Moved to act

How two faded British destinations have taken to refugee resettlement

At the back of a sprawling set of garden allotments in Eastbourne, on England’s south coast, Mahmoud Al-Halabi gently pulls up two carrots for his children and gestures to a thick curtain of green vines. Parting the leaves, he reveals several large bottle gourds, quite unlike anything growing in his neighbors’ plots.

“In Syria summer is longer, and these grow even bigger,” the 33-year-old says, waving admiration aside. The beans, peppers, and kusa squash he’s growing are other staples from that faraway climate. It’s been eight years since Al-Halabi and his family left their home in a pummelled suburb of Damascus, fleeing the conflict devastating their country.

Their route to this seaside resort town took many years, and yet was relatively direct. Along with hundreds of thousands of other Syrian refugees, they first went to Jordan, where Al-Halabi worked three jobs a day to keep his family fed and housed. Then in late 2018 they received a rare lifeline: entry to the UK under a government programme to resettle the “most at risk” refugees in the Middle East displaced by the Syrian conflict. It placed them in Eastbourne with refugee status and resources for their immediate needs.

This programme, the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme (VPRS), has been a core part of the UK government’s refugee policy for the past five years. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the government to pause the programme in March 2020, a few hundred shy of its target of resettling 20,000 people between 2015-2020. At the end of 2020 the programme began to resume and is intended to run until this original commitment is met. But despite growing concerns over the impact of delays on services, the government has yet to confirm when a planned replacement will follow.

A lot rides on the programme, deemed the “gold standard” of UK resettlement schemes in a 2017 report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). For refugees, it has offered one of the only safe routes to Britain, as well as designated support on arrival. For the government, it has been used as a counter to criticism of an antagonistic approach to asylum seekers crossing the English Channel. Across the world, resettlement serves fewer than 1% of refugees, but as Europe grapples with fatal sea crossings, xenophobic politics, and overcrowded asylum facilities, the successes and shortcomings of the VPRS hold lessons for the wider region’s immigration policies.

Since 2014 the UK’s different schemes have resettled over 25,000 people, more than any other European country between 2016 and 2019, though the almost 20,000 resettled under the VPRS is a small fraction of the more than 6.6 million Syrian refugees (close to 7 million more have been internally displaced in Syria).

Other countries accept more people via asylum processes: for the past five years the annual number of asylum claims in the UK has ranged between 26,000-37,000 (with an average grant rate at initial decision of about 40%), compared to an average of over 100,000 in France and over 200,000 in Germany. But the UK is harder to get to, and the VPRS has provided a supportive route for refugees in need – until now. The uncertainty over the resettlement programme’s future has left families who were promised resettlement in limbo and put councils under strain, jeopardizing the services built over the past five years.

Eastbourne: The sunshine coast welcomes you

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nunc eu sapien vel nisi rhoncus hendrerit. Donec posuere odio purus, quis sagittis lacus consectetur ut. Praesent sed imperdiet ligula. Pellentesque sodales ante sapien, id molestie sapien pellentesque dapibus. In ultrices scelerisque sagittis. Mauris luctus elit ac justo tincidunt laoreet. Nam feugiat non mauris at venenatis. Ut quis lectus arcu. Donec sodales lectus sed lectus varius tincidunt. Nunc sodales in enim nec consequat. Donec dapibus tempus augue, et tristique velit mollis vitae. Aliquam mollis erat vitae augue dignissim, vitae tristique ex porta. Proin metus enim, vestibulum ac sapien ut, placerat pretium est. Nunc magna neque, lacinia quis tincidunt ac, varius ac nibh. Nulla facilisi. Nulla consequat sit amet nulla eu iaculis.Praesent lectus est, pulvinar non cursus non, tincidunt id velit. Ut dictum arcu a fermentum finibus. Curabitur volutpat mollis enim, nec lobortis ipsum efficitur nec. Vestibulum id fermentum libero. Donec ac libero elit. Nulla mollis, erat in maximus pretium, neque felis scelerisque sem, ac fermentum lectus mi vel magna. Quisque eget eros nec leo viverra faucibus volutpat vulputate eros. Suspendisse ut lacus et purus pharetra dignissim. Integer porta metus quis nulla mollis, sed facilisis ligula facilisis. Maecenas mollis varius posuere.

Moved to act

How two faded British destinations have taken to refugee resettlement

Eastbourne: The sunshine coast welcomes you

Subhead

Our supporters for this project