Asked by: Rory Stewart (Independent - Penrith and The Border)
Question to the Ministry of Defence:
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, how many Afghan interpreters have been granted asylum since he announced in 2013 that the resettlement package for Afghan interpreters would extend to any interpreter serving for a year continuously up to December 2012.
Answered by Mark Francois
The ex- gratia redundancy scheme for locally engaged civilians (LECs) which was announced on 4 June 2013, includes a bespoke immigration arrangement specifically for Afghan LECs which is unrelated to the UK asylum system.
The ex-gratia scheme includes an offer of relocation to the UK for LECs who meet the relevant eligibility criteria. We estimate that up to 600 LECs will be eligible to apply for relocation via the ex-gratia scheme; the majority of these individuals will have been interpreters. Two have been granted visas; visa applications are being processed for another 269. Further applications will be processed as our remaining LECs are made redundant. We expect the first LECs to arrive in the UK later this summer.
Asked by: Rory Stewart (Independent - Penrith and The Border)
Question to the Ministry of Defence:
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what information his Department holds on where the UK ranks worldwide in terms of its number of deployable forces.
Answered by Mark Francois
The Ministry of Defence does not hold comparative information on this topic, and conducting analysis of each nation's deployable force numbers is not straightforward. The Strategic Defence and Security Review 2010, our ongoing work to deliver the Future Force and emerging work on the Joint Expeditionary Force ensure that the UK has the appropriate number of deployable forces to meet our requirements. The UK does remain one of the very few countries that can deploy and sustain a brigade size force together with its air and maritime enablers, for intervention and enduring stabilisation operations, almost anywhere in the world. We can also deploy three brigades with air and maritime enablers, for a limited time and with sufficient warning, for a larger one-off intervention.