British troops will be sent to help speed up the processing of visas for Ukrainian refugees in Poland but not France, the UK’s armed forces minister has said, amid criticism that people are having to wait too long for help.
James Heappey said the Home Office was “reconsidering” current plans for vetting the more than 20,000 people who had fled Ukraine and were hoping to join family members in the UK.
After Labour accused the government of failing to learn the lessons of Afghanistan and Tory MPs raised concerns about the UK lagging behind other European countries in its support for refugees, Heappey said some bureaucracy could be stripped away.
He said the Home Office believed it could reinforce the visa application centre in northern France without help from the Ministry of Defence (MoD). But Heappey said the MoD had been asked to “supply manpower to Poland, which is the busiest of the visa application centres by some margin” and that the department was “in the process of making that happen”.
It came as the PCS union, which represents civil servants including Home Office staff, has called for the government to take urgent action to help Ukrainian refugees after being told the “surge team” boasted about by Priti Patel amounted to just seven people.
The union understands the seven volunteers, who have been trained in personal safety, will assist with visa applications in Paris, Warsaw, Rzeszów, Chișinău, Bucharest, Budapest and Prague.
On Sunday, visiting the Ukrainian Social Club in Holland Park, London, Patel said everything was being done to process as many applications as possible. “I’m surging staff across all application centres across the entire European Union as well as in the border countries such as Poland, where I was the other day and obviously where huge numbers of people are coming through,” she said.
A Home Office spokesperson said the allegation from the union that there were only seven people in the surge team was “wrong”.
Heappey told Sky News: “We’ll supply as many people as they need in order to be able to get the highest number of people processed in the quickest time possible and then the home secretary has got some choices, which I know she’s considering, around how to further change the visa process and what checks might be necessary within it.”
Heappey said Patel would consider how to change the process and then “weigh that up against risk”. “A lot of people have made the point this is very different to Afghanistan, this is predominantly a refugee flow of women and children because fighting-age men have remained in Ukraine to fight,” he told BBC Breakfast.
“I know the home secretary is very aware of that but she needs to make decisions around how to change visa policy and, crucially, the security checks that are done within visa policy in a way that still gives her the assurance that she needs that at a time of acute competition in Europe between the west and Russia we’re not making the mistake of dropping our guard altogether.”
He added: “I know she’ll make the right decision.”
A warning that Russian forces were considering a chemical weapons attack was made public on Wednesday night in an effort to deter the Kremlin from following through with it, Heappey told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
He said that while recent reports of civilians being killed were tragic, “they are but nothing by comparison to the suffering and devastation” that would be caused by a chemical weapons attack.
Heappey called it “the most despicable thing that everyone could imagine” and said he was “appalled it is even under consideration”.
After a hospital complex in Mariupol was bombed, Heappey said it was “utterly despicable” that Russia had either used its weapons indiscriminately against civilians or deliberately targeted the building.
“It is a war crime to not have due regard when you’re targeting for a protected site – like a hospital – when you’re using artillery,” he said.
