Clause 14 - Establishment of centres
Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Bill
10:45 am
Mr Neil Gerrard (Walthamstow, Labour)
In the light of such experiences, we should be wary about providing centres of that size.
Another consequence of large centres was pointed out to me recently by the chief executive of the Refugee Council. He referred to his previous experience of working with homeless people and explained that the larger the centre, the harder it is to manage. If we are talking about accommodation rather than detention centres, the bigger the centre, the more difficult it will be to create an open regime with a reasonably relaxed atmosphere.
We are supposed to be trialing these centres. It is pretty obvious that it is hard to find sites where local people and the local authorities will accept 750 people. If at the end of the trial we decide that accommodation centres have worked, how many centres of 750 would we need to accommodate a larger proportion of asylum seekers? If we had four they would provide 3,000 places. If they were used twice a year they could accommodate 6,000 people. If we manage to get the decision-making process speeded up and each place is used three times a year, which is unlikely, 9,000 people would go through those four centres.
I suspect that that is an exaggeration of the numbers we would get through. What do we do in three or four years' time? Will we have 10, 20, 30 centres of that size? If so, where will they be located and how will suitable sites be found? Realistically, there will be less chance of
finding suitable sites for large accommodation centres outside urban areas than for smaller centres in urban or semi-urban areas. Simple, practical problems will inevitably flow from the decision to have large centres.