UK flights sending migrants to Rwanda may not take place for months, Downing Street said, as the number of people crossing the Channel so far this year hit more than 7,000.
Downing Street was unable to say when the first flights sending migrants on a one-way trip to the East African nation would take off, as criticism and legal action against the plans continue.
But officials insisted they were not waiting for court challenges to be resolved before putting the policy into practice.
Analysis of government figures by PA shows 7,240 people have reached the UK after crossing the busy English Channel shipping lanes from France in small boats since the start of 2022.
Crossings continued on Tuesday with young children among those being taken ashore.
This month, Home Secretary Priti Patel signed what she described as a “world-first” agreement with Rwanda, which will see it receive asylum seekers deemed by the UK to have arrived “illegally” and therefore inadmissible under new immigration rules.
But the deal is already subject to legal challenges.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s official spokesman said the flights would take place at the “earliest opportunity”, and that the plan was a “fully legally secure approach that has been tested and thought through”.
“We have received pre-action correspondence from a number of legal firms," the spokesman said. "I can’t get into that more … but we still maintain our hope to have the first flights take place in a matter of months.”
Refugee charities claim the Rwanda policy has done little to deter people from making the journey across the Channel, with 1,972 people arriving between April 14 – when the government announced and signed the Rwanda deal – and May 2.
More than 500 people arrived in Kent over two days this weekend, after an 11-day stretch between April 20 and April 30 without any arrivals during bad weather conditions.
When asked if Mr Johnson was disappointed that the plan was yet to curb crossing numbers, the spokesman said: “It’s too early to judge what the situation will be long term on this policy.”
The total for this year so far is more than three times the number recorded for the same period in 2021 (2,390) and more than seven times the amount recorded at this point in 2020 (1,006).
Overall, 28,526 people made the crossing in 2021, compared with 8,466 in 2020, 1,843 in 2019 and 299 in 2018, Home Office figures show.
Despite the increasing numbers, the UK’s small boat arrivals are a fraction of the number of people arriving in Europe.
Data from the UN’s refugee agency shows at least 120,441 people arrived in Europe by land and sea in 2021.
“Ministers have made the entirely reckless political calculation that they would rather be taken to court over their scandalous approach to refugees than put in place policies and practices that actually assist people fleeing conflict and persecution, and diminish their vulnerability to exploitation and smugglers,” said Steve Valdez-Symonds, Amnesty International UK’s refugee and migrant rights director.
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Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
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UK-EU trade at a glance
EU fishing vessels guaranteed access to UK waters for 12 years
Co-operation on security initiatives and procurement of defence products
Youth experience scheme to work, study or volunteer in UK and EU countries
Smoother border management with use of e-gates
Cutting red tape on import and export of food
The biog
Simon Nadim has completed 7,000 dives.
The hardest dive in the UAE is the German U-boat 110m down off the Fujairah coast.
As a child, he loved the documentaries of Jacques Cousteau
He also led a team that discovered the long-lost portion of the Ines oil tanker.
If you are interested in diving, he runs the XR Hub Dive Centre in Fujairah
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COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Kumulus Water
Started: 2021
Founders: Iheb Triki and Mohamed Ali Abid
Based: Tunisia
Sector: Water technology
Number of staff: 22
Investment raised: $4 million
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Tearful appearance
Chancellor Rachel Reeves set markets on edge as she appeared visibly distraught in parliament on Wednesday.
Legislative setbacks for the government have blown a new hole in the budgetary calculations at a time when the deficit is stubbornly large and the economy is struggling to grow.
She appeared with Keir Starmer on Thursday and the pair embraced, but he had failed to give her his backing as she cried a day earlier.
A spokesman said her upset demeanour was due to a personal matter.
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