b.
CONFIDENTIAL
the competition for the limited private rented accommodation remaining drives rents up to impossibly high levels, and with them, the bill for Housing
Benefit.
2. In Our new housing policies, we are putting mechanisms in place to begin to restore some equilibrium in housing markets,
but it will be many years before the policies have their full
effect. Meanwhile, because new refugee populations tend to cluster around existing communities of the same nationality or religion, and usually near areas where there are low skill
employment opportunities, even a small influx of refugees would aggravate the problem. This has happened with the recent inflow of Kurds from Turkey, who have concentrated overwhelmingly in a small area of London, where the underlying imbalance in housing supply and demand is at its worst.
Present policies and their limitations
3.
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Our present policies do not place any obstacles in the way
of refugees who, once accepted, are as free to move about the
country as any other citizen. We try to give them help to settle
when they first arrive, and in the case of the present planned,
intake of Vietnamese, we are taking steps to ensure that they
are first housed away from the South East
in areas where
Vietn mese communities already exist. We already have informal
offers from local authorities throughout Great Britain to
accommodate them. To deter secondary migration, however, it will be essential to provide, in addition to housing, a local support
structure to encourage local affiliations. Such a structure must
include English language tuition, basic skill training, realistic
employment prospects and accessible (Vietnamese speaking) social
CONFIDENTIAL (2)
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