The Home Office must put more resources into making the visa process for refugees easier and faster.

While other countries open their borders to Ukrainian refugees, Britain is relying on complication and delay to avoid providing a safe haven for those in desperate need.

First our government said people who want to host a family have to find their own refugees. Promptly that's what hundreds and hundreds of our fellow citizens did.

But the policy of treating each family member separately, so that a family of five had to wait for five separate permissions, effectively denies urgently-needed help. 

Requiring biometric passports for babes in arms adds layers of difficulty for already hard-pressed mothers. Application forms that take three hours to fill-in for each member of a family group is obstructive and unnecessary. For people under such great stress it must feel like torture.

Then, the lack of communication about progress of an application from the Home Office, to local government, the potential hosts and to the refugees themselves leaves everyone in limbo.

One family contacted by a host in Lincolnshire on March 23rd consists of grandma, mother and four children from 2 to 15 staying since March 16th with a friend in a small apartment in Utrecht. They had left Chernihiv earlier that month and applied for UK visas on March 25th. Now, seventeen days later, nobody involved knows when their visas will be processed.

There must be a better way. Britain's reputation in the world cannot be allowed to slide further down the scale. The Home Office must put more resources into making the process easier and faster.

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