Ukraine

Mike Amesbury Excerpts

Tuesday 26th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Keighley (Robbie Moore) and I concur with much of what he said in his powerful speech.

Like Members from throughout the Chamber, I have been contacted by a large number of constituents who have opened up their hearts and made their homes available to refugees fleeing this horrendous war inflicted on them by Russia and Putin. Having been matched with Ukrainian guests, some of my constituents, such as Charlotte in Weaver Vale, are left waiting for weeks and weeks to hear about the arrival of visas for the people they want to shelter and provide refuge to. They are wondering what the best thing is to do. Some are currently funding guests who are staying in other countries such as Romania or Poland while they wait for their visas to be approved. Some genuinely worry, as hon. Members across the House have today, that vulnerable women and children—they are largely women and children—will be forced to head back into a war zone if they are not given that support soon.

A number of members of my team and I have made representations at the hub in Portcullis House, at the Home Office and to Ministers, but it has been like knitting fog. The bureaucracy of the system does not match the urgency of the situation. Women and children are fleeing for their lives—fleeing bombs, missiles and bullets. Horrendously, they are also fleeing sexual violence, which unfortunately we see reports about in the media from day to day.

I have a number of questions about the homes for Ukraine and family sponsorship programmes. They arise from experiences of hosts who have contacted me, from the work that I and my team have been doing, and from Cheshire West and Chester Council—in particular, Councillor Sam Dixon, who, as my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson) knows, has done excellent work with Ukrainian refugees.

The concerns centre on both the time it is taking for visas to come through—that point has been echoed right across the Chamber—and other parts of the matching process. As the hon. Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) rightly said, it is not clear what local authorities should do when things break down—when sponsors pull out of the scheme, for example, but are still matched with guests in the system. That risks guests arriving and presenting as homeless because, after fleeing war, they have nowhere to go. The last figure I had from the Local Government Association was that 147 people had presented as homeless. I want to put my request to the Home Office, through the Minister, on the record: will it provide an update, with those numbers, about what further support will be provided?

Similarly, if guests do not take up the offer but are still matched on the system, willing sponsors can be rematched with new guests. Also, to speed up the process, local authorities want to be able to perform pre-checks on potential sponsors who have registered, before they are matched with guests. Hon. and right hon. Members across the House have made a strong point about the need to ensure that safeguarding is hardwired into the system. Cheshire West and Chester Council and Halton Borough Council—another council that covers my patch—have raised concerns with me about what to do if sponsors do not pass checks. Further Home Office guidance is certainly needed.

Finally, both councils in my patch have raised questions about the lack of funding that people coming through the family sponsor scheme receive. Indeed, there is no funding at all for local authorities, despite the pressures on schools and GP surgeries, and the need for wraparound services. Many of the people involved, of course, have experienced horrendous things in war-torn Ukraine. That financial assistance is desperately needed. Another question that I would like the Minister to feed back to Home Office Ministers, who are not on the Front Bench today, is about the need to step up and provide additional support for people—the majority, actually—coming through that other route.

We urgently need clarity on all these points. Ultimately, the issues are creating unnecessary bureaucracy; we must ensure that people arrive here swiftly and safely. Look, the generous people of Britain have stepped up—they have opened their hearts and homes. At the moment, that generosity is not replicated by the Government.