For anybody doing the maths that is £170,874 per person over 5 years + £400,000 per person for the first 300 people. An eye-watering sum of money that doesn’t even capture the additional fixed contributions to the ETI fund. Storing claimants on Bibby Stockholm costs £45,000+ per year. Another incredible waste of money.
Actually processing an asylum claim costs £12,000 plus whatever support an approved refugee might require if they are successful. But if they are successful then they aren’t economic migrants are they?
And this as a deterrent? Well here’s one for you. Even if through this policy you deterred every single asylum seeker from coming here for an entire year, then we would still be paying more to Rwanda than we would save. If we generously ignore the huge up-front fixed cost, then if we send 1,000 people to Rwanda each year we would need to deter between 50-75% of unsuccessful asylum claimants from coming here for it to make economic sense in the long-term. That is fantasy. Are people really willing to bet close to a billion pounds on deterring over half of a group of people who clearly aren’t deterred by the much higher odds prospect of drowning in the Channel?
So Yvette Cooper is entirely correct when she describes this as an obscene waste of money. If people think we can sensibly afford a scheme like this right now they are living in an alternate reality.