Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, how many Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy applications his Department has yet to process.

The Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP) is one of the most generous schemes of its type in the world. Since its inception in April 2021, more than 88,000 applications have been received. This number is far higher than the total number of Afghans who ever worked for the UK. Processing those applications and determining eligibility is a very high priority and I have directed significant additional resource to this task.

As of 30 October, all of the 60,000 applications received prior to 31 August, have been reviewed and processing by the eligibility team is under way. Many of these are not appropriate for the ARAP scheme and we are redirecting those to the appropriate alternative mechanism where possible. In other cases, employment checks or verification of information requiring third party input is in progress. This group of applications continues to be our highest priority.

Since 1 September, more than 28,000 additional applications have been received, and we continue to receive them at a rate of over 100 per day. These applications are our next priority for processing; around 3,000 of them are currently being processed.