I have heard that argument advanced before, and of course I am proud of what we have achieved with the Albania scheme, but that is to judge two quite different propositions. The Albania scheme takes somebody who is in the United Kingdom and asks them to return to their home country, which is a European, highly developed country. That is a very different proposition from enforcing somebody’s removal from the United Kingdom to a third country to which they do not wish to go. Also, as the hon. Gentleman may know, very few small boat arrivals have been removed to Albania. Almost all those individuals who have gone to Albania have been time-served foreign national offenders in our prisons, individuals who have voluntarily chosen to return to Albania and those who have been in the United Kingdom for a long time.
The success of the scheme rests on taking people off small boats, detaining them for very short periods of time and then removing them swiftly to Rwanda. For the reasons I have set out, I think that is extremely unlikely to succeed at any scale in the way the Bill is currently structured.