Syria Crisis: UK Response

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Monday 8th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

The UK is obviously not part of the Schengen area, but it has played its own role in helping Syrian refugees who need to be resettled out of the region—the Prime Minister has pledged to resettle Syrians over the course of this Parliament, and I pay tribute to the work of the Under-Secretary of State for Refugees, who has overseen that process to date. We met our first timeline of resettling 1,000 Syrian refugees prior to Christmas, and I think we should be proud of that.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

Today, up to 70,000 refugees from Aleppo are caught between the al-Assad regime’s advancing forces and Russian airstrikes, and are unable to cross to Turkey. What is being done to offer immediate help to those poor people?

[Justine Greening]

That flow of people is happening because action by the Syrian regime is driving them out of their homes, and we have seen that persistently over the past few years. We have talked directly with our partners on the ground to ensure that humanitarian support is getting through to those Syrian refugees, and more broadly we understand that the Turkish authorities are putting in place the necessary measures to ensure that people are able to cross the border.