A Conservative councillor resigned from the party at the weekend after being shocked at the red tape surrounding the UK\u2019s Ukraine visa system, which she said reflected the government\u2019s \u201chostile\u201d and \u201cxenophobic\u201d approach to refugees.<\/p>\n
Samantha Flower has applied to sponsor a 17-year-old Ukrainian boy to live with her family in Buxton, Derbyshire, but said she had been met by delays and bureaucracy. The child has been forced to remain in Ukraine while the paperwork is processed.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf he doesn\u2019t make it out alive it\u2019s because the red tape prevented it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Her unease was reflected by the statement from the heads of the Refugee Council, the British Red Cross, Save the Children and Oxfam who warned that the visa system was \u201ccausing great distress to already traumatised Ukrainians\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose who want to come to the UK are having to navigate a complex web of bureaucratic paperwork to get visas, leaving them facing protracted delays without any information about the status of their application,\u201d the charity heads wrote in a letter published on Monday in the Times.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe government must urgently review the use of visas and waive them as an immediate short-term measure, as has been done by the EU, and look to introduce a simplified emergency humanitarian visa process.\u201d<\/p>\n
Flower, a councillor on High Peak borough council, has signed up to the UK\u2019s\u00a0Home for Ukraine scheme, where strangers act as hosts, but has not yet been approved. Only 1,000 of the 25,000 completed applications have been approved so far.<\/p>\n
The boy and his stepmother and father, both lawyers, fled their home in Kyiv when Russia invaded. They arranged for the teenager to travel to the UK after contacting Flower online, where the councillor had offered her home. However, the boy has only a domestic Ukrainian passport and not the international passport required by the UK as part of its visa process. The boy\u2019s family have had to stay in Ukraine and wait for the correct paperwork \u2013 a process they have been told could take weeks.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re having to wait for the passport to be completed,\u201d said Flower. \u201cThey had a shell land near their home five or six days ago. They don\u2019t know from one day to the other what\u2019s going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said the government\u2019s complex visa system for Ukrainians reflected its \u201chostile\u201d approach to all refugees, adding: \u201cWe\u2019re tipping towards being quite far right and it\u2019s not the party that I joined.\u201d<\/p>\n More than 3.9 million refugees have left Ukraine in the past month, according to the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, more than 2.2 million of whom have ended up in Poland. The\u00a0Home Office\u00a0has granted 21,600 visas to Ukrainians who are hoping to join relatives in Britain under the Ukraine Family scheme.<\/p>\n The Department for Levelling Up, which is handling the parallel Homes for Ukraine scheme, for people who do not have family in the UK, has not yet released any figures about the number of visas granted. However, refugee hosting charities say the numbers of people coming through this scheme are so far \u201ctiny\u201d.<\/p>\n Lauren Scott, director of hosting charity\u00a0Refugees\u00a0at Home, said: \u201cWe have been told anecdotally that the delay is largely down to the onerous visa application process, which is frustrating for our hosts and must be soul-destroying for guests. It is creating a huge bottleneck. So far we only know of three sponsorship visas granted to potential guests, and that\u2019s all to one family.\u201d<\/p>\n An opinion poll released on Sunday by Savanta ComRes indicated that 54% of people in the UK support a no-visa policy, and would like to allow an unlimited number of Ukrainians who are fleeing the Russian invasion to come to the UK.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Leading refugee charities have called on the UK government to scrap visa requirements for Ukrainian refugees, amid mounting anger about the government\u2019s slow progress in issuing paperwork to people fleeing a war zone. Applicants to host Ukrainian refugees under the Homes for\u00a0Ukraine\u00a0scheme have expressed concern that some refugees are being forced to remain in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":18996,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_post_source_name":"","_post_source_url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[11611,5307,5268,7241,9214,287,10767,10000,539,11356,4014,159,5455,8008,11638,2264,1473,10598,12234,9575,10954,5252,5342,8029,12085,11973,6332,2604,837,5656,6134,5524,3457,5217,1920,12264,13057,328,6584,12605,5431,10412,5648,5180,5555,7999,5508,5647,6585,5251,12790,594],"class_list":["post-18995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-news","tag-applications","tag-britain","tag-british","tag-charity","tag-child","tag-children","tag-conflict","tag-conservative","tag-delay","tag-delays","tag-derbyshire","tag-eu","tag-family","tag-far-right","tag-forced","tag-government","tag-home-office","tag-homes","tag-host","tag-humanitarian-visa","tag-international","tag-invasion","tag-kyiv","tag-land","tag-nations","tag-one","tag-online","tag-passport","tag-poland","tag-red-cross","tag-refugee","tag-refugees","tag-russia","tag-russian","tag-samantha","tag-scandal","tag-scrap","tag-shell","tag-travel","tag-uk","tag-uk-airport","tag-uk-government","tag-uk-visa","tag-ukraine","tag-ukrainian","tag-united-nations","tag-united-nations-high-commissioner-for-refugees","tag-visa","tag-visas","tag-war","tag-weekend","tag-who"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Ukrainians](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/2ac2849cf32d6f3f00a2b412e8367db9faa448a8\/0_212_4210_2527\/master\/4210.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=03f59563e636d79299fcfa6423104dd5\")
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