22 July 2024: Guardian: Failed Rwanda deportation scheme cost £700m, says Yvette Cooper
Home secretary describes Tory policy that Labour has axed as ‘the biggest waste of taxpayer money I have ever seen’
19 July 2024: Guardian: Home Office will decide asylum claims of thousands stuck in Rwanda scheme limbo
Previous UK government had built up backlog of 90,000 people whose claims it deemed ‘inadmissible’
Thousands of asylum seekers left in limbo for more than two years as they awaited a decision on the Rwanda scheme will now have their cases decided in the UK.
The decision, revealed during a high court challenge on Friday, is a sharp shift in position from the previous government, which had passed various laws declaring that the claims of those who arrived after January 2022 were “inadmissible” – and so could not be processed in the UK.
But on Friday, the court heard how the new home secretary had pledged to process the claims of those threatened with removal under the Migration and Economic Development Partnership (MEDP) in Britain. Keir Starmer scrapped the Rwanda scheme upon entering Downing Street.
A preliminary hearing in London had already been scheduled, however, in order to hear the progress of the claims of two asylum seekers who had claimed the Home Office had acted unlawfully by delaying its decision over their applications.
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