Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what discussions they have had with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees regarding the number of Syrian refugees in Syria’s neighbouring countries who have been identified as being in need of resettlement.

The majority of refugees displaced from Syria, an estimated 3.8 million people, remain in countries neighbouring Syria. That is why the Government has committed £700 million to the emergency response in the region, the second largest bilateral contribution after the USA, helping hundreds of thousands of people in need.

We have not undertaken a formal assessment of the motivation for Syrian migrants to try to reach the European Union, or the routes they choose to get here. However, given the scale of the crisis in Syria and the hardship and human suffering it has caused, it is to be expected that some Syrians will seek to leave the region by whatever routes are available.

With millions of people in need in Syria and the region, the Government believes that humanitarian aid and actively seeking to end the conflict are the most effective ways for the UK to help the majority of those displaced, rather than larger scale resettlement. We have made our position on this clear in relevant discussions with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), for example at the UNHCR Global Resettlement Pledging Conference in Geneva on 9 December 2014. We also liaise regularly with the UNHCR at a working level about the relocation of particularly vulnerable displaced Syrians to the UK under the UK’s Vulnerable Persons Relocation (VPR) scheme.