Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to the oral evidence session of the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Select Committee of 29 June 2022, how many of the 6,500 people identified for the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme were already residing in the UK prior to the launch of that scheme on 6 January 2022.

The Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS) launched on 6 January 2022 and will see up to 20,000 people from Afghanistan and the region resettled to the UK over the coming years.

We helped over 15,000 people to safety in the biggest and fastest emergency evacuation in recent history and we have continued to bring people to the UK, with over 4,000 people helped to enter since the evacuation. We have been clear from the outset this will include some of those who arrived in the UK under the evacuation programme. Around 6,500 people 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 and members of the LGBT community.

Work is underway to assure information relating to all the individuals relocated under the ARAP and ACRS on case-working systems. Once this work concludes, statistics on both schemes - including the number of people resettled under each - will be included in the published Immigration Statistics.