Miss J M Forsyth HM Treasury Parliament Street LONDON
deer hiss Forsyth,
HOME OFFICE
QUEEN ANNE'S GATE
LONDON SWIH 9AT
1573B
15 August 1979
VIETNAMESE REFUGEES
A
CO-ORDINATION AND PLANNING ARRANGEMENTS
As we agreed, In David Butler's absence on leave, I am writing to you direct to ask your help in connection with the probable need to strengthen the existing arrangements for co-ordinating and planning the reception and resettlement of the further 10,000 Vietnamese refugees the government have undertaken to admit to the UK. Before considering the problems that are likely to need to be solved, I think it may be helpful to rehearse something of the existing arrangements and the history of the exercise so far.
2. The policy is that the bulk of the refugees' needs should be handled by the ordinary statutory authorities and services and that extra provision should be made only for anv additional special reception arrangements that may be needed. The appropriate body for making such arrangements is the British Council for Aid to Refugees and the Home Office makes a grant towards that Council's costs. The Council itself is both a co-ordinating and operational body. It acts as the umbrella for various other refugee organisations. It also runs its own reception arrangements. When the Well Park refugees arrived last October they were handled by BCAR. When the previous administration undertook to admit an additional 1,500 refugees, the intention was that these should also be handled by BCAR and that their arrival should be phased over a period of about a year (which BCAR advised would give them time to make the appropriate reception arrangements). This programme was thrown out of gear by the rescues by the Sibonga and the Roachbank. When we first had news of these we contemplated a phased arrival, the 1,500 programme being deferred to allow for this. In the event, however, various pressures led to the Sibonga and Roachbank groups being admitted more or less in a single exercise. Part of the pressures came from Hong Kong, the other pressures came from the voluntary sector itself, the Ockenden Venture and Save the Children organisations coming forward in parallel with BCAR offering reception accommodation which, with RAF Sopley, would accommodate the whole of the group. The rapidly worsening situation which led to the Geneva Conference in July forced us to consider what additional numbers the UK might accommodate. With the reception accommodation in use after the Sibonga and Roachbank exercise, and assuming an average stay in reception of six months, we calculated that the accommodation could cater for between 3 and 4,000 a year. This meant that there should be no particular problem in adritting 10,000 refugees over a period of three years. period was never in fact made public.
The three year Rumours of it in the press led the
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