The new Prime Minister of the UK Keir Starmer is ending the UK Rwanda deportation plan as announced on 6 July. According to the PM, the plan had the opposite effect on the number of asylum seekers as they increased instead of decreasing.
As per the newly elected prime minister, the number of migrants has reached 12,300 crossing from northern France to Britain this year, an 18% rise from last year. The 5-year UK Rwanda plan, costing 370 million GBP would have flown asylum seekers to the central African country to apply for refuge, rather than in Britain.
PM Starmer said about the UK-Rwanda deal,
“I am not prepared to continue with gimmicks that don’t act as a deterrent. Look at the numbers that have come over in the first six and a bit months of this year, they are record numbers, that is the problem that we are inheriting.”
What was the UK-Rwanda deportation deal?
The British parliament passed the migrant deportation bill in April 2024 to move the asylum seekers who entered the UK illegally. At that time, the previous government announced that the deportation might occur from the very next month. The commercial jest had also been charted to process the deportation process within the next 10 to 12 weeks. According to “The Times“, the UK government also wanted to offer 3,000 GPB to those choosing to move to Rwanda.