Ukrainian Refugees

Marion Fellows Excerpts

Monday 14th March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Marion Fellows (Motherwell and Wishaw) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd, and I thank everyone who has spoken so movingly.

I want to reiterate a point I have made in the Chamber: I have a UK national constituent with a Ukrainian wife with two daughters. They started applying to come here on 12 February in Dnipro. Since then, my constituent’s wife and her daughters have had to cross Ukraine and now they are all in Warsaw. I will not go into any more detail than that.

I want to quote the latest email I have. I thank the staff in the hub in Portcullis House and I thank the Minister, too, because I have been pushing, shouting and screaming—doing everything I can—to get this man’s wife and daughters back to Wishaw. The email from the Home Office hub says:

“I have just checked and the families visas were issued yesterday and manifested to Warsaw today. We will be in touch shortly regarding collection, please advise Mr Yardley not to travel to the VAC until we contact him.

As Mr Yardley’s family have already made applications and given biometrics they will have to wait for a decision before travel. I appreciate this is frustrating however, as the family have provided biometrics they have been granted 3 years leave outside the rules.”

It is frustrating, but I am pleased that we can almost see the end of the road.

Should it have taken that long? No, of course not, and my constituent is a UK national. I want to weep when I think of Ukrainians without passports and who do not have a UK national to help them. What are we doing as a country? I do not understand why this is happening. I will rephrase that—I know why it is happening, but it should not be.

As of last week, the Home Office advice for Ukrainian refugees had been updated nine times and the Home Secretary’s jumbled comments in recent days have only added to the confusion. It is also really concerning to hear of private firms who are cashing in. Can we please get that stopped, Minister? That is obscene and I think that the Minister himself would agree.

It is really heartbreaking that, as my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) said, this country is a signatory to the UN convention on refugees, and the UK has international obligations to recognise refugees who are in the UK and to offer them the protection they need. Get on with it—this is ridiculous.

I could not be in the main Chamber today, but I have seen the update on the Ukrainian sponsorship scheme statement from the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations. It is six pages with what looks like triple-spacing and very large print—I used to teach word processing—but I cannot find anything in here that I can give to my constituents that is of any use. This is happening continually.

[Catherine West]

Does the hon. Member agree that this is a classic case of this Government’s government by press release, rather than having a strategy, a plan or a discussion with local government about how to implement things—that is, doing things properly?

[Marion Fellows]

I could not agree more. I also agree that we are dealing with refugees here and not immigrants. This Government need to get a grip.

One of the new schemes states that Ukrainian refugees will be able to apply online—hooray. Someone is in a war zone and is fleeing for their life. Do they have internet access? Perhaps, but even if they do, my constituent’s application was lost three times in the TLScontact system. They had to reapply three times and they had to fly from Wishaw to Warsaw and then to somewhere else in the south of Poland to try to help get things done. Three times they had to fill out the forms and they could not even make appointments, because the system had gone down as well.

This is not going to work for people. We need, as the First Minister has said, to

“let people in and do the paperwork afterwards.”—[Scottish Parliament Official Report, 8 March 2022; c. 11.]

Common humanity demands that. Other countries have done it, so why can we not? I thought that this was supposed to be global Britain and that we were all on the front foot, trying to help. Minister, please take this on board. Waive the visas. That is what has to happen to get these poor refugees—I repeat that they are refugees—into the UK.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Foster]

In terms of Ukraine, we hope to set things forward very quickly. The hon. Gentleman will be aware of the statement made by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities in the House earlier.

I am conscious of the time and that votes are due again. Given the petition’s call, I want to be clear that, as stated by the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary, we do not believe that a blanket visa waiver is the right way forward—a position that appears to have been endorsed by the Opposition, given their call for visas rather than waivers, with biometric checks included. Normally, security and biometric checks are a fundamental part of our visa process, in order to keep people in this country safe and ensure that we can identify those entering our country. That is consistent with our approach to the evacuation of Afghanistan.

Although it is easy to dismiss, it is vital to keep British citizens safe and to ensure that we are helping those in genuine need. Sadly, we are already seeing people presenting false documents, claiming to be Ukrainian and seeking to enter the UK, including some whom Border Force has subsequently identified as being of other nationalities and having no links to Ukraine. This should not detract from our work creating safe and legal routes for Ukrainian nationals to come to the UK.

[Marion Fellows]

I congratulate the Minister on dancing on the head of a pin so well. Could I also point out to him that my own area, North Lanarkshire, has taken refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Syria and is taking refugees from Afghanistan? We have a long history of taking refugees without UK Government intervention, going right back to 1919.

[Kevin Foster]

We look forward to that area signing up to be a dispersal area as well then. I will be very pleased to take that forward.

Using a visa process means that processing can be controlled and vital security checks carried out, including ensuring that the people coming are actually Ukrainian, meet our eligibility criteria and do not present a risk.