Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Debate between Lord Green of Deddington and Lord Purvis of Tweed

Committee stage
Wednesday 14th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB)]

My Lords, I will make a brief postscript to the very powerful interventions that have been made by many other Members, including and particularly by the noble Lord, Lord Deben. I point to some practical aspects. The fact of the matter is that the asylum system is in chaos. The number of cases that are waiting to be assessed would fill Wembley Stadium. This Government are in real difficulty and the next Government, whoever they are, will be in equal difficulty if we do not find a way forward. I accept all the legal difficulties that have been raised very effectively, but let us also keep in mind the practical aspects, and that if this is allowed to continue there will be a very unfortunate effect on relations between communities in our country.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

The noble Lord is an expert in these areas. If the Bill goes through, what is his estimate of how many people will be relocated from the backlog that he has referred to, and over how many years? I think it could take up to 20 years. How will that deplete Wembley Stadium?

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB)]

I do not think that anybody has any idea of the answer to that. That is one of the difficulties. I am pointing to the social difficulties that will also follow. Therefore, we must give the Government some space in order to make an impression on the future inflow of cases to this country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Lord is completely right on his numbers; migration is about 10 times, sometimes more, the inflow of asylum seekers. But the issue that concerns public opinion—maybe because it is always on television or because it is the only thing that the Government are talking about—is indeed asylum. None the less, the real problem, as the noble Lord implied, is the scale of immigration, and we should be under no illusions about what that means for our future.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord and, to some extent, I agree with him. If we have a legal migration system that has been a catastrophic failure, and the Government then seem to wish to scapegoat those fleeing conflict or danger to claim asylum here, I am not surprised that this dominates the debate. But the Government should not look at us when it comes to that situation.

I found it interesting that, when I asked the noble Lord, Lord Green, who supports this Bill, what impact it would have on that point with regards to the backlog—the Wembley Stadium—he gave me an honest answer and said that he did not know. I think he said that the Government do not know; I think he said no one knows. Yet we have paid nearly £400 million not to know. It is the most expensive question never to be answered in the history of the Treasury.

It will get worse, and Amendment 74 therefore tries to get a bit more detail about this. The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, is absolutely right. The Permanent Secretary did not seek ministerial direction simply, as the Minister alluded to before, because there was maybe a question around this, because it is novel. The Permanent Secretary is the accounting officer; it is his duty to say whether a policy would be value for money for the British taxpayer. He was unable to do that, so he asked to be overruled by the Minister. What was quite extraordinary was that, as we now know from his submission in December, part of the ministerial direction was not to tell Parliament of an extra £100 million that was given as a second tranche under this scheme—another large swathe of funding.

We were told by the noble Lord, Lord Murray, during the passage of what became the Illegal Migration Act, that the costs of the scheme were dependent on a per-person basis. That was correct, but we now know that it was not the full answer. Part of the scheme will be on a per-person basis, but the £100 million was a credit line to the Government of Rwanda. So I would like the Minister, when he responds to this debate, to be quite clear and to tell us what that credit line is being used for. We do not know and, if the court of Parliament is to make a judgment, we need a bit more evidence.

The Hope hostel, which is the receiving centre for the people who are due to be relocated, is a private business. It is operated on a private sector contract and the Government say that they will not release information about what we are paying for because it is a Rwandan private sector contract. The Minister said to me in his letter that the Home Office cannot divulge information about the contracts that other countries have made—but we have paid for it. Not only have we paid for it, we will be paying for it. So I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us if there will be another tranche of funding for the Hope hostel in the next financial year, because it is on an annual rolling contract.

This issue also comes down to the fact that that centre can accommodate 200 people, with a typical processing time of a fortnight, I was told. So that will be a maximum of about 5,000 people a year, unless there are Hope hostels 2, 3 and 4 that we will be paying for. We do not know yet. If that is the case and we look at the Wembley Stadium backlog of at least 90,000 people, at 5,000 people a year it is going to take nearly 20 years to clear it.

So far, it has cost just shy of £400 million. What if it is on a per-person basis? That is where the noble Lord, Lord Murray, was absolutely right because, after we pleaded for the impact assessment of the Illegal Migration Bill, he gave that to us and we were duly grateful. It shows that per-person relocation will cost £169,000, on Home Office estimates. I remind the Committee that that is £63,000 more than processing someone and them staying here in the UK. It is 60 grand per person more expensive to the British taxpayer to relocate them in a scheme that is going to take 20 years and has already cost us nearly half a billion pounds.

If it will be 5,000 people a year, what are we looking at if we times that by £169,000? In one year, that will be just shy of £1 billion for two flights. That is fine if this is about the headlines and the Prime Minister saying, “I’ve got the planes taking off”. It is not fine for the British taxpayer. It is equally not fine if the whole purpose of this was to be a deterrent, because the noble Lord, Lord Green, is correct in one respect: if you are clearing the backlog, you want fewer people to come in the first place. That would require a deterrent rate of 100%. The Government’s best estimate, on a medium-term basis, is that there will likely be a break-even point with a deterrent effect of 50%. That is in the impact assessment. So the Home Office itself is estimating that this whole deterrence scheme is just going to halve the number of boats.

We already know that that does not matter, of course, because the Prime Minister announced in the new year that the deterrent effect was working. But we know that it is not, so I would be grateful if the Minister could outline what has been spent within MEDP—the migration and economic development partnership—in a scheme-by-scheme, line-by-line and project-by-project statement. If the scheme came under official development assistance, it would have to be put down under the DevTracker. But it is not under the DevTracker system of transparency at the FCO: it is from the Home Office, so I would like to see the equivalent of that published and the Minister to state whether the rolling contract is to be paid for another year, going forward. I would be very grateful if the Minister could say, at the end of year 1 of this scheme being in operation—just year 1, I am not going to be too ambitious—what the deterrent effect, the total cost and the per-person cost will be. Ultimately, if we are talking about a Budget coming up, surely we should be straight with the British taxpayer.