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A senior minister has insisted that almost all legal challenges from migrants against the government’s efforts to send them to Rwanda would fail under Rishi Sunak’s flagship asylum legislation.
The claim from Defense Secretary Grant Shapps came as Conservative MPs prepared on Monday to decide whether to back the Rwanda bill, which will be voted on for the first time in the House of Commons on Tuesday.
The vote is a critical test for Sunak, with MPs on the right and centre-left of the Tory party meeting separately to give their verdict on whether they can support the legislation.
Shapps told the BBC that government modeling suggested that 99.5 percent of individual anti-deportation efforts would fail once the bill was passed.
The Rwanda Security (Asylum and Immigration) Bill declares that Rwanda is a safe country for asylum seekers and disapplies parts of the UK Human Rights Act. But migrants can still appeal against their deployment to Rwanda based on individual circumstances.
“We think it will solve 99.5 percent of these challenges – that’s the modeling for this piece of legislation,” Shapps said. “The way this is designed is that 199 out of 200 appeals are resolved within 17 days.
“Ultimately, 99.5 percent of challenges fail and that happens much faster than in the current system,” he added.
Shapps’ claims were disputed by a person close to former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who said the model was “outdated and analytically flawed” because it was drawn up in March, before the government’s defeats at the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court.
“Models were never made for the new Rwanda bill because they failed to make plans,” the person said, adding that the Interior Ministry’s internal legal advice is that the threshold for challenges has been lowered by the decisions of the courts.
Tory MPs from a number of right-wing groups will meet on Monday to discuss the legislation – including seeking legal advice – and how they could vote on Tuesday.
A “star chamber” of Conservative lawyers has decided the legislation is not robust enough to prevent protracted legal challenges, while Robert Jenrick, who quit as immigration secretary last week, has also said it is too weak.
Only 29 Tory MPs are needed to vote with opposition parties to reject the bill on Tuesday evening, but Downing Street is hopeful it can secure victory at this stage.
Even if the bill passes on the first vote in the House of Commons – known in Westminster as a ‘second reading’ – Sunak could still face problematic attempts from the Tory right to tighten it with amendments at a later stage .
“I won’t support this bill, but I do think we can resolve this, and that’s what I want to do now,” Jenrick said on Sunday.
Tory MPs from the moderate One Nation group, who also met on Monday, have expressed concerns that the bill is too onerous, but most are expected to support the legislation on Tuesday.
However, they will oppose any move by right-wing Tory MPs to disapply the European Convention on Human Rights. “We cannot be taken for granted,” said a former minister in the group.
The government last week released a £700 million contract to find providers to provide small boat arrival services at two centers in Kent on the south coast, possibly until 2034.
The contract, first reported by the BBC, is an indication that the government believes small boats are likely to continue reaching British shores, despite Sunak’s pledge to “stop the boats”.
A Downing Street spokesman said: “We are talking to colleagues, but we are confident that this bill is extremely robust and makes the routes to each individual challenge vanishingly small.”