State Secretary Eric van der Burg (Asel policy) does not expect the area around application center Ter Apel to be empty this evening. He thinks there will still be people sleeping outside the gates.
Van der Burg says he is busy in consultation with municipalities to arrange more reception for the newcomers, but according to him that is not yet producing the desired result, he said before the start of the Council of Ministers. The Groningen mayor Koen Schuiling, also a member of the Security Council, demanded earlier this week that no more asylum seekers sleep outside from tonight.
According to Van der Burg, it is “important to come to a deal, not only between the central government and municipalities, but also municipalities themselves. That can also help a lot. I was very happy with the municipality of Apeldoorn, which said yesterday that they are helping out. Doetinchem will open this weekend, which will also help, but we still need additional municipalities in the short term.”
Van der Burg says he still has some irons in the fire for the reception in the medium term. He prefers not to use coercion, such as in Tubbergen, where a hotel has been bought for asylum reception. That was intended for the longer term and is not yielding anything yet, says the state secretary. It also takes longer because the municipality does not cooperate and legal procedures have to be followed.
According to Van der Burg, voluntariness yields much more in the short term. “And I don’t want to use that compulsion for the longer term either, it just costs you a lot of support.”
The cabinet has been struggling with the asylum file for months. “The situation in Ter Apel is indigestible, we will have to come up with a solution,” said Minister Hugo de Jong (Public Housing). One of the problems is that status holders, refugees who have already received a residence permit, do not ‘flow’ well from the centers: there is a shortage of housing for this group, which means that they ‘keep their beds occupied’. Measures are therefore also expected in the area of housing minister De Jonge.