UK to resettle 20,000 Afghan refugees after Taliban takeover

The UK government has promised to resettle up to 20,000 Afghans in the UK over the coming years, after the Taliban seized control of Kabul.

In the first year, 5,000 refugees will be eligible – with women, girls and religious minorities, who are most at risk from the Taliban, given priority.

The scheme is based on the government’s previous Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme, which resettled 20,000 Syrian refugees over a seven-year period from 2014 to 2021. 

The government emphasised the new Afghan Citizens’ Resettlement Scheme would “not compromise on national security” and has promised all those arriving will have to pass “strict security checks”.

The new scheme is separate to the existing “Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy,” which aims to relocate 5,000 former Afghan staff members and their families who are under serious threat to Britain by the end of this year.

The Home Office admitted the new scheme faced “significant challenges” due to the “complex picture on the ground” in the country, but said ministers were “working at speed” to address those obstacles.

On Tuesday evening, Home Secretary Priti Patel chaired a meeting of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance – comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States – to identify safe and legal routes for those who need to leave Afghanistan.

Announcing the scheme, Patel said the it would “save lives”, and promised that the UK would “not abandon people who have been forced to flee their homes and are now living in terror of what might come next”.

However, critics from across the political spectrum have accused the government of failing to meet its moral duty to those abandoned after two decades of failed Western intervention.

Tory MP Tobias Ellwood, chairman of the Defence Select Committee, told the Daily Mirror the scheme was a “woefully inadequate response”. He criticised the government for capping numbers at 5,000 for the first year when “the threat is at its greatest”.

The SNP’s Westminster leader Ian Blackford said the UK should aim to grant asylum to 35,000 or more Afghan refugees, while the Liberal Democrats said the resettlement of 20,000 Afghans in Britain should be “the starting point” and “not the target”.

Labour said the government’s proposed resettlement scheme “does not meet the scale of the challenge” and risked “leaving people in Afghanistan in deadly danger”.

Boris Johnson is expected to announce further details of additional humanitarian aid and diplomatic support in the Commons on Wednesday, when Parliament will be recalled to discuss the situation in Afghanistan.