Rishi Sunak today insisted he backed the Rwanda plan when he was Chancellor – despite claims he doubted the migrant scheme when it was first announced.
The Prime Minister stressed voters should ‘have confidence’ the proposals to send asylum seekers to Africa – in a bid to stop the Channel migrant crisis – ‘will work’.
He has made the Rwanda plan a central part of his pledge to ‘stop the boats’ and is currently trying to pass emergency legislation to get the scheme up and running.
But – ahead of his Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill returning to the House of Commons – Mr Sunak has been hit by reports he was not convinced by the effectiveness of a deportation agreement with Kigali before becoming PM.
According to No 10 papers from March 2022, seen by the BBC, Mr Sunak was described as believing the ‘deterrent won’t work’ in stopping Channel crossings.
Rishi Sunak today insisted he backed the Rwanda plan when he was Chancellor – despite claims he doubted the migrant scheme when it was first announced
The Prime Minister, appearing on the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg show, stressed voters should ‘have confidence’ the proposals to send asylum seekers to Africa ‘will work’
The documents suggested Mr Sunak was also concerned about the cost of sending asylum seekers to Africa and wanted to limit the numbers.
The PM this morning admitted he had questioned the ‘value for money for taxpayers’ of the scheme prior to it being unveiled by Boris Johnson in April 2022.
But he insisted he asked ‘probing questions of every proposal that crossed my desk as Chancellor’ and said it was ‘wrong’ to claim this meant he didn’t ‘believe in the scheme or the principle of deterrence’.
The Safety of Rwanda Bill has been drafted by Mr Sunak in a bid to get around the UK Supreme Court’s ruling last year that the scheme is unlawful.
But some Tory MPs are concerned the legislation is not tough enough to avoid future legal challenges to migrant deportations.
Mr Sunak risked sparking further alarm this morning when he failed to say whether he’d ignore a fresh block from European judges.
The PM declined to explicitly commit to disregarding a so-called Rule 39 order by the European Court of Human Rights, should Strasbourg-based judges issue a new emergency ruling against the scheme.
Labour are demanding Mr Sunak be ‘honest with the public’ by releasing Downing Street papers that reportedly indicate he was unsure about the Rwanda plan in 2022.
They are calling on the PM to ‘come clean about his reservations about the Rwanda scheme as Chancellor’ and demanded the documents be published.
Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said Mr Sunak had become the latest senior Conservative to indicate they ‘don’t believe the Government’s plans will work’.
The No10 papers are said to show Mr Sunak had doubts over the impact of deporting migrants to Rwanda a month before the scheme was unveiled.
The documents – which say No 10 suggested Mr Sunak needed to ‘consider his popularity with the base’ over Rwanda – also said the then Chancellor was reluctant to fund ‘Greek-style reception centres’ in favour of hotels, saying he felt hotels were a ‘cheaper’ form of migrant accommodation.
But, quizzed about the reports on the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme this morning, Mr Sunak said: ‘My job was to ask probing questions of every proposal that crossed my desk as Chancellor.
‘Whether you have doubts about it or not, you shouldn’t come to it with a preconceived notion that everything is fine when you are spending taxpayers money, of course you shouldn’t.
‘You should always ask probing questions, you should always approach things from a position of scepticism to ensure that you get value for money for taxpayers. That is the job of the chancellor and the Treasury when things crossed their desk.
‘But to infer from that that I don’t believe in the scheme or the principle of deterrence is wrong. I was doing my job to get good value for money for taxpayers.
‘I went through that process, funded the scheme with the prime minister and, as PM myself, I have made sure that we have a similar deterrent working with Albania, and I have made the point that it is because Albania is working that we should have confidence that the Rwanda scheme will work too.’
A group of people thought to be migrants are pictured crossing the Channel in a small boat traveling from the coast of France and heading in the direction of Dover
A planned inaugral migrant deportation flight to Rwanda was dramatically halted at the 11th hour in June 2022 when the European Court of Human Rights issued an urgent Rule 39 order
A planned inaugral migrant deportation flight to Rwanda was dramatically halted at the 11th hour in June 2022 when the European Court of Human Rights issued an urgent Rule 39 order.
This prevented the removal of a person to Rwanda, with a Strasbourg judge saying they should not be deported until after a final decision had been made by the UK courts.
No migrant flights from the UK to Africa have since taken place, despite taxpayers having already handed over millions of pounds to Kigali.
Mr Sunak today refused to directly say whether he would ignore any further Rule 39 orders by the ECHR – despite his pledge to ‘do whatever it takes’ to make the scheme a success.
‘I’ve been very clear about this – I won’t let a foreign court stop our ability to remove people once we have been through our process of Parliament and our court system,’ he said.
Asked to be ‘crystal clear’ about whether he would ignore a Rule 39 measure, the PM added: ‘I don’t need to speculate about the future.’
Pressed again on the issue, Mr Sunak replied: ‘There’s lots of steps between now and then.
‘I’m entirely confident that what we’re doing is compliant with all our international obligations.
‘But I’ve been crystal clear I won’t let a foreign court to remove people safely to Rwanda.’
Responding to Mr Sunak’s comments this morning, Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael said: ‘Slippery Sunak needs to come clean with the public.
‘Even the PM knows that this scheme only serves to more throw taxpayers’ money onto the ever growing bonfire of Conservative Government waste.
‘Rishi Sunak is so weak that he has been reduced to pursuing policies that he knows don’t work in order to appease the right of his party. He is PM in name only.
‘If the Conservative Government was serious about tackling this issue they would ditch this unworkable, staggeringly expensive, and immoral scheme.’