Oral Answers to Questions

Janet Daby Excerpts

Monday 11th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

12. What steps he is taking to help support Afghan nationals eligible for resettlement under the Afghan relocations and assistance policy scheme.

[Janet Daby (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

18. What steps he is taking to help support Afghan nationals eligible for resettlement under the Afghan relocations and assistance policy scheme.

[Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)]

19. What steps he is taking to help support Afghan nationals eligible for resettlement under the Afghan relocations and assistance policy scheme.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Heappey]

It seems that my initial reply might have been quite useful, but the hon. Gentleman may not have heard or understood it. ARAP is not explicitly for those who served in the Afghan armed forces alongside the British military; it is for those who served in the employ of the British military in all but a very narrow number of cases. I will write to him on his precise question about Afghan service personnel who are now homeless in the UK—I suspect that they are remarkably few—but Afghan service personnel are not the main target of ARAP. As someone who served in Afghanistan, I share the sense of many of my former colleagues who would have liked to have done more, but that is simply never what ARAP was designed to do. Neither is it credible that the hundreds of thousands of people who served in the Afghan national forces could all be relocated to the UK.

[Janet Daby]

In 2021, I held a public meeting shortly after the evacuation from Afghanistan. It was widely attended by worried and distressed residents, who all wanted help for their relatives’ desperate situations in Afghanistan. Over two years have passed, and there are huge problems with ARAP. Can the Minister say why the Government are allowing people and their relatives to suffer for so long?

[James Heappey]

There is a known number of people who worked in the employ of the British military during our campaign in Afghanistan. Our priority has been to work through and match the lists of people we know have worked for us with those who are applicants. It is my understanding that only about 2,000 applications are outstanding, and that 58,000 decisions have been taken in the past two months alone. Overwhelmingly, those decisions are, I am afraid, to say no to people, but we are making good progress and are nearing the end of tracking down all those we know have worked for us.