By stewartb

Positive findings on Scotland’s response to Ukrainians seeking refuge as National Audit Office reveals big differences in numbers hosted across the UKThe National Audit Office (NAO) has recently (17 October 2023) published an ’Investigation into the Homes for Ukraine scheme’.

See https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/investigation-into-the-homes-for-ukraine-scheme.pdf

Established in March 2022 by the Home Office and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (DLUHC), this was by far the largest UK initiative to enable the hosting of Ukrainian nationals seeking refuge from war in their country. You may recall that in addition to individuals being able to ‘sponsor’ Ukrainians to come to the UK, the Scottish and Welsh governments also acted as sponsors, operating what are referred to as ‘super sponsor schemes’.

Specifically on Ukrainians arriving through individual sponsorships, the NAO reports that England has seen the largest concentration of arrivals, ‘with 171 average arrivals per 100,000 of population as of 8 August 2023. This compares with 121 in Wales, 93 in Scotland and 63 in Northern Ireland’.

However, the Welsh and Scottish Governments sponsored a further 23,398 arrivals under the super sponsor pathway as of 8 August 2023. Oddly, one needs to read a footnote in the NAO’s report to find the following information:

‘If arrivals under the super sponsor pathway are included, Scotland and Wales have the largest concentration of Ukrainian arrivals per population across the UK with 462 and 224 per 100,000 population respectively.’ Recall that the concentration in England was just 171 arrivals per 100,000 of population.

On 18 March 2022, in a BBC News website article headlined ‘Scotland becomes super sponsor as Ukrainian refugee scheme opens’, FM Nicola Sturgeon was reported stating: ‘Scotland could welcome 3,000 Ukrainians immediately. She added that it would later take in “at least a proportionate share” of those coming to the UK’!

End note

On 11 July, 2022, after accepting 7,000 arrivals, the Scottish Government paused its scheme ‘to allow staff to deal with a recent increase in visa applications’. And all hell broke loose: “deeply disappointing” and “Ukrainians are having the rug pulled out from under them” (Labour Party in Scotland); “shoddy planning and lack of foresight” and “The SNP talked up their super sponsor scheme as proof of how welcoming they were being, but that now appears to be unravelling”.(Tory Party in Scotland); “the Scottish government prioritising grandstanding” (Lib Dems in Scotland) – and much more in the same vein! All this aggregated and amplified by the BBC in an online article headlined ‘Ukraine refugees: Scotland pauses super sponsor scheme’.

(By the way, on 8 June 2022, the BBC News website on its Wales page had this headline: ‘Ukraine: Wales refugee super sponsor scheme paused for June’.  We’re told the Conservatives called the announcement a “failure” whilst Plaid Cymru said it raised questions about the “effect of the lack of financial support from Westminster” for Wales efforts to help refugees. The Lib Dems were apparently silent.)

The NAO report confirms that: ‘The Home Office is responsible for the processing of scheme visas to enable Ukrainians to enter the UK.’ It also reports (with my emphasis): ‘The Home Office did not originally set out target turnaround times for processing scheme visas, stating that the focus was simply to process them as quickly as possible. It told us that not having a target meant that the data it collected on its operational processing of these visas are not as good as it collects for other visa processes. It was not until August 2022 that any robust analysis of the data on turnaround times was conducted by the Home Office.’

And: ‘The Home Office acknowledges that it was unable to process visas as quickly as it wanted to at the start of the scheme when the need for Ukrainians to escape was most urgent. In March 2022, the first month that applications were open, of the 26,000 applications received, 18% were processed within five working days and 21% took, or will take, more than 15 working days.’

The following chart from the NAO report plots UK-wide arrivals data. It shows that the total number of arrivals to the UK as a whole dropped off steadily from May-June 2022 onwards. Was there political outrage amplified by the uncritical journalism of the BBC about this drop off in UK data at the time?

On 30 July 2022, the Scotland section of the BBC News website had an article under the headline ‘The Ukrainians living on a cruise ship in Edinburgh’. It was full (only) of positive comments from Ukrainian families about the facilities and the welcome they were experiencing in Scotland.