79. Dispersal has meant that no local authority has taken enough Vietnamese to warrant making special provision to assist them. Even in London, where the density of Vietnamese is probably greatest, there are no more than 300 Vietnamese refugees to any one borough. As a result, when local authority social services departments are faced with problems concerning individual Vietnamese, they most often refer the cases to local voluntary agency resettlement staff. A number of schemes have been suggested whereby local authorities might 'buy in' to the agencies' pool of experienced staff, form consortia to employ individual Vietnamese-speaking staff or take on Vietnamese workers as trainee social or community workers. The agencies have made specific approaches for funding to local authorities where there are reasonable numbers of Vietnamese but the response has so far been limited and slow. Of the authorities which have Vietnamese refugees in their area only a tiny number have enough refugees, and/or enough awareness of the problem, to be ready to examine such ideas seriously, particularly at a time of ever-increasing pressure on social services departments and cutbacks in their spending. For the great majority of authorities the problem is one of insignificant proportion in terms of numbers, brought about in any case by a decision of Central Government to offer 11,500 quota places.
Since no money
has been made available to the authorities themselves, most seem to suppose that any problems relating to the programme will continue to be dealt with by the agencies which have received the Government funding.
80. We have considered whether the Vietnamese community might be in a position to provide adequate support services to its own members from within.
We quote from the Home Office research report which shows that this hope is totally unrealistic:-
"A second argument is that the need for welfare services in resettlement is less today than at the start of the programme due to the community support' offered by the developing Vietnamese ethnic enclaves. While this might have been the case if resettlement had produced large clusters of refugees it is not a logical consequence of the policy of dispersal. The Vietnamese have been resettled in relatively small groups and it is unrealistic to expect such groupings to create close relationships between refugee families that may well be separated by ethnicity, class background, religion or some other social factors. It is unlikely that close relations will develop simply because they have been housed near each other. Social barriers which constrained interaction in Vietnam are no less significant amongst the refugees settled in the United Kingdom. Mere propinquity does not, therefore, ensure 'community support' for newly resettled refugees who will continue to require the assistance of support group volunteers and agency staff (without whom the support groups may well disappear) during the first years of their resettlement period.
!!
81. In addition it cannot be stressed too much that the Vietnamese refugees who have come to the UK are by and large greatly disadvantaged in comparison with those accepted by other resettlement countries. Whereas almost all those accepted by the United States were from South Vietnam and had had contact with Western languages and ways of life, and many were from professional and managerial backgrounds, this is not so in the UK. It is worth drawing together some of the statistics already given in the report to describe the typical Vietnamese in the UK. The refugee is from North Vietnam (62%) of
19.