Just 22 people, including eight children, have been resettled in the UK having fled Afghanistan under part of a Government scheme which promised to help vulnerable refugees. It comes as the figure for Afghan nationals arriving to the UK by boat having crossed the Channel rose to 8,633 last year – a six-fold increase on 2021.
The Refugee Council said the contrast showed the Government needed to “urgently rethink its approach and expand access to refugee visas”. A pledge had been made to take up to 20,000 Afghan refugees, with as many as 5,000 in the first year, who were forced to flee their home or faced threats of persecution from the Taliban under what the Home Office claimed at the time would be “one of the most generous” resettlement schemes in the UK’s history.
The Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS) was formally launched in January 2022 – although 7,141 Afghans had been resettled by December 2021 as people arrived in the UK under the summer evacuation exercise that year. The scheme was split into three pathways by which people would be considered eligible for resettlement.
