Refugee work no longer gets work from the municipality of Midden-Drenthe. The organization is excluded from a European tendering procedure to get work for the next two years. The judge announced this.
Vluchtelingenwerk did not comply with the rules to participate in the tender anonymously. A condition was that you as an organization were not allowed to announce to be able to go things in this assignment. The job is, among other things, in guiding status holders. It concerns about seventy projects in this municipality for the next two years. 2.1 million euros has been set aside for this.
Municipalities nowadays hold a public tender. Multiple organizations are given the chance to compete. To allocate it all and to keep it as honest as possible, the same rules are drawn up in describing, for example, the working method or an action plan. A committee assesses the registrations, without knowing who the tenderer is.
However, the Refugee Work did mention the names of organizations with which they collaborate, so that they were recognized as a tenderer. The organization chose to name the partners by name in order to achieve the most concrete possible interpretation. But they shouldn’t have done that. And if this was unclear for the organization how it had to be done, then questions could have been asked for information. And according to the judge, Vluchtelingenwerk did not do that.
At the Refugee Work, disappointed responded to the verdict. “We believe that we have done the tender anonymously, but the municipality looks at it differently,” says Femke Hummel of Vluchtelingenwerk. “We have always worked well with the municipality in the past and would have liked to continue this now. Whether we appeal? We still have to look at that.”