No apologies for another short blog on immigration.
On the 5th of December the new Home Secretary, James Cleverly, told the house that no new money had been given to Rwanda to sign a new treaty to try and resurrect they collapsed Asylum processing deal. Most people, including myself, understood that to mean that the cost of the Rwanda deal was substantially the same as the £140m already announced.
On the 7th December we found out that wasn’t true. Sir Matthew Rycroft, Permanent Secretary of State at the Home Office wrote to Dame Meg Hillier, the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee. For those not in the loop with Whitehall committees the PAC is the Government spending watchdog- it has wide ranging powers to scrutinise Government spending and is very powerful. I was once sent to “fix” a government commercial deal in a hurry to avoid our Perm Sec and DG a PAC appearance.
We found out that the true costs of the Rwanda deal are:
- £120m in 2022/23 financial year
- Another £20m in the same year
- A further £100m in 2023/24 financial year, paid in April this year
- Another £50m to be paid in the 2024/25 financial year, i.e next year
The total cost of the policy isn’t the £140m reported, but £290m. Bear in mind that the only people who have been sent to Rwanda are 3 home secretaries, and there is little chance of anyone being sent befoe the next General Election.
But there is another part of the letter from Sir Matthew to Dame Meg. The last paragraph reads:
“All of these payments are covered by the Ministerial Direction of 16th April 2022. Given the public interest, this letter will be published on GOV.UK”
A Ministerial Direction is a very unusual procedure in Government. The Permanent Secretary is the Accounting Officer for the Department; they have legal responsibility for how public money is spent, and there are strict rules attached to that. Very rarely a Minister wants to spend money in such a way that breaks those rules. The Permanent Secretary cannot by law break those rules, and so the Minister issues a Ministerial Direction ordering the Perm Sec to do so. Those rules are:
- Regularity – if the proposal is beyond the department’s legal powers, or agreed spending budgets
- Propriety – if it doesn’t meet ‘high standards of public conduct’, such as appropriate governance or parliamentary expectations
- Value for money – if something else, or doing nothing, would be cheaper and better
- Feasibility – if there is doubt about the proposal being ‘implemented accurately, sustainably or to the intended timetable’
This means that in April 2022 Priti Patel ordered the Perm Sec to spend between £140 – £290m of public money knowing that doing so broke one or more of those rules.
Ministerial Directions used to be rare, and were only used in exceptional circumstances; the credit crunch for example, or Covid. There have been attempts to reduce or restrict the use of MDs after examples of mis-use, for example Tony Benn used them to instruct civil servants to invest in workers co-operatives in the 1970s. From 2003 to 2016 there were roughly 1 a year outside the credit crunch crisis. Some of these were relatively small – under Blair a Minister instructed the MOD to buy a airplane ticket so that the father of a murdered serviceman could attend the trial of his sons murderer.
But there has been a sharp in crease int he use of Ministerial Directions since Brexit- a number of MDs were issued around the preparations for Brexit.
This reflects a change in how Government is done in the UK. The usual rules about spending money, transparency or legal scrutiny are being stripped away. Under the latest Rwanda legislation the Government wants to prevent legal challenges to a Ministerial decision, something no Government has ever done before. If you were wondering how so much money was squandered on PPE that didn’t work just look at the list of Ministerial Directions that Matt Hancock and Rishi Sunak issued.
This is a massive erosion of standards of Government, how it spends money, how it legally conducts it’s affairs
So how did the Government get into such a mess that it is having to hide how much it is spending and issue directions to senior civil servants telling them to break the rules on Government spending?
Since April 2022 we have had 3 PMs and 5 home secretaries (counting Suella Braverman twice), and 4 ministers for immigration (counting Tom Pursglove twice). We have had 2 new sets of laws passed, the last set the Government declined to implement, and Sunak is determined to pass another lot.
Truss or Sunak should quietly have dropped the whole mess on taking power, but they needed to placate their own ERG/UKIP members and so they kept on doubling down.
I have never seen a Government bet so many times on a losing hand. Sadly they are betting with our money. £290m of it.
Once upon a time Conservatives believed in standards of accountability and managing public money. For those nostalgic for such times here is Fry and Laurie: