Yvette Cooper

Home secretary Yvette Cooper yesterday told MPs that the scheme, which after two-and-a-half years only led to the voluntary removal of four asylum seekers, was “the most shocking waste of taxpayers’ money I have ever seen”.

The £700m total included £290m in payments to Rwanda as well as “the costs of chartering flights that never took off, detaining hundreds of people and then releasing them, and paying for more than 1,000 civil servants to work on the scheme”, she said.

The outgoing Conservative government “had planned to spend over £10 billion of taxpayers’ money on the scheme” and yet “did not tell Parliament that”, she added.

Shadow home secretary James Cleverly, who held the post until this month, accused Ms Cooper of “hyperbole and made-up numbers”.

Ms Cooper stood by the figures and quipped: “We have often warned that, frankly, it would be cheaper to put [asylum seekers] up in the Paris Ritz. As it turns out, it would have been cheaper to buy the Paris Ritz.”

Asylum seekers arriving in the UK were to be permanently relocated to Rwanda under the scheme, which was dogged from the start by legal challenges on human rights grounds.

Among blows to its credibility was a ruling by the High Court in Belfast in May that legislation providing for the deportation of asylum seekers could not be enforced in Northern Ireland.

Sir Keir Starmer KC, the new Labour prime minister, scrapped the scheme on coming to office on the basis that it was “unworkable”.

However, human rights campaigners have challenged the new government to make firmer commitments to protecting the rights of asylum seekers.

The new prime minister’s “focus on ‘border security’ and ‘smashing the gangs’ risks treading a very similar path to the last government”, Amnesty International uk’s chief executive Sacha Deshmukh said last week.

“It would be enormously refreshing for the new government to acknowledge that some people must and will make dangerous journeys to escape persecution and conflict, and that the UK will play its part in helping and respecting the rights of these people,” he added.