The UK government on Tuesday bowed to pressure to ease the passage of Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s invasion of their country by widening access to a family reunion programme and setting up a refugee sponsorship scheme.
The changes announced by home secretary Priti Patel come less than 24 hours after she unveiled a “bespoke humanitarian route” for Ukrainian residents in the UK to bring over “immediate” family members, which was heavily criticised for not going far enough.
Patel told MPs she was extending the right for Ukrainians living in the UK to bring over other family members, such as parents and siblings.
She also said that charities, community groups, businesses and individuals would be able to sponsor Ukrainians with no family ties to the UK to enter the country. “There will be no numerical cap on this scheme and we will welcome as many Ukrainians as wish to come,” she said.
Those entering the UK under either scheme would have the right to stay for 12 months, to work and to access the benefits system, Patel said.
The new measures are broader than those announced on Monday, which were restricted to a far narrower group of spouses, children under 18 and a very limited number of older relatives.
But some MPs have said that the latest changes still did not go far enough. Roger Gale, MP for North Thanet, urged Patel to take a far less restrictive approach, similar to the one taken by the UK government when people fled the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian revolution and the 1968 Prague Spring by Soviet forces.
“Can we do please as we did in 1956 and 1968, cut through the red tape and get these people home so that their menfolk fighting and dying on the streets of Kyiv can at least know that their women and children are safe?” Gale asked.
MPs were also critical of the sponsorship scheme, citing a similar overly bureaucratic one for Syrian refugees that had proved to be difficult to navigate for many and had led to the resettlement of relatively few people.
“I know many people who have been deterred just by how complex the system is,” Labour’s shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said of the Syrian scheme.
Stuart McDonald, a Scottish National party MP who sits on the Commons home affairs select committee, reiterated his party’s call for the government to follow the lead of the EU by allowing anyone fleeing Ukraine the automatic right to settle in the UK for three years. “If our European allies can do it, so can we,” he said.
Patel declined to say how many refugees the UK was anticipating under the two schemes, although Prime Minister Boris Johnson said earlier that he expected the widened family reunification programme would allow up to 200,000 Ukrainians to come to the UK.
Svitlana Cartwright, a Ukrainian-born British citizen living in Buckingham, welcomed the relaxation. She had been worried about how to help her sister Barbara, her nieces aged 10 and 13, and her mother. The four had fled over the border into Poland on Monday but Cartwright had been concerned she would be unable to bring them to the UK.
Cartwright called Patel’s concession “amazing”, adding: “I will be able to fly to Poland, pick [them] up and offer some support for them.”
Priti Patel bows to pressure to widen Ukrainian refugee rights
Pinoy Variant