Afghan Resettlement Update

Lord Beamish Excerpts

Wednesday 13th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Johnny Mercer]

I reiterate what I said earlier: it is a clear red line for me, as it is for this Government. For those who are eligible for those schemes and who are entitled to be in the United Kingdom in settled accommodation, it will happen. We will keep going until we achieve that objective. We stood here in the summer looking to get 8,500 Afghans out of hotels and into settled accommodation. That was a significant challenge, but we achieved that, and I fully intend to achieve this task, too.

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for his statement, but the system is still shambolic. I had a constituent who was a member of the special forces who arrived here, but trying to get his family here was complete chaos. We were being bounced between the Home Office, Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence. We finally succeeded, but the process was not easy. Who is actually in charge of this? The frustration in this case—it was clear that they were eligible for the scheme—was that without my intervention, it perhaps would not have been solved.

May I pick up on what the Minister just said to my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis)? Is the Minister actually saying, in contradiction to what the Minister for Armed Forces said on Monday, that this scheme does apply to the Triples? The Minister for Armed Forces clearly said that it did not.

[Johnny Mercer]

The two things that the Minister for Armed Forces was saying on Monday are correct. Being in a taskforce does not automatically entitle someone to be in the United Kingdom, because while that might initially get them through the eligibility criteria, there may be well-founded reasons why that individual does not settle into accommodation in the UK, including many different national security reasons that have been outlined. He was correct to say that, and he is correct to say that the Afghan taskforce had an Afghan command reporting chain. I am clear about the criteria for ARAP entitlement, and the vast majority of triple-three and triple-four operators should fit within those criteria. If they meet the criteria and deserve to be in the United Kingdom, I will do everything I can to get them here. This is a Government effort; it is not led by a single Department. This is a cross-Government issue for the Home Office, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and the Ministry of Defence. I have been asked by the Prime Minister to oversee it, and that is what I am doing at the moment.