The struggle of Assen and the province to keep the Johan Willem Friso barracks open can count on a lot of sympathy in the House of Representatives.
The larger parties D66, PVV, CDA, PvdA, SP and ChristenUnie in particular support the appeal from Assen to keep the barracks open, and in any case to maintain employment. Smaller parties, such as the Van Haga Group, jump more firmly into the breach. “Closing the barracks is completely undesirable, this unfortunate proposal must be dropped,” said Wybren van Haga.
In particular, the employment opportunities for the region and the strong, historic ties that exist between Assen and Defense are considered by most parties to be ‘of great value’. “But if jobs disappear, employment will have to come back in any case,” say parliamentary groups for whom retaining Defense is not a solution.
At the end of this afternoon, the standing parliamentary committee for Defense in The Hague will discuss the proposed austerity operation by State Secretary Christophe van der Maat (VVD). He wants to get rid of buildings, because there are buildings that have quite a few things wrong with them. The outdated Defense complex in the city also needs to be completely made more sustainable, which, according to Van der Maat, costs a lot of money.
The Secretary of State’s mission is to concentrate Defense units on larger and more modern sites and to dispose of expensive and outdated sites. The monumental barracks on the Vaart in Assen, with 1050 soldiers and a school battalion of 500 men, should therefore be closed. The more than a thousand soldiers will then have to move to Havelte. There is strong protest against this from Assen.
For the VVD, the party of the State Secretary of Defence, ‘all options are still on the table’, says defense spokesman Peter Valstar. “We are not saying that the barracks should not be closed. But if the soldiers leave, high-quality employment must be returned.”
Valstar points to ‘the incredibly big task’ that Defense faces with all its real estate’. “And the Defense organization must be given the space to do this,” says the VVD member. “That’s why I’m not going to say, ‘Defense must do this, or must that’. Sixty percent of 10,000 buildings in more than 350 locations have more than two defects. And another 40 percent of the real estate has to be divested, in order to to make a real estate portfolio healthy again. You can’t solve that with money alone. Assen is part of the total real estate map with holes in it.”
According to Valstar, the State Secretary must take local and regional circumstances into account. “In Assen you are already losing a lot of jobs at NAM due to the stopping of gas extraction in Groningen. That is why the various ministries must continue to discuss with local and regional authorities how jobs can be returned.”
But for the VVD it is no must that the JWF barracks retain a military function. “I am not saying that Defense should stay. For us it is not Defense and other government services, but Defense and/or other government services. But if you remove Defense from there, then as a national government you have to do something in return for employment.”
According to Valstar, Defense must propose alternatives for this, together with other ministries. “As the VVD, we are not saying that Defense should do this, or should do that, the governments should come to an agreement,” said Peter Valstar.