I wonder whose pocket that goes into

And that price almost certainly doesn’t include the cost of hosting the vulnerable refugee that Rwanda sends to the UK in return.

Article 19: Resettlement of vulnerable refugees

The Parties shall make arrangements for the United Kingdom to resettle a portion of Rwanda’s most vulnerable refugees in the United Kingdom, recognising both Parties’ commitment towards providing better international protection for refugees.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Rishi Sunak’s flagship plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda will cost taxpayers £1.8m for each of the first 300 people the government deports to Kigali, Whitehall’s official spending watchdog has disclosed.

“Unless the government deals with the realities of the situation and focuses its energy and the public’s money on fixing the real issues in the asylum and immigration system, it will achieve nothing.”

The Home Office has spent £20m setting up the Rwanda scheme, which has survived the tenure of three prime ministers – Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.

Four home secretaries – Priti Patel, Suella Braverman in two separate terms, Grant Shapps and James Cleverly – have overseen the scheme.

The impact assessment for the Illegal Migration Act 2023 projects that if nothing is done, the cost of housing asylum seekers will reach £11bn a year by 2026.

“In order to send less than 1% of UK asylum seekers to Rwanda on a few symbolic flights, the taxpayer will be forced fork out over half a billion pounds – with no ability to recover any of the money already sent.

The original article contains 898 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!