LONDON - British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Saturday confirmed his newly formed government would not pursue his predecessor’s policy to deport asylum seekers who arrive in small boats to Rwanda, ending the scheme before any flights took off.
“The Rwanda scheme was dead and buried before it started. It’s never been a deterrent (to small boat crossings),” Starmer said at a press conference.
“I’m not prepared to continue with gimmicks that don’t act as a deterrent.”
The question of how to stop the small boats carrying migrants across the English Channel was a major theme of the campaign. Former prime minister Rishi Sunak called the election without putting his deportation plan into effect.
Starmer has said his government would shift to tackling the issue “upstream” by smashing the people-smuggling gangs behind the crossings.
Central to Labour’s policy would be a new “elite” Border Security Command, comprising immigration and law enforcement specialists, as well as the domestic intelligence service MI5.
On Saturday, he said the Rwanda policy had never delivered the deterrent that Sunak promised, pointing to the record number of asylum-seekers arriving in the UK so far this year.
An estimated 12,313 people have made the crossing to Britain so far this year, an 18% increase from the same period last year, the Home Office said last month.
There were 29,437 arrivals in all of 2023, a drop of 36% from a record 45,774 the year before.