The government owes a debt to contractors stranded in Afghanistan

Britain owes these people a debt of gratitude for furthering our aims in Afghanistan and we must not let them down, writes John Baron

The government’s warm words about providing sanctuary for those who helped Britain are ringing increasingly hollow (AFP via Getty)

In the tearing haste of Operation Pitting, the government devised schemes to enable Afghans who had worked closely with Britain to leave Afghanistan; however, a significant number fell between the cracks.

One such group were the around 200 Afghans who had worked as contractors for the British Council. Though employees of the British Council were included in the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy, guidance was less clear for the contractors, and the vast majority did not make it out of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021.

As chair of the British Council All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG), we began to be contacted by the contractors directly, as well as by those in the UK working on their behalf. I first raised their plight in November 2021, when I alerted the defence secretary that the contractors had described lives in hiding, moving from house to house, all the time being hunted by the Taliban.

Although they had not officially worked for the British Council, the Taliban saw no distinction and, provincial Afghanistan being quite a small place, the locals know who had “collaborated” with the foreigners.

In January 2022 the government launched the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme (ACRS) to great fanfare, which would enable at-risk Afghans with no links to Britain to escape Afghanistan and make new lives here. Quite early on it was established that the contractors would be eligible under this scheme, but the system has been ponderous, and progress glacial. This is all the more frustrating because the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), as the British Council’s sponsoring department, categorised almost all of the contractors remaining in Afghanistan as being at “very high” or “high” risk.

Some progress came in June when it was announced that the contractors could apply for a place under the ACRS in an application window open until August. Even then, the government needed persuading to process applications as they came in, rather than waiting until the window closed and processing them all then. The British Council worked at pace with the FCDO to winnow out the genuine applications.

In September around 90 of the contractors were informed that they had a place on ACRS, pending security checks, but by December they still had heard nothing further. The British Council APPG raised this in parliament shortly before Christmas, and again in a Westminster Hall debate on 11 January.

The answers the minister gave our questions were largely positive, but in an extraordinary development the FCDO “corrected” almost all the responses he gave 24 hours later – something I have never seen in my over 20 years as an MP. This caused alarm and confusion, not least amongst the contractors in Afghanistan, who follow these events closely.

In a further debate, the government had another opportunity to set the record straight, but unfortunately the only concrete clarification we received was that the quota of contractors, embassy guards and Chevening scholars was indeed an upper limit, rather than the “measuring tool” it was described as on 11 January.

A quota is distasteful: what happens if the quota is met and there are still people eligible for ACRS in Afghanistan? After all, there were no quotas when it came to volunteers or the extent of these people’s courage.

As it stands, 47 of the around 200 contractors have received the green light from the government to leave Afghanistan with their families in preparation for their onward journey to the UK. Of the remaining 150, around 50 have had their applications acknowledged pending security checks. The final 100 are yet to hear anything at all since they submitted their applications last summer.

The sad fact is that not a single person was brought to the UK in 2022 by the government’s flagship Afghan citizens resettlement scheme. The government’s warm words about providing sanctuary for those who helped Britain are ringing increasingly hollow. It urgently needs to process the remaining applications, and begin the process of getting our Afghan colleagues to safety. Britain owes these people a debt of gratitude for furthering our aims in Afghanistan, and we must not let them down.

John Baron is the Conservative MP for Basildon and Billericay