Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, whether Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy applications are considered in date order; and whether applications that are lost by his Department and subsequently resubmitted would be considered according to the date on which they were initially submitted.

Rather than being processed in the order in which they were received, new Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP) applications are triaged to separate out those that are clearly ineligible and those more likely to be eligible. These are then allocated to separate casework teams to process.

The system used by casework teams ensures that applications are not lost, by collating applications made on the UK government website and providing all ARAP applications are provided with a unique reference number at the point of submission, which is recorded. Significant progress has been made to accelerate the decision-making process in recent months, including uplifts in resourcing and investment in the aforementioned system.