Oral Answers to Questions

Julian Sturdy Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd March 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I just advise Mystic Meg over there that he has only 10 minutes to wait before he will have the answer to that question.

[Julian Sturdy (York Outer) (Con)]

Q5. I warmly welcome the improvements to our national Ukraine refugee response, but in the weeks since these improved measures, numbers fleeing Putin’s invasion have sadly doubled to 3.5 million, and are expected to go even higher. Does the Prime Minister agree that our response must still move much faster, with a shift to processing applications in the UK and cutting the red tape and bureaucracy, so we can match the scale of Europe’s worst humanitarian crisis since the second world war?

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is right that we will see many more people coming here. He is right that the instincts of this country are to be as generous as possible. That is why we have made sure that applications can now be processed online very quickly, so people can come here with their passports. Under the family reunion scheme alone, I think the numbers are now running in excess of 16,000 people coming here.