Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will make it her policy to expand the Afghan Interpreters Scheme to include people engaged in UK-linked initiatives and human rights activists who are at risk of being targeted by the Taliban.

The Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP) launched on 1 April 2021. The scheme enables any current or former locally employed staff who are assessed to be under serious threat to life priority relocation to the UK regardless of their employment status, rank or role, or length of time served.

Our Afghan relocation policy is one of the most generous in the world and has already supported over 8,000 directly employed former Afghan staff and their families to start new lives in the UK.

The Home Office is committed to providing protection for vulnerable people fleeing Afghanistan. The Afghan Citizens’ Resettlement Scheme will welcome up to 5,000 vulnerable Afghans to the UK, who have been forced to flee the country, in its first year, with up to a total of 20,000 in the long-term.