They are, however, said to be reviewing options for contingencies. It won’t happen,” he told the 8,000-member Ascension Island Facebook group. “The current spend of £1.6 billion a year for immigrants would be chicken-feed compared to the real cost of getting buildings, food, medicine, transport and so on to Ascension. Jim Butterworth, a former transmitter engineer with the island’s radio service, said it would be “madness” if the Government went ahead. The potential resurrection of the plan also provoked a backlash among islanders and their supporters. The Ascension islanders were also opposed to it.” The logistics of doing that in a far-away place is quite tricky. You would have to build a reception facility. “You would have to then get the staff to run it who would have to be sent out there, which would cost a fortune. And even then the capacity for the numbers of asylum seekers would be very small.
You would have to build all new facilities. “It’s so far away and when you get there, there’s nothing. “It is a non-starter just because of the logistics,” said one former official. It cited the lack of infrastructure, inadequate power and water supplies. The 34-square mile Ascension Island, which lies about 1,000 miles off Africa, was considered as an option for offshore processing of asylum seekers under Boris Johnson but was dropped after a feasibility study by the Foreign Office declared it unviable. They are also said to be in talks with five other countries – all believed to be in Africa – to take those who arrive in small boats or in the back of lorries under schemes similar to the deal with Rwanda, where migrants will be deported and seek asylum there. The disclosures came after it emerged that ministers have considered reviving plans to fly people who arrive illegally in the UK to Ascension Island as a part of a contingency “plan B” in the event of the government’s Rwanda deportation plan faltering. Jacob Rees-Mogg revealed that when he was a minister he was told it would cost £1 million for each migrant sent to the island, which has a population of just 900, no general hospital and is more than 4,000 miles from the UK. Senior officials who helped draw up the first offshore asylum agreement with Rwanda are understood to have warned that transferring asylum seekers to the remote South Atlantic island would be impractical because of the cost of building new migrant facilities and staffing them. Sending Channel migrants to Ascension Island is a “non-starter”, ministers have been advised by officials.
0 kommentar(er)
