Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda asylum bill suffers defeats in House of Lords

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Members of the House of Lords have inflicted the first defeat on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda asylum bill in a move aimed at ensuring the legislation is fully compliant with domestic and international law.

Some 274 members of the UK parliament’s upper house on Monday voted for an amendment to the bill, introduced by Labour peer Lord Vernon Coaker, with 102 voting against.

A second amendment, brought by crossbencher Lord David Hope, former deputy president of the Supreme Court, was also voted through with a majority of 102.

It moved to change the bill so that the central African country would be treated as safe only “when, and so long as, the arrangements provided for in the Rwanda treaty have been fully implemented and are being adhered to in practice”.

Peers also backed a third amendment meant to ensure that there was a system in place to check that the UK and Rwanda had implemented the safeguards set out in the legally binding treaty both countries signed late last year. The 110-majority on that vote marked Sunak’s biggest defeat in the Lords since he became prime minister.

Peers are this week voting on almost 50 amendments to Sunak’s bill, which is intended to clear legal obstacles to the government’s plans to send asylum seekers to the east African country and allow for the first removal flights to take off before the election expected this year.

The parliamentary joint committee on human rights joined the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, immigration experts and charities in warning last month that the bill was “fundamentally incompatible with the UK’s human rights obligations”.

Sunak has made “stopping the boats” coming across the Channel one of his core pre-election pledges. So far no one has been sent to Rwanda, and critics say there is little chance the current bill will allow flights imminently, given that it leaves removal decisions vulnerable to challenges in UK and European courts.

Many of the amendments proposed by peers seek to strengthen human rights provisions in the legislation. One introduced by Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti challenges the government’s central premise that Rwanda is a safe place to send asylum seekers, despite the Supreme Court finding otherwise last year.

The bill is expected to face significant opposition in the House of Lords this week but is still likely to get past its final parliamentary hurdle in late March in the House of Commons.

Coaker, a former Labour minister, said in the debate that the bill was evidence that the government “has said the facts are not convenient so we’ll change them by legislation”. 

He noted that Sunak’s government had invoked the need to adhere to international law when it was convenient, including in upholding shipping arrangements in the Red Sea and holding Russia to account for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

“It matters what this country does because we often stand . . . to say international law is important, that international law should be applied, that international law should be adhered to,” he said. “If that isn’t done then that is the road to chaos.”

The Home Office was contacted for comment. Earlier on Monday, Downing Street said the government remained committed to sending flights to Rwanda “in the spring”.

Ministers hope sending some asylum seekers to Rwanda will deter others from making the perilous cross-Channel journey and start to reduce the number of people crossing into the UK using clandestine routes.

The Home Office said on Monday that 327 people made the crossing in small boats on Sunday, the second highest daily count this year.

“The prime minister is focused on delivering for the British people and stopping the boats, and he is clear that our partnership with Rwanda is one of the key levers to deliver this,” Number 10 said on Monday.

Last week, the UK’s public spending watchdog said Sunak’s Rwanda policy could exceed £580mn by the end of the decade, the vast bulk of which would be aid payments.

In response, the House of Commons public accounts committee said it would launch an inquiry into the costs of the UK-Rwanda partnership to scrutinise whether it represented “value for money”.