Ukraine Refugee Visas

Robert Jenrick Excerpts

Thursday 31st March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Foster]

First, it is too early to say how many people have arrived under the Homes for Ukraine scheme, but we are now publishing details of visa grants. By 9am today 3,705 visas had been granted, and the trajectory for visa grants is increasing every day. I remind hon. Members that at one point last week we issued nearly 6,000 family scheme visas in two days. Again, that shows the type of capacity available once we get decisions ready to be made, and we would expect to see a similar increase in trajectory on the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

On the accusation that applications are being deleted, what has actually happened is, first, a removal of duplicates, for example where someone applied initially with biometrics and then did so without biometrics. Where someone did not qualify for the family scheme but they have someone in the UK who would be prepared to sponsor them—such as godparents, for the sake of argument—we transfer this over to the Homes for Ukraine scheme. Members will realise why that is a sensible and proportionate approach to take.

On the accusation about “reams of info”, we have cut back on what people are asked to supply. We do not need authorised translations and people can submit in Ukrainian, with the most basic of documentation: any evidence that shows residence in Ukraine. Again, we are not asking people to give us travel history or previous addresses; we are asking purely for something that shows they were resident in Ukraine in December and that there is a basic family link, if relevant, for the family scheme. We are cutting down the information purely to that which is necessary for vital safeguarding checks.

This is the latest in a number of humanitarian interventions and routes we have created over the past year. We saw the determination to help people in Afghanistan, from which we saw the biggest evacuation since Dunkirk; we saw the British national overseas route delivered, with more than 100,000 applications over the past year; and now we see these two routes for Ukrainians set up in record time, with tens of thousands of people already having visas under them. I just compare that with how the shadow Home Secretary got on with her own pledge to rehome one Syrian refugee.

[Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Con)]

This is going to be a wonderful scheme and we are all looking forward to welcoming tens of thousands of Ukrainians to this country, but something is going wrong with the scheme right now. Tomorrow, the vast majority of sponsors will have waited two weeks and will not have heard anything at all. We are testing the patience of people in this country who have put themselves forward as sponsors and, much more importantly, we are letting down vulnerable individuals and families in Ukraine. We need to process only about 8,000 households, and we are talking about 20,000 or 30,000 applications in total. That is not a huge or insurmountable task, but it does require the Home Office to make sure that the resources and the leadership are in place to get this sorted. I hope that we have heard today from the Minister that that will now happen in the next few days.

[Kevin Foster]

My right hon. Friend is right to say that people want to get on and help. Tens of thousands of people throughout the country have made a very generous offer and they want to be able to extend that and for it to be taken up. We are rightly doing vital safeguarding checks. Sadly, we have had some pings on the police national computer in respect of some of the sponsors who have come forward, and we will need to consider them, but the vast and overwhelming majority of people want to do the right thing.

I appreciate my right hon. Friend’s wish that we go faster. As I have touched on, the rate at which visas are being granted is increasing. As we have seen with the Ukraine family scheme, once people have passed through a number of checks, we can quickly start to issue a large number of visas, which is what we plan to do.