Home Office minister defends extra payment to Rwanda taking total cost of plan to £290m – UK politics live

Tom Pursglove defends cost of scheme after Labour brands it an ‘astronomical’ waste of taxpayers’ money

Good morning. Rishi Sunak is still struggling to persuade his party to back his new Rwanda deportation bill, and at his press conference yesterday he was trying to focus attention instead on Labour, criticising it for not backing legislation he claimed was in line with “the values of the British people”. When the policy was first announced last year, Labour did not immediately commit to scrapping the policy. But it did overtime harden its opposition to the policy, it has said it will vote against the new bill on Tuesday, and last night the Home Office made an announcement that must strengthen Labour’s case considerably.

Until yesterday the price tag for the Rwanda policy was £140m – £120 of which was going on the economic development part of the Rwanda deal, and £20m of which was to fund setting up the facilities that would allow the country to house asylum seekers from the UK. But last night, in a letter to the chairs of the home affairs committee and the public accounts committee, which have been asking for information about the full costs, Sir Matthew Rycroft, permanent secretary at the Home Office revealed that another £100m has been paid this year, and £50m more is due to be handed over next year. That will take the total cost of the scheme to £290m by 2025 – even though not a single asylum seeker has flown to Africa, and there is still considerable doubt as to whether any will.

This is just incredible. The Tories’ have wasted an astronomical £290 million of taxpayers’ money on a failing scheme which hasn’t sent a single asylum seeker to Rwanda.

How many more blank cheques will Rishi Sunak write before the Tories come clean about this scheme being a total farce?

We’ve always been clear that this is an economic and migration partnership. We want to support economic development in Rwanda. And of course, there are quite understandably obligations on us to work with Rwanda to make sure that all of the right infrastructure to support the partnership is in place.