The bottomless financial insanity of the Rwanda scheme

We've finally seen the accounts. And they are atrocious.

Photo by Thiébaud Faix on Unsplash

Rwanda is a lunatic project in any number of ways, but until now we hadn't seen quite how mad it was on a financial level. As of this morning, that has changed. We finally have access to the numbers. 

Today's National Audit Office (NAO) report is a testament to the economic mania of the Home Office. It is an extensive guide to a unique form of British administrative pathology. A journey into the dark heart of man, through the poetry of comprehensive auditing techniques.

We've urgently needed this document. For over a year now, Rwanda has been discussed in lurid and vague terms which do not give us a decent indication of the details. Last December, senior MPs had enough. The chairs of the public accounts committee and the home affairs committee wrote to the comptroller and auditor general to express their concern about the lack of information available to parliament and asked the NAO to step in so it could find out what the hell was going on.

The NAO is one of those organisations which can still rightfully make you proud of Britain. It roams widely, interviewing who it likes, finding the most reliable information and then presenting it clearly and concisely. Once its reports come out, they are utterly dependable. If it's in there, you know it's true. It has no political views, no broader layers. It is just rigorous auditing. 

It outlined three spending streams. 

The first is composed of the direct costs the UK will incur by setting up and operationalising the Rwanda scheme. It's already spent £20 million on this and that number is going to rise dramatically. They've ploughed millions into staffing budgets, legal fees, and set-up costs for escorting people to Rwanda. They will continue to do so: a million a year in staffing, £11,000 in transportation for each individual sent to the country, £12.6 million this year alone in training escorts to get people onto the flights. There will also be significant costs in training Rwandan officials and setting up a monitoring system. 

The second stream is composed of direct payments to Rwanda's Economic Transformation and Integration Fund. This is basically our bribe to get them to do the scheme at all. We already paid £120 million in April 2022, then made another £100 million payment in April 2023. We're going to pay an additional £50 million in April of the next three consecutive years, totalling £370 million overall. There will also be an additional payment of £20,000 for each individual relocated - because why not? Just keep throwing cash at it.

All of this is for a scheme which has not sent a single person to Rwanda. But even if the scheme is implemented, it'll never be anything more than a drop in the ocean. The country made 487 asylum decisions in 2021. It simply doesn't have the capacity to process anything like the kind of claims we'd need. Our asylum backlog has over 100,000 people in it. 

And here's the thing. The Home Office knows this. It has agreed an additional payment of £120 million to Rwanda once 300 people have been relocated. That's very interesting. It is a tacit admission of just how low the benchmark for success is. Transporting 300 people would make no difference at all to the asylum backlog. But the payments system makes clear that this is what the government would consider a triumph.

The final spending stream comes in the form of individual payments to Rwanda to cover asylum processing and operational costs for each individual sent to Rwanda. It's part of a five-year package covering accommodation, food, medical services, education and integration programmes. The numbers here are simply insane. They are really beyond the wildest imaginings of the most ferocious critics of the programme. They total £150,874 for each individual. 

To get a sense of just how mad this is, consider how much a functioning asylum system costs. Because that, after all, is the alternative. It's what we used to have, before a succession of hard-line immigration bills meant that we stopped processing the claims. 

The last period in which the system was working broadly effectively was 2015/16. At this stage, most cases were still processed in six months. That's financially important, because the state only really supports asylum seekers when they're waiting for their case to be processed. Then their claim is either accepted or refused. If they're accepted, they get refugee status, go to work, pay tax, become a normal member of society. If they’re refused, they're removed. Either way, the state no longer has to support them. It is not paying for their accommodation costs or giving them a bit of money each week for food.

It's hard to find comparable figures for asylum seekers in the normal British processing system. Inflation messes with the numbers, obviously. The Home Office changed its methodology in 2017, which doesn't help either. So this is all slightly back-of-a-fag packet. But it's striking nonetheless. 

The information can be found in table ASY_04 of the government's immigration data. It is stark. When the asylum system was working properly in 2015/16, the 'unit cost' of each asylum case was £7,062. This includes all the costs associated with it - from accommodation, to interviews with Home Office caseworkers, to challenging legal appeals.

By 2022/23 that cost had soared to £20,921. This is largely because the government lost control of the system. People stayed on the waiting list way past the six-month mark, often waiting years for a decision. As the backlog grew, the Home Office ran out of long-term accommodation to house them and had to start using hotels. That was incredibly expensive. Housing an asylum seeker in a hotel costs £120 a night, compared to just £18 for shared accommodation in houses and flats. But even in this scenario, we are talking about £20,921 per asylum seeker - still way below the Rwanda scheme level. 

So let's compare. The unit cost of the Rwandan scheme is £150,874 in individual payments, an additional £20,000 in per-individual sweeteners to the Rwandan government and £11,000 in transportation fees, coming in at £181,874 overall. And even this is an understatement, because it excludes direct spending and the lump sum payments to the Rwandan government needed to get the scheme up and running. 

The unit cost of a functioning system, on the other hand, is £7,062. 

It's just deranged. There's no other word for it. In policy terms, it's really end-of-days stuff: an active and concerted attempt to secure the least rational financial outcome, all so that we can inflict unnecessary suffering on marginalised people. A disastrous moral project, conducted in a biblically self-defeating way. 

If the Rwanda scheme was a person, you would have them committed.