Former Afghan Special Forces: Deportation Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateLord Lancaster of Kimbolton
Main Page: Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton (Conservative - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton's debates with the Ministry of Defence
(8 months, 2 weeks ago)
Lords ChamberI do not disagree with quite a lot of what the noble and gallant Lord said. However, perhaps I may just take a moment to advise noble Lords of the scale of the challenge. There have been 142,000 applications under the ARAP scheme, 95,000 of which are unique—in other words, there are a certain number of repetitions. From April 2023 until the end of August 2023, the bureaucracy coped with 75,000 of those applications. To date, we have settled nearly 14,000 Afghans in this country, and we are hoping to settle another 2,800 by the end of December. There are 2,500 people with approval currently in Pakistan, with whom we have very good relations, and they all have the document which allows them to leave. In fact, 500 were approved last week. While I am not saying that we are on top of it, we are very close to getting there.
I thank my noble and gallant friend Lord Stirrup for probably setting me up to fail. I had the privilege of working with some of these Triples during my own service in Afghanistan and was very involved during my time as Minister for the Armed Forces. I accept that this is not straightforward, but I must add my voice to those saying that we owe an absolute duty to these people and we must sort this out. That said, there are many applications, and a lot of false ones. From our perspective, the biggest challenge seems to be our lack of paperwork and documentation, which is causing the delay. While I encourage my noble friend, as others have done, to do everything he can to support these armed forces personnel, please can we learn the lesson from this episode and ensure that we keep the right documentation in future?
In the interests of brevity, I quite agree.