Yvette Cooper dismantled Robert Jenrick’s immigration claims in a blistering exchange in the Commons today.
The immigration minister had defended the Illegal Migration Bill and its accompanying economic impact assessment.
A total of 45,755 people were detected to have crossed the Channel in small boats last year.
Rwanda
Even Tory MP Caroline Nokes, who chairs the Women and Equalities Select Committee, said the plan to move asylum seekers to Rwanda is “very difficult to justify”.
Nokes told Sky News: “No, I don’t think it does and I have always been concerned that the Rwanda scheme is not only very difficult to justify why we should be sending asylum seekers to Rwanda to be processed within the Rwandan asylum system, when actually we should have better systems here.
“But the value for money question is a perfectly valid and legitimate one.
“And it’s worrying when the Home Office themselves can’t be certain that these figures are accurate, and they’re more predicated on the Rwandan scheme acting more as a deterrent and, to date, we’ve not seen it act as a deterrent.”
Yvette Cooper immigration
In response for Labour, shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said: “I was going to ask if the immigration minister had seriously signed-off this garbage of an impact assessment that no self-respecting minister could possibly think was serious, but actually the nonsense he has just said is even worse and even less coherent.”
Ms Cooper added: “It does provide evidence of the scale of Conservative failure, the cost for one person in the asylum system for just one night has gone up five-fold in four years.
“That is just the cost of Tory mismanagement; it’s gone up faster than mortgages, energy bills, it’s even gone up faster than the price of cheese.”
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