Ministers can give “no guarantee” that deportation flights to Rwanda will take off before the next election, Jeremy Hunt admitted as the government prepared for a constitutional showdown over the policy.
A new treaty with Rwanda is expected to be published on Monday and emergency legislation to block legal challenges is set to be introduced the week after.
Downing Street insisted that its twin-track approach was the “fastest way to get flights in the air” after the Supreme Court ruled that deporting migrants to Rwanda would be unlawful.
However, critics said that Rishi Sunak faced a “very steep mountain” to have the legislation passed swiftly by parliament. Opponents of the plan pledged to block or delay it in the House of Lords.
Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, called on Sunak to ditch the “immoral and indefensible” policy and adopt an alternative plan that “treats all people with compassion and dignity”.
“I hope this judgment will give the government the opportunity to reflect and reconsider its approach,” he said.
Lord Sumption, a former Supreme Court judge, said the plan was “constitutionally really quite extraordinary” and accused the government of attempting to “change the facts from those which have been declared by the courts to be correct”.
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“For as long as black isn’t white, the business of passing acts of parliament to say it is, is profoundly discreditable,” he said.
While Sunak has insisted that the government’s plan would allow deportation flights to start in the spring, Hunt, the chancellor, admitted it could take longer.
“We are hopeful that because of the solutions that the prime minister announced yesterday we will be able to get flights off to Rwanda next year,” he told Sky News. We can’t guarantee that, we have to pass legislation in the House of Commons and sign a new international treaty with Rwanda.”
The emergency legislation will designate Rwanda as a “safe country” and is designed to bar legal challenges that argue it is unsafe for asylum seekers. It is aimed at preventing legal challenges being brought against the policy as a whole.
But one senior Tory peer predicted that the government would face a concerted attempt to delay the legislation in the Lords.
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“Ultimately peers will not seek to thwart the will of the democratically elected house but they will not allow the government to rush this through without proper scrutiny,” the peer said.
The Bishop of Manchester, the Right Reverend Prof David Walker, told the BBC that the Rwanda plan “feels like a very steep mountain for the government to climb”.
“I think that it is incumbent upon me as a citizen of this land to treat matters that the supreme court of this land has judged as fact to be fact,” he said.
“Until the facts change it’s hard to see how my opinion will change”.
Nick Vineall KC, chairman of the Bar Council, said that if parliament were to pass legislation which reversed “a finding of fact made by a court of competent jurisdiction” it would raise “profound questions”.
“We hope that any such legislation would only be brought forward after the most anxious and careful consideration of its constitutional propriety,” he said.
