Britain should resettle at least 5,000 refugees each year, says cross-party group of MPs
Britain should resettle at least 5,000 refugees each year, says cross-party group of MPs
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Former child refugee Lord Dubs among those calling on government to improve safe and legal routes to come to the UK. Britain should take-in at least 5,000 refugees each year and make it easier for families to be reunited, a cross-party group of MPs has told the government. Former child refugee and Labour peer Lord Alf Dubs is among parliamentarians calling for the government to improve safe and legal routes for refugees to come to the UK alongside its efforts to stop people smuggling gangs.
Strengthened family reunion and resettlement schemes and a pilot humanitarian visa scheme for people coming from Sudan and Eritrea are among the recommendations from the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Refugees. MPs said that the UK resettlement scheme (UKRS), which is meant to bring 5,000 refugees to the UK each year, has consistently failed to meet that target - with only 435 people resettled in the year to September 2024.
Applications for refugee families to reunite in the UK are also beset by delays, MPs said in the new report, with over 11,000 cases backlogged. Co-chairs of the APPG, Lord Dubs and Labour MP Laura Kyrke Smith, said that the current routes to come to the UK are “overly complex, restrictive, and slow, causing, among many other things, prolonged separation of families at a time when they most need to be together”.
They concluded that lack of legal routes for refugees to come to the UK is “driving up irregular arrivals”. As part of its call to improve refugee family reunion processes, the APPG said immigration rules should be amended to allow refugee children in the UK to sponsor their close family to join them. The report highlighted a "stark difference" in the tens of thousands who came to the UK under the Ukraine schemes in the wake of the war compared with much smaller numbers under the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme (ACRS) following the Taliban takeover.
MPs highlighted that while just two Ukrainians have been recorded crossing the Channel since 2022, Afghans continue to top the nationality of those arriving on small boats. They called on the government to recommit to resettling 20,000 Afghans under the ACRS scheme for vulnerable Afghans, which is separate from the MoD’s scheme for Afghans who served alongside British forces. The report said there has been a "scattergun approach to safe and legal routes" by governments in recent years, adding: “Anyone facing persecution or war and wanting to seek asylum in the UK who is not from one of the countries with nationality-specific schemes has very limited ways to get here”.
