Home Secretary targeting ‘fair spread’ of asylum accommodation

Rob Freeman, Press Association

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said she wants a “fair spread” of accommodation to house asylum seekers.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham said last week the country “cannot have a situation where it’s only the poorest communities in the country” housing asylum seekers.

Ms Mahmood said she is targeting a mixed model of accommodation utilising military sites, former student apartments, bedsits and homes of multiple occupancy.

She told The Times: “You’ve got to get a fair spread and what we are doing with the new model of asylum accommodation and the future of asylum accommodation is think carefully about how you have a fair spread that doesn’t end up being in one community or one type of community.

“In a way it doesn’t really matter whether you’re in an affluent part of the country or in a more deprived constituency like mine.

“A change in the population, the demographic and in the housing in which asylum seekers are often housed and the transient nature of that population does have an impact on communities.”

The Home Secretary said she understood the concerns of people living near asylum accommodation, with experience in her Birmingham Ladywood constituency.

“I get it, I understand that these are things that worry people and I get where they’re coming from,” she said.

“The people in better off parts of the country, really the issues aren’t that different to people who I represent in my patch.”

Plans to house more than 1,000 asylum seekers at an ex-military base in the village of Piddington in Oxfordshire were met with protests and labelled “illogical” in terms of security and cost by local councillor Mike Nixon.

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