Plans for flights to send illegal migrants to Rwanda have reportedly been put on hold until the Conservative Party selects a new Prime Minister, reports have claimed.
A scheme which aims to send migrants who enter Britain illegally to Rwanda is to be put on hold until after the Conservative Party leadership election concludes, reports on Tuesday have claimed.
Designed to discourage more illegal migrants from coming to the UK, the scheme has already encountered heaps of legal and political difficulty, with the Tory government so far not being able to get one removal flight in the air thanks in part to a court ruling in Europe.
Now, according to a report by The Times, it appears like the next attempt to send such illegal migrants to the sub-Saharan nation will not come for some time, with unnamed insiders reportedly claiming that there is “zero chance” of such a flight taking off before the next Prime Minister assumes power.
Such a successor to Boris Johnson is now slated to be announced on September 5.
Despite this, officials have reportedly insisted that their commitment to the plan has not wavered, saying that they will continue to either detain or tag migrants who they think should be removed from the country.
However, it remains ultimately unknown whether the next Prime Minister will actually keep the Johnson-era plan alive, or will succumb to the calls from a variety of activist lawyers and NGOs to scrap the plan for any number of reasons.
As the Tory Party put plans on hold to relocate illegal migrants to Rwanda, more and more continue to make the perilous journey across the English Channel to Britain.
According to statistics published by the UK government on Tuesday, 442 migrants were detected making the journey in small boats on Monday, with the government saying that these hundreds of migrants were split across at least 15 different boats.
A further 607 migrants meanwhile made the same journey in small boats over the previous week, with officials expecting the number of total migrants who end up making the journey to be around 65,000 by the end of the year.
Some ex-government personnel expect the overall number of arrivals could be far higher than this, with one former Director-General of UK Border Force, Tony Smith, previously predicting that over 100,000 could end up arriving illegally in Britain this year.
“The numbers are going up, a fourfold increase already this year — 28,500 last year,” the former official said in April. “That’s going to be over 100,000 this year just by migrant boats alone.”
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