Ukraine: Urgent Refugee Applications

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Tuesday 8th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Home Secretary.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

It is deeply disappointing that the Home Secretary is not here to respond, given the gravity of the issue—especially after she gave wrong information to the House several times yesterday.

Two million refugees have left Ukraine. Other countries are supporting hundreds of thousands of people; the Home Office is currently issuing about 250 family scheme visas a day. Most people want to stay close to home, but some want to come here to join family or friends, and we should be helping them. Instead, most people are still being held up by Home Office bureaucracy or are being turned away.

Yesterday, the Home Secretary told the House twice that a visa centre en route to Calais had been set up, but it still does not exist. The Foreign Secretary has just said that it might be in Lille, nearly 75 miles from Calais. The Home Office said this morning that no decision had been taken. Which is it? Has it? Where is it? Can people get there yet?

The Home Secretary said yesterday:

“It is wrong to say that we are just turning people back”.—[Official Report, 7 March 2022; Vol. 710, c. 27.]

But there are 600 people in Calais right now who have been turned back and are being told to go to Brussels, where the visa centre is open only three days a week, or to Paris, where people are still being told that the next appointment is on 15 March, a week away. In Warsaw, people are also still being told that the next appointment is on 15 March, a week away. In Rzeszów, the booking system seems to have completely broken down: this morning, they are sending people away.

The Home Office was warned by the chief inspector in November that the geographical spread of visa application centres was a real problem for vulnerable applicants, leading to difficult journeys, yet it did nothing about it, even when it was given weeks of warning by British intelligence that an invasion was coming.

Yesterday, the Home Secretary told me that elderly aunts were covered by the scheme. Two hours later, the Home Office helpline said that they were not. I welcome the inclusion of extended relatives, but the Government should not be continuing to change the system in a chaotic way, rather than opening it properly. Will the Government urgently set up emergency visa centres at all major travel points, do the security checks on the spot and then issue emergency visas for Ukrainians—for all family, but not just family—so that they can come here and the UK can do our historic bit to help refugees fleeing war in Europe, as we have done before?

[Kevin Foster]

The answer to the right hon. Lady’s points about setting up a facility in northern France was in the comments that I have just made about Lille and about setting it up in the next 24 hours.

On the numbers that the right hon. Lady cites, we are training more decision makers as we speak. We are pulling people in from across UK Visas and Immigration to ensure that there is an almost frictionless approach to caseworking, and we will see the number of visas issued ramping up each day.

But this is a complex scenario. As I touched on in my statement, we have seen people presenting themselves at Calais port pretending to be Ukrainian. [Interruption.] I appreciate that some Opposition Members may think that that is not an issue, but we need only look at some of the statements coming out of the Kremlin to see which countries are very much in the crosshairs of Mr Putin’s Russia and his regime. We only have to look back a short period to see the impact in this country of attacks by those pretending that they had come here to look at a cathedral spire.

We will move out to extend this. We recognise the desperate plight that there is; that is why we are working with countries on the ground, providing humanitarian aid and ensuring that we are helping to provide support as people cross borders. We are looking to ensure that we have a wide system that allows people to come here, and abandoning many of our normal requirements for countries. We recognise that it is not a time for the usual immigration process, hence the system that we are setting up. As we have said, we have the confidence that it will expand. We know that the British people will be generous. We know that when we move to open up the sponsorship visa, many people, including many of our constituents, will want to step forward.

I will just say that if we look at the surveys being done in Ukraine about which countries people feel are most on their side, it is notable which one regularly comes top.