Tony Blair’s government discussed diverting £2m earmarked to prevent conflict in Africa in order to fund a controversial pilot scheme to process and house asylum-seekers in Tanzania, newly released government files show.
Under the scheme, Britain would have offered Tanzania an extra £4m in aid if it opened an asylum camp to house people claiming to be Somalian refugees while their applications to live in Britain were assessed.
Hilary Benn, the then international development secretary, wrote to the then home secretary, David Blunkett, in 2004 saying the migration partnership with Tanzania was “off the ground”, files released to the National Archives in Kew, west London, show.
“As the quickest way forward, therefore, I would propose a PES transfer of £2 million from the Africa Conflict Prevention Pool to the Home Office budget, on the understanding that you – with help, I hope, from Jack Straw – will find the resources needed to fill the remaining shortfall,” Benn wrote in January 2004.
Straw, the then foreign secretary, responded, writing to Blunkett in February 2004 that he had “some reservations” about using ACPP funding in this way, but was willing to agree a one-off transfer.
The then armed forces minister, Adam Ingram, however, wrote to Benn to say that while he agreed that the removal of refused asylum seekers should be addressed, he did not “consider it appropriate” to draw on the ACPP fund.
Ingram wrote: “In the medium and longer terms improving stability in Africa is likely to be one of the more sustainable means of reducing the flow of economic and other migrants; that is what the ACPP exists to achieve. Perhaps there are other more appropriate funding sources we should look at in this case.”
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The 2004 asylum camp scheme – put forward at a time when Blair sought to persuade voters that his government still controlled Britain’s borders – was dropped in the face of opposition in Tanzania and criticism from the EU, with some German officials likening the proposals to concentration camps.
