Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will publish the number of Afghan Citizen Resettlement Scheme (ACRS) cases that were formerly ARAP cases; when the oldest ACRS application still in process was submitted; the number of staff appointed to deal with the ACRS cases; the number of ACRS applications that have been closed due to the applicant either being killed or dying; and the number of ACRS applicants on the Taliban Kill list.

Over 15,000 people were supported to come to the UK directly following the evacuation of Afghanistan, and more than 4,000 have since arrived.

Work is underway to ensure information relating to all the individuals relocated under all schemes are recorded on case working systems. Once this work concludes, statistics on ACRS and ARAP will be included in future editions of the Immigration Statistics. We will publish resettlement figures in line with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics, allowing transparent progress-monitoring.

The ACRS is not application-based. Instead, eligible people will be prioritised for resettlement through three referral pathways.

Some of those brought to safety in the UK during and after the evacuation are eligible for the ACRS under Pathway 1. They include women’s rights activists, journalists, and prosecutors, as well as the Afghan families of British Nationals. We have now granted many of these ILR under the ACRS.

Under the newly-opened second pathway, we are now able to begin receiving referrals from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) of vulnerable refugees who have fled Afghanistan for resettlement to the UK.

The FCDO have also launched the third referral pathway, which will see eligible British Council and GardaWorld contractors and Chevening alumni considered for resettlement to the UK.

We are committed to ensuring our operational teams have the resources they need to run an efficient and effective system, and we actively monitor workflows to ensure sufficient resources are in place to meet demand, including from pressures relating to the situations in Afghanistan and Ukraine.