Question to the Home Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what discussions they had with Afghan refugees prior to their decision to move them from London to Yorkshire.

The Home Office are not able to provide the data on ages requested, the recent update to the published 'Afghan Resettlement: Operational Data', shows that, at 4^th November 2022: 9,242 people, around half of whom were children, were living in temporary accommodation such as hotels.

Work is underway to assure information relating to all the individuals relocated under the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS) and Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP) on case working systems. Once this work concludes, further statistics on both schemes will be included in the published Immigration Statistics.

We acknowledge that hotels do not provide a long-term solution, however, they do offer safe, secure and clean accommodation. We will continue to bring down the number of people in bridging hotels and support people into more sustainable accommodation as quickly as possible. In order to deliver value for money to the taxpayer, we are consolidating the number of bridging hotels being used, by maximising capacity in hotels which have available rooms and rooms being returned back to hotels that are not being used or do not match family requirements.

This sometimes means families can be moved from a hotel scheduled for closure to another hotel. In this case, families were notified in September 2022 that the Home Office contract was ending in February 2023, and have been supported by their Home Office Liaison Officer and Local Authority every step of the way since then. This includes the receiving Local Authorities, who are responsible for allocating school places and ensuring that suitable health care support is in place.

There is an acknowledged shortage of longer-term housing for all, nevertheless, we continue to work tirelessly with over 350 local authorities to house and support Afghan families.