The Labour government has used flights scheduled to deport migrants under the Tories’ scrapped Rwanda scheme to return failed asylum seekers to Vietnam and Timor-Leste.
The Home Office has announced that a charter flight took 46 migrants to the Asian countries on Wednesday.
Home secretary Yvette Cooper told MPs this week that flight planning for the scrapped Rwanda deportation scheme would be redirected to deport criminals and immigration offenders.
She said: “We have immediately replaced the flight planning for Rwanda with actual flights to return people who have no right to stay to their home countries instead.”
Wednesday’s flight is the UK’s first charter returns flight to Timor-Leste, and the first to Vietnam since 2022, the Home Office said.
Officials said the flight arrived at Timor-Leste at around 9am on Thursday, having stopped in Vietnam. The Home Office described migrants on the deportation flight as “46 criminals and immigration offenders”.
Ms Cooper said: “Today’s flight shows the government is taking quick and decisive action to secure our borders and return those with no right to be here.
“We thank the government of Vietnam and Timor-Leste for their co-operation, without which this could never have happened. Our strong diplomatic bonds with other countries have never been more crucial to our mission to bring order back into the asylum and immigration system, tackling irregular migration, and making sure the rules are properly respected and enforced.”
Earlier this week, Ms Cooper revealed that Rishi Sunak’s government had already spent £700m on the plan to remove asylum seekers to Rwanda and had planned to spend a further £10bn.
Ms Cooper said the amount already spent includes a £290m payment to Rwanda, as well as “chartering flights that never took off, detaining hundreds of people and then releasing them, and paying for more than a thousand civil servants to work on the scheme”.
Shadow home secretary James Cleverly, who had been in charge of the scrapped scheme, accused Ms Cooper of using “made up numbers” and criticised the government’s “discourtesy” to the Rwandan government.