Plans to send some asylum seekers to Rwanda are “brutal” and “impractical”, an ex-Tory home secretary has warned.
Amber Rudd told GB News it was “extraordinary” the current home secretary had said it was her “dream” to see a plane take off for Rwanda.
She suggested ministers should instead focus on improving relations with France to tackle Channel crossings.
Ms Rudd resigned as home secretary in 2018 over the Windrush scandal and briefly sat as an independent.
She quit the parliamentary Conservative Party in September 2019 in protest at Boris Johnson’s handling of Brexit.
The Rwanda asylum plan was established in April to take some asylum seekers who cross the Channel to the UK, on a one-way ticket to the east African country to claim asylum there instead.
Under the scheme, which aims to discourage people from using unsafe routes, migrants “deliberately entering the UK illegally from a safe country should be swiftly returned to their home country or relocated to Rwanda”.
The first planned flight was cancelled minutes before take-off in June following legal challenges.
Ms Rudd told GB News she did not “believe” in the scheme.
“For [a] start I think it is a brutal policy, which we should not have introduced anyway,” she said.
“But it is also, putting that aside, impractical. I just don’t believe it will ever happen.”
She said the “growing numbers of people putting their lives in danger” to get to the UK was “a shared problem with the French”.
“I hope that this new government is going to address it by having a better relationship with the French. I mean, let’s face it, it can only improve,” she added.
At the Conservative Party conference in October, Home Secretary Suella Braverman said it was her “dream” and “obsession” to see a flight of migrants depart for Rwanda by Christmas.
Ms Braverman resigned from her role in the final days of Liz Truss’s premiership over data breaches, but she was reappointed just six days later by Rishi Sunak.
Opposition parties and some Tory MPs have raised concerns about her reappointment, after she admitted sending an official document from her personal email to someone not authorised to receive it.
Ms Rudd said she was “surprised” to see Ms Braverman return to her role, but it was right to “give her a chance and see how it goes”.
