The Rwanda plan will cost us £2m per refugee. Cruelty has rarely been so lavishly funded

Ministers wouldn’t tell us the cost but the National Audit Office has revealed a figure to shame the ages, writes Sean O’Grady. This is the most wasteful government in British history

Rishi Sunak, one of the richest politicians ever to enter Downing Street, with the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame (PA Archive)

We all know the Rwanda plan, which actually doesn’t amount to a plan, is a useless, unlawful, and cruel flop of a scheme dreamt up for presentational purposes by Priti Patel and Boris Johnson. But the sheer scale of its wastefulness has been camouflaged, until now.

We were told the details about the cost are secret, commercially confidential, not yet finalised, money well spent (however much is involved), a moving target and all the rest of it. Thankfully, one arm of what Liz Truss calls “the deep state” – the independent National Audit Office – had a good look through the books and provided us all with a figure to shame the ages. A total of over half a billion pounds spaffed on what is, at best, a symbolic gesture that’s shortly to be abolished by an incoming Labour government.

So that’s more than £500,000,000. That is a serious amount of taxpayers’ money to blow for no good reason. Granted, it is put in the shade by, say, the billions already wasted on the now-dismembered HS2 project, or the £5bn lost to Covid support scheme fraud. But it beats the £200m sent to the PPE manufacturing company associated with Michelle Mone and her husband.