The Home Office spent £50 million on an airfield and planes for its Rwanda scheme, without a single deportation flight taking off. Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, published a breakdown of the £715 million spent by the previous government on its scheme to detain and deport illegal migrants to Rwanda.

The Tories’ Rwanda scheme cost nearly three quarters of a billion pounds despite failing to send a single asylum seeker to the country, it has been revealed. Official figures released on Monday by the Home Office showed that a staggering £715m of taxpayers’ money was spent on the failed policy,

The last government spent £50m on Rwanda deportation flights that never took off, new figures reveal. This included the cost of securing the flights, escorts to force migrants on to the planes and preparing and securing the airfields,

The eye-watering sum was shown in a new document detailing the £715million total spend on the migration partnership with Kigali, before Labour scrapped the scheme this summer.