Would the policy have deterred unauthorised arrivals?
There is no evidence that political discussions surrounding the Rwanda policy deterred small boat arrivals. The number of people taking this route did not fall following the policy’s announcement in April 2022, for example. If there was a deterrent effect, it was too small to see in the data.
Because the Rwanda policy was never implemented, we cannot be sure what its impact would have been on the number of people crossing the Channel in small boats or claiming asylum in the UK.
The available evidence suggests the deterrent effect of asylum policies is often small, which means there was no guarantee the Rwanda policy would have been the game-changer that the Conservative government had hoped it would be.
The deterrent impact of the policy would likely have depended on the number of people sent to Rwanda. If only a few hundred asylum seekers were sent to Rwanda each year (as suggested by the Deputy Prime Minister and the Home Office’s modelling) and unauthorised arrivals had continued at rates similar to those seen in 2022 and 2023, then the probability of a person crossing the Channel in a small boat being sent to Rwanda would have be small – around 1–2%. This raises the question about how high the likelihood of removal to Rwanda would have to have been to materially reduce irregular entry to the UK – especially given that the dangerous small boat journey itself has not been enough to dissuade many people.
Fundamentally, there was a high degree of uncertainty about the deterrent effect of the Rwanda policy. The Home Office’s Permanent Secretary, the department’s most senior civil servant, wrote in a 13 April letter to Priti Patel, then Home Secretary, that “evidence of a deterrent effect is highly uncertain and cannot be quantified with sufficient certainty to provide me with the necessary level of assurance over [the policy’s] value for money”. In other words, because there was insufficient evidence that the policy would deter irregular arrivals, the Home Office could not firmly conclude that it would have been cost-effective.