The shadow foreign secretary, Lisa Nandy, is demanding an immediate meeting with the head of the Foreign Office as thousands of British nationals remain stranded abroad two weeks after Dominic Raab unveiled his £75m coronavirus rescue mission.
Nandy’s office has let the foreign secretary know they are seeking a meeting with the permanent secretary “as an absolute matter of urgency”, a spokesman said after a conference call with 70 MPs and staff to discuss the continuing repatriation crisis.
MPs expressed concern about Britons stranded in India, Pakistan, Australia and New Zealand, which closed its borders two weeks ago.
They also expressed frustration that 11 new rescue flights were being laid on for India while none were being planned for Pakistan, where it emerged there could be as many as 20,000 stranded Britons.
During the call there were also complaints that the Foreign Office was fobbing off politicians who were making representations about their constituents with stock emails and an “auto-response” saying emails were not being monitored.
Their concerns emerged as insiders complained that the crisis response seemed to involve a “head of correspondence” rather than a “head of crisis” in relation to repatriation flights.
Planes organised by the government have already been organised for Peru, Ghana, Algeria, India, Nepal and South Africa, with Ecuador and Bolivia also on the list. There have also been calls for charter flights to be laid on to Argentina.
A retired GP, Adrienne Newton, who has been stranded for weeks in Córdoba, 700km (435 miles) from Buenos Aires, said the embassy, had sent details at 1am on the day of a potential Air France flight from Buenos Aires.
After protesting on Twitter that there were no connections to the capital because of the lockdown, the embassy tweeted details of a transport company “that has worked with other embassies, good luck!”, she said.
“If other countries are contracting companies to transport its nationals to airports for flights home, why isn’t ours? Clearly it’s not a logistical issue. The flight yesterday with KLM left Buenos Aires half empty. I am starting to think this is not just a question of inefficiency,” she added.
Meanwhile, the Foreign Office says that as long as the Pakistani government allows the national airline, PIA, to continue repatriation flights to London, there is no need to charter flights.
It says it has already repatriated 4,000 of 6,000 people stranded in that country and was confident it could get thousands more home on PIA flights.
However, in a conference call between the government’s South Asia minister, Lord Ahmad, the UK high commissioner in Pakistan and 10 MPs with large numbers of constituents stranded, it emerged there could be tens of thousands of Britons stuck in the country.
Sam Tarry, the Labour MP for South Ilford, who was on the call, said: “I know the British high commission has been working very hard on this. They said that there’s going to be a series of more flights. They’re saying there are up to 20,000 people who want to come home.”
He added that MPs on the call raised the issue of the “lack of faith” in PIA to deliver further flights after constituents paid out thousands of pounds for tickets on flights that were cancelled. But he was told that charter flights would be difficult. “They felt the issues were going to be that the Pakistan government were not going to open the international airspace to obviously allow charter flights to take place. So they were saying essentially the only option is PIA.”
Afzal Khan MP
(@Afzal4Gorton)Today, I led 90 cross-party MPs & Peers in writing to @DominicRaab about the dire situation for those British nationals who are stranded in Pakistan.
The Govt’s continued reliance on the commercial operation of @Official_PIA is no longer tenable & they must look at alternatives. pic.twitter.com/oGQ0UHpW4r
Afzal Khan, the shadow deputy leader of the House of Commons, said that British nationals in Pakistan were “still having to pay for the chaotic mismanagement of PIA and the British repatriation effort”, in a letter to Raab.
A spokesperson for the FCO said Lord Ahmad and the high commission were “in close contact with their Pakistani counterparts as well as PIA, the national carrier, to ensure that commercial flight routes are kept open between our two countries.”
It added that there had been 17 flights between Pakistan for the UK since 4 April, “returning in excess of 6000 people to the UK”. It said it was working hard with the local authorities to keep flights “operational in the coming days.”
