TNAG-1540-FCO40-2104-Further-resettlement-of-Vietnamese-refugees-from-Hong-Kong-i-1986 — Page 95

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David Waddington QC MP Minister of State

Home Office

Queen Anne's Gate

41

BRITISH REFUGEE COUNCIL

Bondway House 3/9 Bondway London SW8 1SJ Telephone 01-582 6922 Cables BREFCON LONDON SW8

London SW1H 9AT

21 August 1986

I am writing to bring to your attention the serious concern of the Executive Council of the BRC regarding the SCORRI programme of family reunions for Indochinese refugees from Hong Kong and elsewhere in SE Asia. At its meeting on 19 August the Council heard a report of a meeting which had taken place at Lunar House on the previous day, at which it appears that some serious differences of interpretation emerged. These have resulted in a suspension of the process of calling forward families for reunion under the SCORRI programme, until the position can be clarified.

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The basic reference from which the BRC and its/mies have been working is the Government Reply to the Third Report from the Home Affairs Committee (Cmnd. 9626), and specifically paragraphs 6-8 in response to Recommendation 1. In the absence of any further written communication, the agencies have been pro- ceeding on the basis that all those who qualified under the criteria laid out in those paragraphs would be admitted and that it was the responsibility of the Home Office to establish whether individuals, whose names were submitted by the refugee agencies, met those criteria. This interpretation is borne out by the Minutes of a Meeting to discuss the SCORRI Programme held at Lunar House on 21 January 1986 at which representatives of the Home Office, FCO, Hong Kong Government Office and UNHCR were present, together with representa- tives of the BRC and its member agencies.

It has therefore come as a considerable shock to learn that the Home Office has in fact been working to a firm quota, apparently based on the estimates of those likely to qualify which were made by UNHCR in submissions to the SCORRI enquiry. The precise figure for this quota and whether or not certain groups are included (such as Lao and Cambodians in Thailand) has still not been made clear to us. If we had realised that such a firm upper limit existed, our response would have been to gather all applications together and submit them in a single comprehensive list to the Home Office, so that the Home Office could establish who should come, since the agencies are not in a position to make this kind of selection. In practice, and in full consultation with Home Office officials, inclusion on call forward lists has been dependent upon availability of housing for the individuals concerned. This procedure

Chairman Sir Arthur Peterson KCB MVO

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