Municipalities and Red Cross are once again raising an alarm about beds for Ukrainians – ‘people sleep on the street or in their car’

“Remember that the war in Ukraine is still going on,” says Daniëlle Brouwer, spokesperson for the Dutch Red Cross. “Ukrainians show my colleagues videos of bombing, sometimes a kilometer from their old house. They tell how they were almost only in the shelter. If they then flee to the Netherlands, we have a duty to protect them.”

According to Brouwer, the Netherlands has been renouncing that task for some time now. The Red Cross, in its own words, warned three times earlier of a shortage of reception places. On Thursday, the organization sounded an alarm for a fourth time. “Warning feels like our moral duty,” says Brouwer. “At the beginning of the year, about two hundred Ukrainians still came to us, to say that they had to sleep on the street or in their car. In August it was 435 people. Only last week there were fifty.”

Ukrainians are taken care of outside the regular asylum system. They have to go to the municipality themselves to ask for daycare. This is in line with the European Directive for Temporary Protection (RTB), which was recently extended up to and including March 2027. This directive stipulates that every Ukrainian is entitled to reception, education and may work immediately.

Hundreds a week

The number of Ukrainian refugees who register in the Database BRP, the basic registration persons, has been increasing by more than a hundred years and a half, sometimes even almost four hundred people per week. Whether they come directly from Ukraine, or through another European country, is unknown. “The registration of this is often poor, but we are mapping it,” said outgoing minister Mona Keijzer (BBB, asylum reception) about that last week.

This year the number of registered Ukrainian refugees in the Netherlands grew between January and September with more than eight thousand people. In the same period, the number of reception spots increased by around six thousand.

We wonder if we have to offer shelter to young men who come here alone to work.

Around 129,000 Ukrainian refugees now live in the Netherlands, of which nearly 98,000 of which are in municipal care. Not every Ukrainian fleeing needs a shelter. Some have found a house themselves, or live with private individuals or family. Since the spring of 2024, almost all available beds have been occupied in the shelter.

Nobody knows how many Ukrainians in the Netherlands are currently looking for a shelter because this is a responsibility of individual municipalities. “If that is not kept centrally, you also do not know how many places are needed,” says Red Cross spokesperson Brouwer. There was a registration center in the Utrecht Jaarbeurs, where it was intended that Ukrainians would stay for 24 hours, to continue to other shelter. But that location closed because she became overcrowded, precisely because of the poor number of reception places elsewhere in the country.

‘No longer shelf life’

Municipalities have been complaining for months that it is “no longer sustainable” to ensure sufficient reception places, says a spokesperson for the Association of Dutch Municipalities (VNG). “The daycare is 99.99 percent full.”

According to the VNG, municipalities are looking for new reception places. These are then mainly to replace already existing locations where Ukrainians have to go out again, because a building is being demolished, for example, or the rental period. “This is how Utrecht is looking for replacement for 1,200 places,” says the VNG. “She fears that she will only find six hundred places.”

The interest group criticizes the fact that the reimbursement that municipalities receive per shelter has fallen to around 40 euros. “That was more than 100 euros at first,” says the VNG spokesperson. “Suppose we are now building extra reception places and the war is running, then municipalities are with the costs. Not all locations are suitable for making homes for young people later, for example.”

A possible solution that municipalities see is that the government determines which Ukrainian is given priority to be taken care of. “This way we prevent dire cases from ending up on the street,” says the spokesperson. “We wonder if we also have to offer shelter to work young men who come here alone, or whether we can appeal to employers for that group.” The VNG says last fall to have asked such criteria, but ‘never received a serious answer’ from the empire.

Zoom in

Keijzer: Men Weren

In response to the CRAINS OF THE RO REM CREAT and the municipalities, outgoing minister Keijzer told the NOS That she wants to give mothers and children priority at a shelter. She wants to keep Ukrainian men with a job in the Netherlands away from municipal care.

A week earlier, during the question time in the Lower House, the outgoing minister said that there is little room for this in the European directive. Also the Ukrainians who, according to the minister, ‘turn things away’, municipalities cannot simply show the door, she said. Just like Ukrainians whose “you can reasonably wonder if they cannot provide for their care.”

A long -term perspective for the care of Ukrainians is necessary, Keijzer agreed. But what that should look like “is still dependent on whether peace negotiations lead to results”. If there is a peace agreement, the outgoing minister is in favor of that Ukrainians will return “to build their country”.

Since the registration location in Utrecht has been closed, the Red Cross says it receives more emergency cries from Ukrainians. The organization has its own crisis shelter in Westervoort in Gelderland. “Sometimes we let them take a shower there and give them a toothbrush and something to eat, but we are also full. That people have to knock on and off at five, six, seven municipalities and are sent away, that’s not how it should be.”

To share





Mail the editors