A tragedy waiting to happen, say critics of dispersal system

Alan Travis, home affairs editor, Monday August 06 2001, The Guardian

For many refugee welfare workers, the weekend murder of a Kurdish asylum seeker in Glasgow was particularly depressing because the city had become one of the better aspects of Britain's forced dispersal system of asylum seekers.

Glasgow did not feature strongly as a destination when Home Office ministers decided to set up the compulsory dispersal scheme in April last year to relieve growing racial tensions in Kent and London.

Yet the Scottish city has made strenuous efforts to welcome the 3,500 asylum seekers who have been sent to live in its empty council flats on already deprived estates - most of them in the Sighthill area. That is a significant proportion of the 26,800 asylum seekers who have been sent north and it is expected to rise to between 6,500 and 7,000 by the autumn.

"I am very surprised that it has happened in Glasgow," said Keith Best of the Immigration Advisory Service, which runs a surgery in Sighthill. "They are getting two coachloads a day going up there. They have pulled out all the stops to make life easier for people. They gave them emergency vouchers when the Sodexho (Home Office) vouchers were not arriving on time and they made sure they had leisure cards so they could use the council facilities during the day."

But despite the efforts of Glasgow council, welfare workers believe that the current dispersal system bears little resemblance to the one originally outlined by Home Office ministers, who promised to ensure that refugees would be sent to "cluster areas" where there were existing minority ethnic communities which could support the asylum seekers.

It was also promised that they would not be left isolated on hard-to-let sink estates. There are no existing Afghan or Somali communities in Glasgow - the countries from which asylum seekers in Britain are most likely come.

"Other local authorities have not offered accommodation and so they have had to rely on the private sector," said Mr Best. "It means all the old assurances about cluster areas and existing communities have gone by the board. It is creating racial tension.

"A policy which was designed to ease racial tension in one part of the country is actually creating a cauldron in another. I am not opposed to dispersal but only if people have an element of choice. The government say they can't do that," said Mr Best, who yesterday met the immigration minister Lord Rooker to discuss the issue.

Dispersal has worked relatively well in some local authority areas, particularly in Yorkshire and Humberside, where a support system had already been put in place to welcome the Kosovan refugees.

A Home Office spokesman acknowledged that the number of dispersed asylum seekers - 26,800 - was much lower than the target of 65,000.

But he said that the system was working and had not completely broken down as some had claimed.

It was always expected that at least a third of those involved would drift back to London and the south-east even though that meant losing state help with accommodation and subsistence. But others believe the dispersal policy was always going to end in the kind of tragedy seen in Glasgow this weekend.

"The government must have known that bringing empty council houses into use for asylum seekers would result in mass concentration of asylum seekers and fuel racial tensions in already deprived council estates," said Robina Qureshi of Positive Action in Housing, a Scottish housing charity.

"Asylum seekers should have a say in where they are relocated. They need to be in areas where they feel safe."

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