Ukraine

Lord Harrington of Watford Excerpts

Thursday 21st September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harrington of Watford (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend the Minister for securing this debate, and I pay tribute to the contributions of my predecessors. I cannot opine in any way comparable to them on matters of defence, foreign policy or the geopolitical and strategic matters that have been mentioned today—I would not pretend to, nor detain your Lordships’ time on that.

I would like to briefly note the aspect that I dealt with as the Minister for Refugees, however, dealing with the Ukrainian problems. Prior to Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, my only knowledge of the subject was that one of my grandparents stemmed from Ukraine. Had he not fled another evil Russian, the Tsar, at the time, I probably would not be here today, or at least not in this form. I could say that I am grateful to Tsar Nicholas for what he did, I suppose, because I have had the privilege and honour to be brought up in this country.

More seriously, my involvement in the refugee situation with Ukraine came about, to be honest with your Lordships, not because of a great love of me by the former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who had taken the whip off me two years prior to that for disagreeing, but because I had some experience of dealing with refugees with the Syrian refugee programme, which I did when David Cameron was Prime Minister. I was grateful to Boris Johnson to be called on to do this job and help in this situation, and place that on record.

At the time, I went to Poland and various places surrounding Ukraine, to actually see what was happening on site with the refugees. The experiences I had will remain with me for the rest of my life. I saw stations perhaps the size of Waterloo in London, where every train coming in was full of young women and children—people who three or four days prior to that had been living a perfectly normal life like anyone else does. They were literally packed with one wheelie suitcase; the kids maybe had a toy to cuddle, but if you did not know the situation you would think it was just people on a weekend’s holiday or something like that. There were vast numbers of people. As I say, on the surface the appearance was very much that it could have been anywhere, in any street or any town, but beneath that surface there was shock and horror.

The other thing that struck me—noting that my late father was in the Army in 1940; perhaps his parents would have been lucky to receive a postcard every three months—was that these women were predominantly on the phone, live, to their husbands and fathers who were fighting. I know that is quite obvious in this technological age, but I did not think of it in refugee terms. It of course has many good aspects—they knew who was safe and what was happening, However, when that phone went dead, which I saw a number of times, it was not just that they did not have a good signal; fear spread throughout that carriage and station. That is probably the life of refugees in the modern world—with mobile phones but barely the clothes they stand up in.

I shall not detain your Lordships very long, but I would like to talk about the Homes for Ukraine scheme. We were faced with the prospect of the former Prime Minister saying, in very good faith to his good friend Volodymyr Zelensky, as he put it to me, that we would take an uncapped number of refugees into this country. At the time, however, not much thought had gone into delivering a resettlement mechanism for them.

With the Syrian crisis, which was equally tragic in many ways, if not more so, we had sourced from a humanitarian point of view which families we wished to bring over here, based on the grounds of vulnerability, which the UNHCR did for us. Before they arrived, we pre-settled them into accommodation; we knew exactly where they were going, and which council and which flat they were going to go into. In this case, this was uncapped; we were not going to be able to select people on the grounds of vulnerability—they were all vulnerable, but in Syria we were able to look at medical and other traumatic cases.

The Homes for Ukraine scheme came out of trying to think laterally about another way to settle refugees, because without going into the asylum stories and everything else, there was no capacity in hotels or other ways to do it. The call to arms to the Great British public was absolutely phenomenal. We had about 210,000 people—admittedly, just registering on a database, but they did it—within two weeks of announcing it. The system itself had to be worked out; the visa system was totally unsuitable for this volume of refugees because it was based on a comparatively small number of visas. For example, why would we have a visa centre in Poland that opened more than one or two days a week? Before the war, there was no need for it. Getting the visas down from the chaos that there was—weeks of not hearing anything—to a reasonable 48 hours was at first a feat of volunteers from the rest of the Civil Service. At peak, we had a thousand people on special laptops processing visas. Fortunately, within a few weeks it became automated, on an app-based system, which helped tremendously.

Then there is the question of people who volunteer their homes. Are they real people? Are they criminals and paedophiles? Are they people who perhaps think it might be good for a few days but have not really thought about the consequences? I have always said with refugee policy that it brings out the best of people and the worst of people. The best of people are the people who work for NGOs, who offer to help in dangerous situations, voluntarily or not paid very much, and people in religious or other civil groups in the recipient country, but the worst of people are traffickers, pimps, child molesters and financial scammers. It is just a fact that all over the world that is the case with refugees. So we had to make sure that each property was properly inspected and that the hosts were not just doing it for money, cramming people into a small area or worse than that.

This is the upshot. The most recent figure published by the Home Office on the Homes for Ukraine scheme is that there have been 133,000 arrivals and 54,000 people have come under a very extended family reunion scheme. I think that is very good. I think it is the biggest movement of people into the UK since the Second World War. I am not saying it is perfect. There are a lot of faults, and various adaptations to the policy are needed for the future.

At first, we had the intention of not taking unaccompanied children, largely at the time because we did not have the facilities for them and because the Ukrainian Government did not want them moved away from countries nearby. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, who is with us here today. He pushed, kicked and cajoled me in the nicest and most gentlemanly way to do what I wanted to do in the first place, using him as an excuse. We came up with a compromise that was acceptable to the Ukrainian Government, and I hope that some children’s lives have been greatly enhanced as a result. The reality is that the Ukrainian Government had very mixed feelings about refugees. They were grateful for what we and other countries had done, but on the other hand they did not want to lose their population. They did not want them resettling in another country. These things are never very black and white.

My fear for the future is that the system of opening communities to refugees is forgotten about. When Ukraine is off the headlines and a large number of people have been settled, and hopefully many of them will move on or have moved on to employment, education and all the other things, the next crisis will happen in the world. It will happen. If it is not Syria or Afghanistan, it will be somewhere else. I want this to be a permanent mechanism to bring refugees into this country. That does not mean that there will be hundreds of thousands of volunteers all the time, but I believe a lot of people will do it and would be on a standing register. A lot of churches, synagogues and other groups will organise groups of their members, congregants et cetera to be on standby for this sort of thing. I ask the Minister— I know it is not exactly her field, but she covers so many things for the Government, particularly today—to pass on the message that this should be a standing system for welcoming refugees into people’s homes. I hope those lessons are learned and that when the Ukrainian crisis is over, which of course I hope is very soon, they are not forgotten.