Afghanistan

Baggy Shanker Excerpts

Tuesday 15th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

The hon. Gentleman is very fast off the mark, and I am glad that he has already issued his invitation to his Committee. He is asking for figures as Chair of the PAC. The cost of what has been spent and committed in order to get in transit to Britain the 900 principals eligible under ARR, plus their immediate family members, is around £400 million. For the remaining members of the ARR and their immediate families who have been issued invitations, we expect something similar again. But because of the policy decisions that we have been able to announce and the changes that we have been able to make to the programmes we inherited—he may want to probe this with his Committee—it means that the taxpayer should be paying £1.2 billion less over the next few years, and that around 9,500 fewer Afghans will come to this country.

[Baggy Shanker (Derby South) (Lab/Co-op)]

I welcome the Government’s decision to support the lifting of the super-injunction today and bring this awful matter properly into the public domain. Does the Secretary of State agree that it is right and proper that this issue is now fully scrutinised by Parliament?

[John Healey]

I do, indeed. One important feature for me in being able to make this statement and to set out the details before the House this afternoon has been that we are now restoring the proper parliamentary accountability of Ministers to this House for the decisions that we take, the schemes that we run and the spending that we commit on behalf of the taxpayer. I look forward to Members in this Chamber—and, I hope, in the appropriate Committees—undertaking their proper constitutional role in a way they have not been able to do over the past two years without being constrained.