Sending illegal migrants to Rwanda will cost £2 million per person and the scheme is not a good use of public money, Labour’s Shadow Health Minister Andrew Gwynne has claimed.
Commenting during PMQs Live on GB News, he said: “Is it a good use of public money for it to cost £2 million per person to send them to Rwanda? I don’t think it is.
“I don’t think any sane-minded person would think it is worth £2 million per person. And then that’s just the cost of getting them to Rwanda.
“The cost of housing them here at the moment, a lot of money is spent on hotel costs, and the Government I think is right to want to remove those hotel costs altogether.
“Its main answer is to do up two RAF bases. They scheduled £5 million per base. It turns out that one base is going to cost £49 million to do up and the other base £27 million. That cost is far more than the cost of putting them in hotels.
“In fact, you could put all those illegal immigrants on a cruise liner and send them round the world in perpetuity at a lesser cost than this Government’s paying.
“We’ve got to tackle the issue at source and that means cracking the gangs, it means working with our European partners.”
In a discussion with GB News Political Editor Christopher Hope and Gloria De Piero, Conservative Health Minister Maria Caulfield said: “We’ve heard that Keir Starmer has been over to Europe to start negotiations about taking quotas of people in order to co-operate with EU countries.
“That’s not something we would support. We absolutely are tackling the backlog. There’s been huge progress made towards the end of the last year, but it’s been tackled, and people are being deported.
“People are being turned away as well. The final piece of the jigsaw is the Rwanda flights which are a deterrent, which also will try and stop those constant legal challenges.
“You dis-apply the Human Rights Act and give ministers powers to overrule some of those emergency European court decisions, which take people literally off flights as they’re being deported.
“The Rwanda bill is about much more than sending people to Rwanda.”
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