James Cleverly said a Labour claim that the Rwanda scheme has cost a total of £700 million was “completely made up”.
Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, disclosed the figure in the House of Commons yesterday, describing it as the “most shocking waste of taxpayers’ money” she had ever seen.
But Mr Cleverly, the shadow home secretary, accused Ms Cooper of having “plucked” the number “out of the air”.
Told that the figures cited by Ms Cooper were “staggering”, Mr Cleverly told BBC Breakfast: “They are also completely made up. My advice to Yvette Cooper is if you are going to make up numbers don’t pick nice round numbers because it makes it obvious that you have plucked them out of the air.”
Asked if he was saying Ms Cooper’s claims were wrong, he said: “Yes. That is exactly what I am saying. What she has got to remember is until very recently I was the home secretary so I know exactly how much this has cost.
“And when she is including… the salary of civil servants who were always going to be on the payroll, she is including costs of flights which she has cancelled because she chose to scrap the scheme.
“The fact that people were being released is because the scheme is being scrapped by her government.
“So the fact is that that money that she has spoken about and the projected future cost that she has spoke[n] about are not figures that I recognise and I had complete oversight of the costs, both the historic costs and ongoing costs, of that scheme until just a few weeks ago and those are not figures that I am familiar with.”