Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a new podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host Alan Tolhurst and each week I'll be taking an in-depth look at this week's

biggest political stories with fellow politics home reporters and special guests from across

Westminster. The ongoing crisis in Ukraine, as the Russian invasion continues,

remains the most important story in politics right now, and it's been a chaotic week for the

Home Office, whose complicated refugee policy has been described as cruel by those trying to

navigate the system. We'll have an interview with Robert Buckland, former Justice Secretary,

who has been among a group of conservatives calling for the Home Office to use more technology

to move faster on accepting those refugees, fleeing the shelling, which has devastated several cities

in recent days. I'm joined to discuss this by Politics Home Reporter, Eleanor Langford, and our

departing political editor, Kate Proctor, who is spending her last day with us on the podcast,

so thanks very much for that. And if I can start with you, Kate, we're

recording this on Thursday lunchtime. Where is the UK on allowing Ukrainians into the country?

So we've had some movement today. The Home Secretary, after coming under a huge amount of pressure,

has finally said that there's going to be some changes for people that are coming on the family

scheme. So this biometric testing, so this is your fingerprints or

facial recognition, the stuff that has to be done usually in person at a visa processing centre,

all of that can now be done at a later date. So if you are a Ukrainian with a passport and a relative

in the UK, you are able to come to this country and the biometric stuff is going to be waived.

If you don't have a passport, then you're still going to have to go through this very lengthy process

of having to get all your biometric data done. And as we've, as we're going to come on to,

there's been some really difficult stories of people that are fleeing Ukraine and yet stuck in this

...