Auditors agree to run the numbers on Rwanda
The National Audit Office will produce a factual report on the costs incurred so far by the government's Rwanda scheme and the Home Office's estimate of future costs
The English language has an arsenal of maybe 170,000 words in common usage (I admit I probably dip into the estimated 47,000 obsolete words more often than many people) but, regrettably, “audit” is among the least inspiring of them. It just reeks of slow, methodical, necessary but excruciating study of numbers. That may go some way to explaining why the National Audit Office (NAO) is sometimes underrated, but it is one of the most important public bodies we have.
The NAO was created in 1983 under the provisions of the National Audit Act 1983. This created a public body—a parliamentary rather than a ministerial institution—to audit bodies directly funded by Parliament: government departments, agencies and non-departmental public bodies. It also carries out value-for-money (VFM) audits of the administration of public policy. The NAO is headed by the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG), an officer of the House of Commons, appointed by letters patent by the monarch, and he (it has not yet been a she) is responsible to the Public Accounts Commission. The current C&AG, whose full title is the rather sonorous “Comptroller General of the Receipt and Issue of His Majesty’s Exchequer and Auditor General of Public Accounts”, is Gareth Davies, an accountant with experience in the public and private sectors.
The public face, so to speak, of the NAO is the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee. I wrote about PAC last year, describing its robust role in the parliamentary scrutiny process, and it has benefited over the years from some no-nonsense chairs, including Sir Edward du Cann, David Davis, Sir Edward Leigh and Dame Margaret Hodge. The current chair, Labour’s Dame Meg Hillier, now in her ninth year in the role, is less punchy than some of her predecessors but is a quietly intelligent former journalist who was a junior Home Office minister under Gordon Brown and served briefly in Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet. PAC oversees all government expenditure and works on reports and data supplied by the NAO.
I explain all of this because Dame Meg and her committee have become embroiled in a row with the Home Office over transparency of costs connected with the government’s policy to divert asylum seekers to Rwanda. In July, the permanent secretary to the Home Office, Sir Matthew Rycroft, appeared in front of the committee to discuss the Asylum Transformation Programme, when he was pressed on some of the financial details of the UK-Rwanda Migration and Economic Development Partnership. Rycroft declined to answer some of the committee’s questions, citing commercial confidentiality, which members found unsatisfactory, and in September their displeasure was exacerbated when Rycroft told them that the then-home secretary, Suella Braverman, refused to disclose the figures to PAC, even on a confidential basis.
Hillier was clear that she regarded the request as reasonable.
We have looked at previous Home Office matters. We are a responsible committee, not a reckless one. We have never yet leaked anything; we would not start all of a sudden. It would be helpful to look at the numbers underpinning this, if we could do that.
Braverman was unmoved. But Hillier had an ally in this fight: the Home Affairs Committee, chaired by Dame Diana Johnson, was also understandably keen to dig behind the façade of the Rwanda policy. Last month, Rycroft appeared before the committee to discuss the work of the Home Office in general, accompanied by the interim second permanent secretary, Simon Ridley. It was only a fortnight after the Supreme Court had ruled the Rwanda policy unlawful, so inevitably it was close to the top of the committee’s agenda. Questioned on specific costs and details, both Rycroft and Ridley veered between evasive and uninformed, to the exasperation of MPs. Dame Diana summed up the mood when she addressed the permanent secretary:
It is really quite hard, Sir Matthew, to effectively scrutinise the flagship policy of the Home Office and how much is being spent on it, when we get the figures only at the end of the year. Do you see our problem?
Rycroft did not indicate enormous sympathy.
Yesterday, 11 December, PAC brought Rycroft back in, this time with Daniel Hobbs, director general migration and borders, to approach the issue again. Members of the Home Affairs Committee also participated. But very little progress was made, Rycroft continued to give as little detail as possible and MPs’ tempers frayed further.
Meanwhile, Hillier and Johnson had written jointly to the C&AG, asking that the NAO examine the costs of the Rwanda scheme and in particular the extent to which it represents value for money. Today, he replied. Davies explained that it was not possible at this point to make a VFM judgement on the policy, given that its main thrust was deterrent and was therefore still speculative. However, he acknowledged the high level of public interest in the policy and therefore agreed to produce “a factual report covering the costs incurred to-date and the Department’s estimate of costs when the scheme is operational”, which will be laid before the House of Commons in 2024.
This moves the matter on. PAC and the Home Affairs Committee may generate headlines and can embarrass officials and ministers, but the NAO will grind through the data and produce weighty, evidence-based conclusions which will be difficult to refute. A government is unlikely to fall on the basis of a critical report from the National Audit Office, but it is another headache for Rishi Sunak and his ministers. As I explained in an earlier essay, as long ago as April 2022, Rycroft, in his capacity and principal accounting officer for the Home Office, had been unable to say with confidence that the Rwanda policy represented value for money, and so had requested a ministerial direction—essentially a note saying he was acting under direct political instruction—from the then-home secretary Dame Priti Patel to allow him to proceed with the policy. I suspected then, and have had no cause to revise my opinion, that it is likely that the Rwanda policy is proving to be extremely expensive, especially on a per capita basis.
The whole notion of sending asylum seekers and would-be migrants to Rwanda was never based on hard evidence. It was a gesture to show that the government, initially under Boris Johnson, was taking tough and eye-catching measures to tackle illegal migration, and Rishi Sunak bound himself to the policy by setting as one of his five priorities for 2023 to “stop the small boats”. When the Supreme Court ruled the policy unlawful, Sunak inexplicably doubled down, leading to today’s battle over the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill.
There is a bleak irony here. Sunak, the son of immigrant parents, sold himself to the Conservaive Party as a young, financially literate technocrat, a former analyst at Goldman Sachs who then became a hedge fund manager in California and earned a sizeable personal fortune in the process. He is the first prime minister to have earned an MBA. Here was a man who would bring at least competence to the premiership, after the twin storms of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, having proven himself in the outside world. And he seemed relatively un-ideological, adhering most closely to one of the most Blairite tenets of Labour’s 1997 manifesto, “What counts is what works”.
Now, however, the prime minister finds himself assailed almost on all sides, and the rampart he is currently defending, the Migration and Economic Development Partnership with Rwanda, with a very shaky evidential basis, has become a symbol in a much wider struggle over philosophical and ideological issues like the sovereignty of Parliament, the rule of law, the status of international treaties and obligations and even the definition of basic concepts of human rights. Compromise is becoming more and more distant, though all attention will now be focused on the progress through Parliament of the Safety of Rwanda Bill: the programme motion for the bill, which will be considered in Committee of the whole House, was agreed but proceedings have yet to be scheduled.
The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill was given a second reading by the House of Commons this evening by an unexpectedly comfortable majority of 44. No Conservative MPs voted against the bill, though 37 abstained, which will be the source of unease as the government’s business managers look ahead to the next legislative stages, let alone the progress of the bill through the House of Lords. The narrative henceforth is genuinely uncertain: even if the bill becomes law, it might well see legal challenges, and in any event is likely to make next to no real impact on the number of migrants coming to the UK. But the government must pretend that this a workable rather than a totemic policy.
Under those circumstances, the prospect of a report from the NAO, which is widely respected, which cast serious doubt on the financial basis of the Rwanda policy would be a serious blow to the government. The danger is partly to the credibility of the policy itself—though we are in a strange situation in which polls suggest there is widespread support for the policy but a majority of these surveyed don’t think it will work—but much more to the government’s battered image. The prime minister’s authority is running on fumes. When I sketched out the different Tory tribes for The i Paper earlier, I noted the peculiar fact that there is no significant body of MPs who are guided primarily by loyalty to the party leadership. It is worrying that until last week Robert Jenrick was seen as a close ally, until he resigned as immigration minister; he has now weighed in heavily against the Rwanda bill.
It is hard to imagine Rishi Sunak will have a peaceful Christmas. The New Year seems to offer little to look forward to, though he will know, if anyone does, when we are likely to go to the polls. But the letter from Gareth Davies, comptroller and auditor general, announcing the NAO’s new investigation just contributed another woe to the prime minister’s 2024. We will wait to see how heavily it weighs.