Paul Monaghan – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Paul Monaghan on 2015-11-05.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many refugee families she expects to be relocated to Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross constituency; where such families will be housed; and what steps the Government is taking to ensure that such families have access to education for their children.

James Brokenshire

With regard to the resettlement of 20,000 Syrians that the Prime Minister announced on 7 September, this is a voluntary scheme whereby local authorities sign up to accept refugees on a voluntary basis and there is no expectation on any particular local authority.

We are working closely with those local authorities that have indicated they wish to be involved as well as with the Local Government Association and with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities. We do not disclose the details of where refugees are resettled upon their arrival in the UK under the Government resettlement schemes as this may undermine the privacy and recovery of this vulnerable group of people.

The Home Office alongside other departments and the Local Government Association and the Convention of Scottish Authorities will work with individual local authorities who are volunteering to take Syrian refugees to secure appropriate accommodation.

The Government has committed to investing £7 billion on new school places over the next six years, and in the last Parliament funding for school places doubled to £5 billion to create 445,000 additional places. Local Authorities are allocated funding for school places based on their own local data on school capacity and pupil forecasts, in which they take account of factors including rising birth rates, housing development, trends in internal migration and migration to England from elsewhere in the United Kingdom and from overseas. We continue to work with Local Authorities to make sure that every child has a school place.