The cost of Suella Braverman's Rwanda dream
I asked the Home Office how much it had spent on legal challenges to the Rwanda deportation scheme - and on a controversial press trip in March. Here's what it told me.
It’s a big morning in British politics. At 10am, five justices of the Supreme Court will issue a decision on the government’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.
The Rwanda scheme has been a central plank of Conservative immigration policy since Boris Johnson and Priti Patel unveiled the policy, but it’s most closely associated with Suella Braverman, the recently departed home secretary who thinks rough sleeping is a ‘lifestyle choice’.
The Rwanda plan has been the subject - unsurprisingly - of numerous court cases.
So a few months ago, I asked the Home Office how much the department had spent on legal challenges to the Rwanda case.
The answer - when it finally came - was, as of July 21, “the total amount of money spent in relation to legal challenges against the Rwanda policy is £1,429,804.59.”
As one person commenting on X/Twitter last night last night put it, ‘that’s £1.4m of our money on legal fees’. Quite.
The cost of legal bills today - more than three months later - will be much higher.
Also, you might remember that in March, Braverman visited the Rwandan capital Kigali view facilities being prepared for asylum seekers - but only brought along journalists from ‘friendly’ media such as the Mail, the Telegraph and GB News.
The Guardian, the Mirror and the Independent were all excluded. At the time, the Council of Europe issued an alert about how British journalists had been “blocked from joining government press trip to Rwanda.”
I sent a Freedom of Information request to the Home Office and they eventually told me how much the press trip cost to Rwanda - and what outlets were brought along for the ride.
The Home Office told me that it spent almost £40,000 on the press trip (this figure doesn’t include flights, hotels and other expenses incurred by the journalists, which were covered by their outlets.)
£40,000 might sound like a lot for a partisan press trip - for it’s less than a quarter of the estimated of sending one asylum seeker to Rwanda, according to the government’s own analysis.
I also asked the Home Office to “please provide copies of any media briefings/notes about the Rwanda visit circulated to journalists between 17 and 24 March 2023.”
The Home Office refused “after careful consideration”, saying that to give out this information “would likely inhibit the free and frank provision of advice for the purposes of deliberation.”
Who made this decision to withhold the information? That would be the qualified person - “in this case the Home Secretary”.
So Suella Braverman herself was able to block the release information about a crucial part of her controversial Rwanda press trip. Nothing to see here, then….