Afghanistan: FCDO Update

James Murray Excerpts

Monday 6th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. If we have very short questions and short answers, we will possibly get through everybody.

[James Murray (Ealing North) (Lab/Co-op)]

As of this morning, I had received urgent, heartbreaking pleas from 289 constituents of mine about well over 1,500 of their loved ones desperate to get out of Afghanistan. My team and I have been doing everything we can to help, but we need the Government to respond and to be clear about what options people might have. Can the Secretary of State make it clear whether the response the Prime Minister promised today will include a specific response to the inquiries that I and other MPs have raised, and can he confirm when the eligibility for the Afghan citizens’ resettlement scheme will be published?

[Dominic Raab]

We will do everything we can to support the hon. Member, and indeed hon. Members across the House. The thing to understand is that there are three separate ways of being eligible to come to the UK. We want to triage the cases, and point people in the direction of the right port of call and give them the right advice for each one of those three channels, rather than mixing them together, given that they do not have the same eligibility criteria.