CONFIDENTIAL
HOME OFFICE
Queen Anne's Gate, LONDON, SW1H 9AT
Direct line: 01-213 6309 Switchboard: 01-213 3000
23 May 1979
Hkk 243/1
RECEIVED
1762
TRY NO. 51
31 MAY 1079
DESK OFFICER
INDEX
Our reference: FIN/74 150/21/3 Your reference:
C D Butler Esq
HM Treasury
1 Parliament Street
SW1P 3AG
INDO-CHINESE REFUGEES
LING
MV SIBONGA
PA
Actin.. man
лю
jm.5
As you know, our Minister of State has received a formal request from the Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (a copy of which
I sent to you in the course of this morning) to accept a substantial proportion of the 900 shipwrecked Vietnamese refugees who have been picked up by the MV Sibonga.
You should also mow that we have now heard that another British ship, the MV Roach Bank, has apparently picked up another 293 refugees and is en route to Taiwan where it is expected to arrive on 25 May.
No
We have yet to submit advice to our Ministers on either of these groups. decision to accept them has yet been taken and we think that the Home Secretary will wish to consider the matter carefully and possibly to consult his colleagues. We shall clearly need to advise Ministers very quickly, however, on whether it would be possible to meet the extra cost of receiving and resettling these refugees should the Government wish to do so.
For the purpose of dealing with this most recent group of refugees, should they be accepted, we would propose to continue to use the services of the voluntary refugee organisations whose capacity to expand their operations and to prepare for such a large influx will effectively determine the speed at which we would be able to accept them. In practice, there could no question of the bulk of the 900 being moved from Hong Kong to the United Kingdom within the month suggested by the Governor and our present thinking is that the voluntary bodies would need some three months to make plans and to render operational the extra reception accommodation which will be needed. We think it almost certain that numbers of this magnitude, even if their arrival were phased over two or three months, would require the opening of one or two camps.
When we last discussed these matters at a meeting in the Treasury on 4 January 1979
(in connection with the proposal to accept 1,500 Indo-Chinese refugees in addition to the boat people) we said that the present BCAR estimate of the marginal cost of coping with refugees was £500 a head over 18 months, ie about £350 per head per year. On that basis, the cost of coping with 900 refugees from the Sibonga would cost about £315,000 ina full year. If we add to that the cost of accepting the 293 from the MV Roach Bank, the total cost in a full year would be of the order of £418,000 a year. That estimate would clearly need to be adjusted to take account of inflation.
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CONFIDENTIAL