Brabant municipalities are lagging far behind in arranging reception places for asylum seekers, while the national government is looking for more reception places. Brabant is expected to create more than double the number of shelter places than there are now.
Brabant municipalities must provide more than thirteen thousand reception places for asylum seekers. There are now just under 6,300 available, which means that more than 7,100 shelter places still need to be added. This is evident from a letter that Minister Bart van den Brink (CDA) of the Ministry of Asylum and Migration sent to the House of Representatives on Friday.
Spread law
The letter to Parliament is a so-called estimate for the distribution law. This determines how many asylum seekers municipalities are expected to have to accommodate. Provinces are primarily responsible for the distribution among the various municipalities, which must provide a number of shelter places based on the number of inhabitants and prosperity in the municipality.
Provinces now have until the beginning of December this year to divide this task among the municipalities. The municipalities then have until mid-2027 to set up the shelters.
If that fails, Minister Van den Brink can impose penalty payments. But Van den Brink doesn’t want to threaten that yet, he says against NOS: “A conversation with municipalities is first and foremost a conversation. Those kinds of measures are not the start of a conversation.”
