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.

In fact, £500m is the sort of sum that Mrs Sunak might consider material, albeit less than a tenth of her estimated wealth. It makes one wonder whether Rishi Sunak and those around him have any idea of the value of money – the taxpayers’ money that they keep banging on about. We should take no more lectures from them on efficiency savings and eliminating waste; this is the most wasteful government in history: they make the Prince Regent look like Mr Gladstone.

More to the point, it equates to about £2m per refugee, if any of the planes ever take off for Kigali and take asylum seekers away. Two million quid, even in today’s market, is enough to buy quite a nice house, and maybe a car and some investments too. It really makes those hotel rooms look pretty cheap.

The logical conclusion is that it would be cheaper for His Majesty’s government to fly them over from Sudan or Iran, buy them a suitable property, throw in a car and get them a job or set them up in a business of their own with the remaining capital. At least that way they’d be contributing something to the UK for that considerable per capita outlay.

Better, surely, to have these people in Britain doing their bit to grow the economy rather than leaving them to languish in some camp in central Africa awaiting leave to remain. We’d have to really hate someone to spend £2m to get rid of them. Maybe that’s value for money in today’s Conservative Party?

Sadly, it’s the kind of madhouse economics and profligacy that we’ve grown all too used to, and betrays a certain sort of irrational petulance on the part of the prime minister. Thwarted time and again by the unavoidable fact that Rwanda is not a safe place and sending people there breaches international law, Sunak just keeps doubling down, like a gambler on a losing streak who cannot bear to admit defeat.

So, apparently without much resistance from the Treasury, he keeps sending the cash over to President Kagame, who has made it abundantly clear that the British can’t have it back, no matter how hard-up we now find ourselves.

Not only that, but Sunak is staking huge amounts of political capital on trying to “stop the boats”, an unnecessarily absolutist guarantee that would be impossible to honour at the best of times. In fact, the personal promise was intended to be for 2023, and has now expired, unfulfilled. It’s already been broken.

Had Sunak been better at politics, or better advised, he’d have cut his (i.e. our) losses, shelved the Rwanda plan when the Supreme Court ruled it unlawful, and pledged to make it an issue at the next general election. Instead, he has made himself look very foolish and cost us all a great deal of money all for making some migrants, prospectively, suicidally miserable. Cruelty has rarely been so lavishly funded.