Homes for Ukraine: Child Refugees

Sarah Green Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd June 2022 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Green (Chesham and Amersham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I congratulate and thank the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq) for securing the debate.

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be invited to a coffee morning for Ukrainian refugees at St Mary’s church in Chesham. The coffee mornings are held weekly and are organised by local volunteers who have dedicated their time to helping new arrivals settle in. Watching the Ukrainian children play with local children and hearing how they felt about starting school here in the UK was particularly moving. For many of them, getting here was not straightforward, and many more like them are stuck in Ukraine or neighbouring countries, with or without their parents, unable to make it to the homes waiting for them here due to overcomplicated and unnecessary bureaucracy.

To add to some of the examples, two siblings—a 22-year-old woman and her 17-year-old brother—were stuck in Warsaw for over seven weeks waiting for their visa applications to be approved. The 17-year-old boy’s application was put on hold as he was marked as being an unaccompanied minor. We were instructed to obtain an official parental letter of consent and passport scans. We were told the case was being escalated, and it seemed like progress was being made. Yet after weeks of back and forth with Home Office staff and multiple visits to the Portcullis House hub, we were told the documents were not legally binding and that the case should not be progressed any further until the policy decision was made by the Home Secretary. That was on 13 May. It has been reported that a policy decision has now been taken on unaccompanied minors, and I am sure that I am not the only Member keen to hear the detail of that decision, hopefully, today.

For the officials and Ministers responsible for the scheme, it must feel like driving at full speed while still trying to build the car, and I am sure that I am not the only person grateful for the many hours being put into trying to make the scheme work as best as possible. If I may give one additional piece of feedback, the problems are not just with unaccompanied minors. In the cases my team and I have been dealing with, there is a real pattern of errors and delays whenever children are involved. Where children have applied with their parents, there are often issues with linking the applications, and that is what I want to highlight this morning. In one case, the Home Office failed to link a mother’s application with that of her two children for six weeks. While her application progressed, theirs were halted and marked as unaccompanied minors. When they were finally linked, additional sponsor checks had to be done given that the sponsors were now hosting two children, rather than a single adult female as they had thought. It took eight weeks for the family to arrive in the UK.

In another case, a mother travelled from Lviv to Warsaw with her two young children to collect their visas only to be told the children’s visas were not yet ready. The failure to link families’ cases is causing additional and unnecessary stress for people who are already terrified, traumatised and exhausted. There must be a better way of ensuring children are dealt with alongside their parents, so that they are not incorrectly marked as unaccompanied minors and unfairly delayed.