First Rwanda flights to leave in July as Sunak misses spring deadline

The first deportation flights to Rwanda will take off in 10 to 12 weeks as Rishi Sunak admitted parliamentary delays meant he would miss his spring deadline.

The Prime Minister’s Rwanda Bill finally passed Parliament early on Tuesday morning after a marathon debate between the House of Lords and House of Commons that went on for eight hours.

At a Downing Street press conference, the Prime Minister signalled the first flights were now likely in July but he pledged there would be a “regular rhythm” of multiple flights every month through the “summer and beyond” once the Rwanda scheme was operational.

Mr Sunak blamed the delays on Labour and opponents in the Lords for “using every trick in the book” to block the flights as he warned MPs and Peers that he expected them to sit through the night on Monday to ensure the Safety of Rwanda Bill passes.

The Bill, which paves the way for the flights by declaring Rwanda safe for asylum seekers, restricts asylum seekers’ rights to legal challenges to deportation and gives ministers powers to ignore injunctions by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) seeking to ground the planes.

“Enough is enough. No more prevarication. No more delay. Parliament will sit there tonight and vote no matter how late it goes. No ifs No buts. These flights are going to Rwanda,” said Mr Sunak.

“We’re going to deliver this indispensable deterrent so that we finally break the business model of the criminal gangs and save lives.”

Preparations

The Prime Minister said the Home Office had booked commercial charter planes for specific slots for removal flights and an airfield had been put on standby ready for the first deportations.

The number of detention places to hold migrants while their legal claims are processed has been increased to 2,200. Some 200 of the most experienced caseworkers had been trained and are ready to deal with any legal claims “quickly and decisively.”

“We want to make sure that the quality of the decision-making is absolutely great, because in the past, people have raised concerns with that and used that as an excuse to frustrate the policy,” said Mr Sunak.

Some 25 courtrooms have been set aside to hear cases overseen by 150 judges specialising in immigration law able to provide the equivalent of 5,000 sitting days.

The Home Office has trained 500 minders to escort illegal migrants “all the way to Rwanda,” with a further 300 more joining them in the coming weeks.

“The first flight will leave in 10 to 12 weeks. Now of course that is later than we wanted. But we have always been clear that processing will take time and if Labour peers had not spent weeks holding up the bill in the House of Lords to try to block these flights altogether, we would have begun this process weeks ago,” said Mr Sunak.

“The success of this deterrent doesn’t rest on one flight alone. It rests on the relentless continual process of successfully and permanently removing people to Rwanda with a regular rhythm of multiple fights every month over the summer and beyond until the boats are stopped.”

The first meeting of the Home Office’s new illegal migration operations committee was held on Monday morning to co-ordinate what Mr Sunak described as “an incredibly complex operation.”

The ECHR threat

Mr Sunak welcomed a move by the ECtHR to make it harder for Strasbourg judges to block the flights through Rule 39 injunctions - as happened two years ago when the first flight was grounded by such a move.

The court has raised the threshold for interim injunctions. A newly codified version of court guidance states that migrants must be at “imminent risk of irreparable harm” if they are deported. It mirrors the language in the government’s legislation.

The Prime Minister said the Safety of Rwanda Bill also put “beyond all doubt” that ministers could ignore rule 39 injunctions, with civil servants required to deliver the move. “I would not have put that power there unless I intended to use it,” he said.

He said the Bill and the new Treaty signed with Rwanda addressed “all the concerns” raised by the Supreme Court when it ruled that the Rwanda policy was unlawful as the African country was unsafe for asylum seekers.

“So at this point, now’s the time for the flights to go and I’m not going to let a foreign court, given all of that,  block us from getting flights up and this deterrent up and running,” he said.

The Prime Minister again hinted he might be prepared to quit the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

“If it ever comes to a choice between our national security securing our borders and membership of a foreign court I’m of course always going to prioritise our national security,” he said. “That’s the right thing for the British prime minister to do, and that’s what I would do.”

Vietnamese migrants

The number of Vietnamese crossing the Channel in small boats has increased tenfold and are now the biggest cohort of people reaching the UK across the Dover straits. The total number crossing this year is up 28 per cent at 6,265 compared with the same point in 2023 with the Vietnamese accounting for almost all that rise.

Mr Sunak said he and Emmanuel Macron, the French president had agreed to work with European partners closing loopholes to enter Europe. A new visa agreement Vietnam signed with Hungary allowing easier access into the EU’s Schengen zone has been blamed for the surge in Channel crossings.

The Home Office has also signed a new agreement with the Vietnamese government to share intelligence and the two governments are exploring ways to speed up returns of illegal Vietnamese.

The two countries have also agreed to widen the social media campaign targeting Vietnamese citizens that was launched last month and aims to deter them from travelling to the UK illegally.

Compassion

“Now I know there are some who will hear all of this and accuse me of lacking compassion. But the truth is the opposite. We are in a battle with countless sophisticated and global criminal gangs who can do nothing for the lies they risk in unseaworthy dinghies,” said Mr Sunak.

“Nine people have died already attempting to cross the Channel just this year, including a seven-year-old girl.”

Listing action already taken by the Government, Mr Sunak cited the £480 million deal with France and a returns agreement with Albania that had reduced crossings by migrants from the country by 90 per cent.

He said 1,000 people connected with the smuggling gangs had been arrested, with sentences amounting to nearly 500 years in prison after prosecution. Some 7,000 bank accounts had been shut down and thousands arrested in raids on illegal working.

“But we can’t keep playing this Whack a Mole strategy dealing with it in a piecemeal fashion. We need a systematic deterrent. That’s why the Rwanda scheme is so important,” said Mr Sunak.

Rwanda

Rwanda is ready to take thousands of deported migrants, said Mr Sunak. Some 69 different asylum decision-makers had been trained in Rwanda with 40 lawyers ready to provide extra legal assistance.

Asked about the sale of homes earmarked for deported migrants to Rwanda locals, the Prime Minister said: “Paul is completely committed to making this partnership work.

“Whenever we have needed something from them or we have had to address concerns that have been raised by our courts, they have been willing to work with us.

“We have done it constructively and collaboratively. I think the question you should ask, and Andrew Mitchell [deputy foreign secretary] spoke to this morning, is: Why? Why, because Rwanda cares about tackling this issue.”

Election

The Prime Minister made clear in his press conference that it would take months worth of Rwanda flights for the deterrent to take effect in reducing small boat crossings, insisting that his aim was to reduce them to zero.

The argument was seen as an indication that he is more likely to call an election in the Autumn because he would have to explain why he was going to the polls before the policy was beginning to take effect.

There has been speculation over the weekend that figures in Downing Street are mulling over whether it would be in the Tories interests to call an election despite being way behind Labour in the opinion polls.

But Mr Sunak repeated his position that his “working assumption” was that the election would be held in the “second half of the year”.

One minister left the press conference mouthing a potential election slogan: “We stop the boats, Labour stops the flights.”

Mr Sunak was joined at the press conference by James Cleverly, the  Home Secretary, Grant Shapps, the Defence Secretary, Victoria Prentis, the Attorney General, and Michael Tomlinson, the illegal migration minister.