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

At his press conference yesterday Rishi Sunak said that under the new Rwanda bill successful legal challenges against deportation will be “vanishingly rare” because the bill is so tightly drafted.

This morning the Times has splashed on a story saying some lawyers have told the government that that is not true. In their story Matt Dathan and Steven Swinford report:

The Times has been told that Downing Street was warned by two senior lawyers that the scheme risked failure because it would continue to ­allow migrants to lodge challenges against their individual removal to Rwanda. Legal advice from a senior government lawyer said “the scheme would be seriously impeded” if the bill did not include a so-called ­“ouster clause” that barred individual legal challenges.

Separate external legal counsel that was sought by the government warned that the failure to bar individual challenges “is inconsistent with the intellectual underpinning of the bill and also would provide an easy way for many applicants to avoid the effects of the bill”.

Asked about this story, Tom Pursglove, the new legal migration minister, played down suggestions it contains a signficant loophole, saying the law was “robust”. He said:

The legislation closes off so many of the grounds that people have come forward with in raising claims about being sent to Rwanda previously. We believe that this is robust …

I believe that this will do the job. The prime minister has said that we will do whatever is necessary in order to make this work. This is an important step in doing that.

Tom Pursglove, the new minister for legal migration, was trying to play down suggestions that the Conservative party is tearing itself apart over the Rwanda policy in his interviews this morning. He told the Today programme that there was “a unity of purpose on the Conservative benches in parliament” over the need to address the issue.

But he did suggest that the government might accept amendments to the safety of Rwanda (immigration and asylum) bill, which is getting its second reading on Tuesday. Yesterday Rishi Sunak suggested that if he were to move “an inch” in the direction of making it tougher, Rwanda would withdraw support for the policy.

But when Pursglove was asked on Sky News if the government would accept amendments to the bill, he did not say no. He replied:

There will be parliamentary debates, there will be opportunities for people to bring amendments, the House will consider them in the normal way and as ministers we will engage constructively with parliamentarians around any concerns that they have and handle that in the way that we would any other piece of legislation.

The Home Office only disclosed the full costs of the Rwanda deal in response to pressure from Commons committees. Last week Sir Matthew Rycroft, the permanent secretary, told the home affairs committee that the figures would not be published until next year.

This morning Meg Hillier, the chair of the public accounts committee, accused the government of “cloak and dagger” tactics. She told the Today programme:

We’re very concerned that at each step of the way, as a change is proposed [to the Rwanda policy], we have no detailed information about what’s happening … It’s unconscionable that MPs would be expected to vote on this without understanding fully what the costs are so far, what they are expected to deliver and what the costs are going forward.

Emily Dugan has more on what Hillier said here.

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.

Commenting on the revelation last night, Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said:

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?

Britain simply can’t afford more of this costly chaos from the Conservatives.

Tom Pursglove, the new minister for legal migration at the Home Office, has been doing an interview round this morning and he defended the payments. He told Times Radio:

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.

But a more telling indication of how this is seen in government came from the BBC’s Chris Mason revealing on the Today programme this morning that Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, seem to be blaming each other for the payments. He said that No 10 sources are saying Braverman signed off on the payments, although Sunak knew about them, and that sources close to Braverman are saying it was the PM who approved the payments.

In reality, they were both responsible. The Home Office paid the money, with No 10 approval. If they are trying to pretend otherwise, MPs won’t find that convincing.

I will post more from the Pursglove interviews, and more on the Rwanda crisis, shortly.

Otherwise, it may be a quiet day. There is a No 10 lobby briefing at 11.30am, and we are due to get the judgement from the court of session in Edinburgh on whether it was lawful for the UK government to use the Scotland Act to block the Scottish parliament’s gender recognition (reform) bill.

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