Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking regularly to review the number of people offered resettlement places in the United Kingdom under the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Relocation Scheme to ensure that the scheme is responsive to need.

When we launched the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Relocation (VPR) scheme from January 2014, we wrote to local authorities to invite them to participate. As the scheme has progressed, we have continued to engage closely with local authorities who have expressed an interest in participation. Following the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) pledging conference in Geneva on 9 December 2014, a number of additional local authorities have also expressed an interest, and we are in discussions with them. We are grateful to the local authorities who are supporting the scheme, and we remain confident that we can continue to meet the needs of arrivals in the UK under the scheme as planned. We expect the scheme to help several hundred Syrians over three years, and we welcome further offers of support from local authorities as the scheme progresses.

With millions of Syrians displaced by the conflict, the Government strongly believes that the UK can have the greatest impact and help the most people in need through humanitarian aid in the region and actively seeking an end to the crisis. We have committed £700 million in response to the humanitarian crisis, making the UK the second largest bilateral donor after the USA, and this funding is helping to support hundred of thousands of people. Compared with aid, resettlement can only ever help a minority of those in need. However, we recognise that some very vulnerable people cannot be supported effectively in the region, and we launched the VPR scheme to complement our aid by offering protection in the UK to particularly vulnerable individuals and their families, prioritising women and children at risk, those in need of medical care and survivors of violence and torture. Potential beneficiaries of the scheme are identified and referred to us by UNHCR on this basis. The VPR scheme is therefore based on need rather than fulfilling a quota. However, it was necessary for planning purposes to estimate the scale of potential arrivals under the scheme, bearing in mind the purpose of the scheme, UNHCR’s capacity and the need to have suitable care and support in place for these very vulnerable individuals as soon as they arrive in the UK.

We believe that substantial aid, actively seeking an end to the crisis and providing protection for some of the most vulnerable people are the most effective ways for the UK to help those displaced by the crisis and their host countries, rather than larger scale resettlement. We therefore have no current plans to expand the VPR scheme, and we made our position clear at the UNHCR pledging conference on 9 December. However, we continue to monitor the situation in Syria and the surrounding region and work closely with UNHCR to identify the most vulnerable people displaced by the conflict to ensure that the scheme remains appropriate.