In Bristol, a house awaits. There is food in the cupboards. Beds are made up with crisp blue linen. A cheery red hot water bottle has been placed on each duvet.
This is a home for a family about to arrive on the official Home Office sponsored Syrian vulnerable persons resettlement programme: the Labour-controlled city council has taken in 35 Syrians to date, and is now preparing for more.
But getting to this point has not been an easy journey, as Loubaba Mamluk, a research epidemiologist at Bristol university who co-chairs the local Citizens UK campaign group explains. “It was 18 months ago that a small group of concerned people got together, and asked for a meeting with the council,” she recalls. Mamluk is Syrian, and was reeling from the devastation being wreaked on her country. She was not an expert in refugee resettlement, and nor were any of the rest of the group.
Nor, as it turned out, was Bristol city council. During the meeting with officials – “it was six of us and three of them, and we were describing the problem, and there was a bit of emotion going on” she recalls – it became evident to Mamluk that the feeling from the council side was more about asking advice than giving it. “It was very frustrating” she says. “We were not the council - we felt they should be telling us!”
There was no doubt as to the council’s desire to help, Mamluk says. But it may be telling that confusion about how to approach the task was the initial reaction even in one of the UK’s largest and most diverse cities. The expansion of the government’s existing vulnerable persons resettlement scheme to take another 20,000 Syrian refugees over five years had not yet been announced, and the funding mechanism for taking people in was far from clear, remembers Mike Hennessey, Bristol’s director of adult social care, who has led on this project from the start. Traumatised refugees cannot simply be flown here and dropped anywhere. “We knew that to create any basis for a productive life, people needed somewhere to live. And housing is in very short supply in Bristol,” Hennessey explains.
He also knew that education, health and therapeutic support from organisations such as The Haven would need to be brought on board.
The political challenges were considerable. This may be why four Conservative councils now taking Syrian refugees have either refused to speak to the Guardian or failed to reply to repeated interview requests.
Housing is a hot potato across the country: despite this, it is interesting to note that, just north of Bristol, LibDem-controlled Cheltenham has opted to make 100 social housing homes available to Syrian refugees. The town is now home to 19 Syrians, and more houses are on offer. Cheltenham’s cabinet member for housing Peter Jeffries acknowledges the potential for criticism, but says these are people “who have nothing other than the clothes they stand up in, refugees, displaced by wars ... I think the number we are taking is pitiful. We should be doing more, and it should be speeded up.”
In Bristol, a city where there are already 8,000 people on the housing register, the decision was made that social housing would not be used, so the Citizens UK group mobilised contacts in the media to make a plea to private landlords. After each appeal, offers of help flooded in: managing the public response and the project overall has required the equivalent of one salaried post.
Hennessey has also been challenged by organisations already working with refugees: “One person said to me, ‘we’re supporting 400 people and you’ve got a whole working group supporting [at that time] eight.’” It was, he says, a fair point – the Syrian scheme has created a hierarchy of refugees: most in the city are scraping by with very little recourse to public funds at all.
Even on the resettlement programme, Home Office funding does not fully meet the cost of renting and furnishing a home. Individuals and businesses in Bristol have responded by donating many of the items needed. But the way the council has managed the money, so that the people who need more support get it and funding can be reallocated from those who are more self-sufficient more quickly, means, Hennessey says, that it is now nearly enough.
Perhaps because of the energetic outreach and communication by Mamluk and her fellow volunteers – the Citizens UK group have convened city-wide discussion forums, organised Welcome Refugees marches and rallies, and invited Bristolians to help with befriending, English lessons and practical tasks – Hennessey believes concerns about the political sensitivities have been allayed. “We have not experienced any adverse reaction. What we have had is neighbours who’ve made biscuits to welcome families, and people who’ve tidied their gardens. We’re not letting this disadvantage other people, we’re talking about people being contributors.”
The council and Citizens UK are soon to launch a campaign entitled 25 Homes, 100 Lives, which states the scale of the ambition for the city, and are working together on how best to provide for the 10 unaccompanied child refugees Bristol has initially committed to take; five immediately, five in the coming weeks. “I feel like the lesson of why Bristol is looked at as a successful resettlement programme, is that we did a successful co-production between so many organisations,” says Mamluk. “We looked at their fears and we looked at our ambitions, and tried to find a happy place, because that is the only way.”
More houses are set to be approved by Bristol council. And when the next families arrive, they will see that someone put food in the kitchen. Someone donated bed linen, and someone ironed it. Someone constructed 15 flat-pack beds instead of having a weekend. Someone carefully laid the red hot water bottles on the duvets, because they didn’t want children to feel cold as they fell asleep on their first night in this country. And so yes, this is a story about civic leadership. But it is also, importantly, a story about love.
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