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.
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.
Networx tries to offset these gaps with provisions fundamental to general wellbeing. In Al-Halabi’s case that was the first year’s rent for the garden plot; for a man with a spine injury, Networx paid for an adjustable bed. The group also pairs families with volunteer ‘befrienders’, who might help with practicing English or managing the school run, and include physiotherapists, teachers and others whose experiences are useful for the project.
The group’s work is driven by a Christian ethos, fitting into a long global history of faith communities helping people affected by displacement, according to Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, a professor of migration and refugee studies. Their importance in Britain has increased over the last decade. “With centrally provided welfare provision having been eroded over time in the UK, we see faith groups filling key gaps, by providing assistance and sanctuary in different ways,” said Fiddian-Qasmiyeh.
Networx’s links to churches have given it facilities for events and a café space, a congregation to help source housing, as well as access to funding from Christian charities.
While faith clearly guides Reid, it features little in conversation. Instead, she talks about language acquisition difficulties for the town’s new arrivals. She considers the programme’s requirement of eight hours of English language instruction per week in the first year to be insufficient. For each child, £4,500 is allocated to support learning English in the first year, but the usage varies hugely. She said one school “did it really well, by hiring an Arabic-speaking assistant to be with the child, dividing hours across the year so she’d be there often,” whereas another school “didn’t even know [the student] was a Syrian refugee, and he left last summer with nothing.”
UNHCR reported similar challenges among adults. The agency recommended increasing the number of English teaching hours available, particularly for two low participation groups: women with young children and young people aged 18-24.
Once known to Glaswegians as part of the “Costa Clyde”, the Scottish Isle of Bute shares with Eastbourne the legacy of a fabled but faded domestic holiday resort. Yet Bute’s remoteness, northern climate, and smaller population of roughly 6,000 made it an unusual location for the resettlement of Syrian refugees – and the adjustments all the more stark.
“For the first six months, I studied English at home for five hours every day,” recalled Mounzer Darsani at his Orient Salon barbershop in Rothesay, on the eastern edge of Bute. Darsani ran a barbershop in Damascus before imprisonment and torture by the government forced him to flee to Lebanon with his wife and two children. They were among the first of 34 families so far to be resettled on this small island two hours west of Glasgow.
The decision to bring refugees to this island community came when the regional Argyll and Bute council determined in September 2015 that of the mainland areas and 23 islands it administers, Bute “best met the criteria drawn up to support refugee families having available property, capacity in schools and ability to access health care.”
Yet the reality was not so straightforward – much of the housing consisted of one-bedroom flats unsuitable for families, and health needs beyond primary care required a visit to the mainland. The surplus of housing also betrayed the island’s economic decline since the 1960s, with part of Rothesay counted among the top 10% “most deprived” places in Scotland today. This meant finding employment might be challenging for the new arrivals, but many locals hoped an infusion of young families would be a boon to the area.
“We knew all of them would need homes, and there was also the sense that people with professional background and business acumen would revitalise the community,” said Owen Jones, a Rothesay minister involved in the programme. Residents largely embraced the prospect, quickly establishing a welcome committee with over a hundred volunteers. They collected and sorted clothes, toys, and essential items for distribution.
There was a simultaneous surge in attendance at community council meetings by both residents in favour and against the programme.
“I can understand some of the locals living nearby being less than enamoured, especially when it was suggested not to have Christmas decorations because of the possibility of causing offence,” said Jean Moffat, a Bute councillor. “But the attitude of the locals and behaviour of the Syrians meant they were soon welcomed into the community.”
Helping out on the job was the obvious thing to do for Michael, one of the island’s bus drivers and himself a relative newcomer from Wales via London, which he said made him “used to people not knowing” an unfamiliar setting. He would count out the different coins for his new passengers, and make sure they knew when they had reached their stop.
Others initiated efforts of their own. When the first group of families arrived in the winter of 2015, they had no public space to gather, so the Catholic priest Michael Hutson offered a vacant church hall for their use. Though draughty, it provided a place for meetings and accessing services, as well as a possible prayer space.
As in Eastbourne, the church response has been significant. Hutson spearheaded an ecumenical collaboration to support the resettled families. Like Reid, he championed general wellbeing, and his church decided to give bicycles to the children in the first two waves of arrivals. “It’s a human right for kids to bike,” he said.
But such unilateral decisions that could be seen to privilege newcomers also caused friction. There were some “vociferous” naysayers at the beginning. Hutson recalled one resident complaining about being unable to drive without encountering four boys riding bikes in the street, at a time when he said there were not even four Syrian boys with bikes on the island.
For the group of volunteers new to working with refugees, certain growing pains emerged. One volunteer, Alison Clark, described it as a “big learning curve for the statutory agencies and for the volunteers,” even in realizing the diversity of backgrounds and language levels among the families. As time went on, a challenge arose in navigating the roles of volunteer, teacher, and friend – boundaries that could easily blur and were difficult to communicate.
The council emphazised creating paths to employment through volunteering, English competency, and training, and in time some of the refugees found work at the Mount Stuart estate and gardens, and at the vegan cheese factory that is one of the largest employers on the island. One woman started working as a carer for a local resident.
Yet the most visible manifestations are the businesses started by Syrians in Rothesay, none more so than Helmi’s Patisserie. The pastel pink exterior of Helmi’s, as it is affectionately known, makes it unmissable on the seafront of Victorian terraced housing. Its proprietor is the invariably smiling Bashar Helmi, who seems to be constantly shuttling between kitchens and supply stores. His son Momen offers customers a warm greeting in an English cadenced by a childhood in Syria and adolescence in Scotland. The mixture of dishes on the café’s chalkboard menu befits the same marriage of origin and setting: eclairs and cakes, halloumi wraps and lentil soup, and a mezze feast undersold as the “Syrian breakfast platter.”
The café’s huge popularity has propelled the opening of a new branch on the edge of Glasgow. But when UK chancellor Rishi Sunak chose Helmi’s on a visit to the island in August 2020 to promote the government’s “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme to aid food businesses during the coronavirus pandemic, a number of people grumbled on the island’s Facebook group – both that Helmi’s is often visited, and that the Conservative politician was exploiting the café’s success for his own ends.
“People don’t resent the success of the business, but the publicity it attracts, because others have been around for a long time and no-one notices them,” said summer resident Ian Jack. “It’s a difficult place to make a living in.”
Other Syrian businesses have not done so well. Two takeaway restaurants and a food truck that started with local support have not opened for months. The pandemic hasn’t helped, but the barber Darsani suggested there’s just a limited market. People are curious about Syrian food, but do not want to eat it every week. Similarly, the island offers his barbershop a steady number of customers but no increase, and he has dreams of growth.
The loyalty of his customers and those at Helmi’s Patisserie might reflect the businesses’ high quality of service as well as a kind of ethical consumerism. “A slight moral glow attends you if you go in there. You think you’re doing good here, buying this stuff from someone who had to leave their homeland because life was unsupportable,” said Jack about Helmi’s.
Still, the Bute resettlement initiative has not been wholly successful. Of the 34 families resettled on Bute, 20 have subsequently moved to Glasgow, Liverpool, or elsewhere for familial links or urban amenities. Even Darsani now commutes from the mainland (where he’s opened a second barbershop) to run his Rothesay salon two days a week, saying the lack of restaurants serving halal food, mosques, and Arab shops contributed to his reason to leave.
Island life is not for everyone, and many of the families have come from cities – despite the Home Office’s aim not to resettle families from urban areas to remote settings. Nor is the challenge unique to Bute: UNHCR found that “some of the refugees resettled in small towns and rural areas of the UK found the process more complicated than for those in major cosmopolitan cities.”
Five years since the first families arrived, the island is more settled. While over half of the families have left, others seem likely to stay, just as Bute’s larger population continues to ebb and flow.
