Nov 27, 2023 at 9:16 PM Update: 5 hours ago
According to the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA), many municipalities do not arrange enough housing for status holders, despite agreements with the government. COA will contact those municipalities about this. This should ensure that status holders can still be accommodated quickly.
The COA has started approaching 45 municipalities that, according to the body, “are lagging behind the target and are still doing little or nothing about asylum reception”. In this way, COA wants to ensure that it can allow an additional five hundred status holders to “flow” into housing in those municipalities every week, the agency announced on Monday. That would mean a doubling of the normal outflow.
According to the COA, many status holders are now staying in asylum reception facilities for too long, while those places are so desperately needed. The situation at the reception location in Ter Apel has been “dire” for weeks and according to the COA, all other locations are also “overcrowded”.
There are currently about sixteen thousand status holders in asylum reception, says the COA. About ten thousand status holders have been waiting for housing for more than fourteen weeks. In some cases, the waiting period can be up to a year.
The COA says that the call round has already yielded results. The service expects that 129 status holders will be able to move to a new (temporary) location this week, while another 180 others are about to leave.
That is not always a home. Sometimes status holders first end up in a hotel, for example when a municipality has no housing available. Last summer, a cruise ship served as a temporary location in Rotterdam.
Receive notifications for articles about asylum reception in the Netherlands Stay informed with notifications25 Nov 2023 at 6:08 PM
The Hague is arranging emergency accommodation for asylum seekers in Ter Apel this weekend
Oct 30, 2023 at 10:08 p.m
All COA reception locations for asylum seekers are full
Image: ANP Photo
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2023-11-27 20:16:54
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