Sir Roger Gale

The hon. Lady is absolutely right to pay tribute to the farmers and to highlight the phenomenal difficulty of clearing mines. The HALO Trust has experience of that around the world, and it will take years, not months. For all those reasons, I say to the Minister—I was going to say my hon. Friend—that this is a sensitive issue, but there are scores of Ukrainians living in the United Kingdom who regard the UK as home, because they have to: they have no choice. My wife and I have five young people whom we now regard as grandchildren, two in one family and three in another, ranging from teenaged down to the cot. Last weekend, a young lady—young in my terms—came to my surgery. She has a 16-year-old daughter who wants to go to college. Like so many other young Ukrainians of that age, she is now between a rock and a hard place, because she does not know how long she will be allowed to remain in the United Kingdom. There are also professional people who cannot work here and would like to return home, but who need to be enabled to establish a proper professional life in the United Kingdom. I will give the Minister one example: Dr Olena Hubska, now a personal friend of ours, who is the mother of two of those children. She is a fully qualified dentist and has 16 years in practice as a hospital doctor, but the General Dental Council will not allow her to practise here, despite the fact that the country is crying out for dentists. I am told there are some 200 others like her with such qualifications. That is nonsense. Every school holiday, Olena returns to Kharkiv, where her mother is living in a bombed-out flat, so that she can treat children and frontline soldiers who otherwise cannot get dental care, but she is not allowed to practise here. I do not want to put the Minister on the spot today, but I say to him that we must sort out the longer-term future for these people, who are not even classed as refugees—they are stateless and have no actual status in this country. We have generously, initially, made them welcome, but we have now reached the point where we have to take some decisions for the longer term. I would like the Minister to go back to his colleagues in the Department and the Secretary of State to take this to Cabinet, to say that we really have to recognise that, however sensitive the immigration issue is—as I of course understand—there is a group of people living in this country, contributing to our way of life now, culturally, as has been said earlier, who have to be regularised. They must have a pathway to settlement so that the young people can go to school and on to college, and can qualify and build lives here. President Zelensky wants his people to return home, and we want them to be able to return home, but for the moment and for the foreseeable future that is not possible. So please, Minister, take that message away and see what can be done, working with the Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary, to now regularise the position in the interests not just of them, but of the United Kingdom as well.