More than half of the municipalities appear to have housed fewer refugees on 1 February than they are required by law. According to provinces, the shortage of social rental housing and insufficiently registered refugees are the main reasons why municipalities do not include enough people.
From figures from the central government it appears that on 1 February 2020, 180 municipalities had a backlog from 2019 when housing refugees. The province has the task of checking whether municipalities accommodate enough refugees. NU.nl therefore asked the provinces why there are still many municipalities behind.
How is it determined how many refugees a municipality has to accommodate?
- Every six months the central government determines how many refugees municipalities have to accommodate. This is determined on the basis of the expected number of refugees with a residence permit and the number of residents of the municipality. Small municipalities do not have to accommodate as many refugees as large ones.
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Social rental housing and insufficient registrations
NU.nl asked about the placement of refugees in the past four years. At the time of publication, we only received no response from the province of Friesland.
Seven of the eleven provinces who responded said the shortage on the housing market and the shortage of social rental housing are the main reasons why municipalities sometimes do not house enough refugees.
The majority of the provinces also write that it is sometimes impossible for municipalities to comply with the legal requirement because they do not receive enough refugees with a residence permit from the Central Agency for Asylum Seekers (COA).
The province of Drenthe writes that since the beginning of 2019, the COA has not been able to refer enough refugees with a residence permit to municipalities, due to backlogs with the authorities that assess whether someone will receive a residence permit.
Municipalities with large disadvantages are assigned more refugees
The COA disputes the idea that there are generally fewer refugees with a residence permit than the law requires municipalities to take. A COA spokesperson said that it was decided in 2018 to let municipalities that are lagging far behind the housing of refugees accommodate more refugees, so that they can catch up. According to COA, this also meant that some other municipalities received fewer refugees.
The COA says it is trying to ensure that every municipality receives enough refugees to comply with the law. “And if a municipality tells us that it has a property available, we will ensure that a refugee is placed in it, even if that person was actually linked to another municipality. There are no homes vacant because there are no refugees.”
Provinces rarely warn
The COA also recognizes that there is a shortage of social rental housing and that refugees with a residence permit may therefore have to wait a long time before they can be placed in a municipality.
If a municipality accommodates too few people for a longer period of time, the province can warn and eventually even intervene. Announced on February 12 North Holland that if the municipality of Amsterdam does not quickly accommodate more refugees, the province ensures that status holders can be placed in Amsterdam at the municipality’s expense.
Such warnings are rare. This was the first time that Noord-Holland handed out such a warning and other provinces write that they have either never issued a warning, or that they mainly issued warnings in 2016 and 2017, when municipalities had to accommodate more refugees than they do now.
Why don’t provinces warn?
According to the provinces, the most important reasons for not warning while a municipality does not have enough refugees are that the backlog cannot be blamed, or that municipalities have resolved the deficit in a relatively short period of time. Of the provinces that have responded, only Groningen itself has intervened in a municipality, this was in 2016
The number of municipalities that do not meet the legal requirement according to the figures is decreasing. There were forty fewer at the beginning of this year than one year previously. Nearly six thousand refugees with a residence permit are currently waiting for a home. According to the COA this number is stable.
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