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The Conservative government spent more than £130m on IT and data systems for the scheme to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, which will never be used, the Observer can reveal.
Digital tools needed to put the forced removal programme into effect made up the second-largest chunk of the £715m spent in little over two years, behind only the £290m handed directly to Paul Kagame’s government.
They included a database for anticipated complaints to a “monitoring committee”, which was set up to oversee the deal’s compliance with human rights laws, and systems to enforce the Tories’ attempted legal duty to remove asylum seekers arriving on small boats.
Labour announced that it was scrapping the policy shortly after winning the general election, with home secretary Yvette Cooper calling it “the most shocking waste of taxpayers’ money I have ever seen”.
A Home Office official said data protection laws had caused spending to increase and new systems were needed to send Rwandan authorities biometric information, such as fingerprints.
“The Home Office had to deploy people and technology to Rwanda so that they were compliant with data protection,” the civil servant added.
“If people were sent to Rwanda and had an appeal going, the system meant they would have to wait for the decision while in Rwanda.
“If their appeal was successful, they would have been flown back to the UK, so part of those costs was setting up the IT infrastructure to get them visas and transport to come back.”
The £134m spending on IT programmes was not disclosed as part of a breakdown of spending released by the Labour government last month because it was grouped with a wider £280m pool of “other fixed costs”.
A detailed breakdown obtained by the Observer under freedom of information laws shows that £87m was also spent on staff working directly on the Rwanda scheme who have since been redeployed to other tasks.
A further £57m spent since 2022 was classed as “programme and legal costs”, which covers the court battle that culminated in Supreme Court judges declaring the Rwanda scheme unlawful in 2023, as well as the Home Office’s fight against individual challenges brought by selected asylum seekers. The Home Office source said it paid for both government legal department lawyers and external counsel, adding: “Some were solicitors crafting those agreements [with Rwanda] or dealing with legal challenges, and a few were barristers instructed in judicial reviews or appeals.
“The Home Office basically appealed every ruling against them, so the costs went up and up.”
The category also includes spending on setting up the Conservatives’ wider “new plan for immigration”, which saw external consultants hired to help plan and design the programme.
The Home Office source said the plan was organised into many “projects”, each assigned several staff.
“The law was poorly written and difficult to implement,” they added. “It required a lot of policy people hired for these jobs – mostly consultants or people on temporary promotions.”
Previously disclosed spending on the Rwanda scheme included £95m on increasing capacity in immigration detention centres, which were not large enough to hold the number of asylum seekers the Conservatives wanted to force on flights to Kigali.
An attempted flight in June 2022, and planning and preparing for further flights, cost £50m.
The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, which represents Home Office and Border Force staff, said the huge sums “could – and should – have been better spent providing a safe and humane solution” to small boat crossings in the English Channel.
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General secretary Fran Heathcote said: “As we said at the time, the previous government’s Rwanda scheme was never going to stop the boats – it was all about political posturing.”
Only four volunteers travelled to Kigali as a result of the policy, following a late-stage change meaning it could apply to failed asylum seekers.
They were paid £3,000 to leave the UK voluntarily and were also promised the full package of support drawn up under the original scheme, which was designed for small boat migrants declared “inadmissible” for asylum consideration in Britain.
Tory ministers claimed the Rwanda policy would “deter” small boat crossings when it was announced in April 2022, but the Home Office permanent secretary refused to sign off the policy and Priti Patel forced it through using a rare ministerial direction.
Matthew Rycroft warned the then-home secretary there was “uncertainty surrounding value for money” and that the scheme would have “high costs”, adding: “I do not believe sufficient evidence can be obtained to demonstrate that the policy will have a deterrent effect significant enough to make the policy value for money.”
Patel replied with a formal direction for Sir Matthew to proceed and claimed it would “reduce illegal migration, save lives and ultimately break the business model of the smuggling gangs”.
Small boat crossings hit record levels in the year the Rwanda policy was announced, and deaths in the Channel have steadily risen in the subsequent period, with at least 78 people known to have died in 2024.
Chris Philp MP, shadow home secretary, said: “One of Labour’s first acts was to scrap our illegal immigration deterrent before it even started without a clear plan of their own, despite having 14 years to conjure one up.
“This Labour government must act urgently to ensure that no more people die crossing the Channel, no more criminal gangs profit off this organised crime and no more taxpayer money is wasted on hotels.
“We know this is a priority of the British people, which is why, under new leadership, we will take the time to develop a clear and effective plan to tackle illegal immigration year on year.”
