Refugees: Afghanistan

(asked on 18th January 2024) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many new arrivals from Afghanistan have been placed in bridging hotels since September 2023.


Answered by
Tom Pursglove Portrait
Tom Pursglove
Minister of State (Minister for Legal Migration and Delivery)
This question was answered on 24th January 2024

The UK has made an ambitious and generous commitment to help at-risk people in Afghanistan and, so far, we have brought around 24,600 people to safety, including thousands of people eligible for our Afghan schemes. We continue to honour our commitments to bring eligible Afghans to the UK.

As of 31 August 2023, we successfully ended the use of bridging hotels for legally resettled Afghans, with the overwhelming majority of those being resettled now having moved into settled accommodation. We have now provided these Afghans with the homes they need to begin the next chapter of their life in the UK, fully integrate, find employment and provide their children with stability.

Whilst we cannot confirm the longest length of stay in bridging accommodation, our statistics show that the earliest record of an Afghan in bridging accommodation was in the second quarter of 2021.

The Home Office publish data on Afghan resettlement in the Immigration System Statistics release. In table Asy_D02 of the asylum and resettlement detailed datasets, you can view the number of Afghans resettled, by when they arrived in the UK (quarterly breakdowns) and what type of accommodation they were recorded in as of the date of the data extraction (currently the data is as of 30 September 2023). The next Immigration Statistics are due for release around 22 February 2024.

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