Why Glasgow should get more money to accommodate asylum seekers

For more than 20 years, Glasgow has been Scotland’s only ‘dispersal city’ for people seeking asylum. Furthermore, it has become home to considerably more refugees than any other council area in the UK. As of September, Scotland’s largest city was hosting 4,075 people, compared to 2,719 in Hillingdon, 2,612 in Liverpool and 2,476 in Birmingham.

In a letter to the Home Office, Glasgow council leader Susan Aitken says, justifiably, that the city “continues to be proud of the role that we have played as an asylum dispersal city”. Amid considerable hostility towards asylum seekers – and not just south of the Border – Glasgow has become a beacon of hope.

However, as Aitken points out, after people are granted asylum, they are required to leave Home Office accommodation and some then become homeless. This, she suggests, is a significant reason why Glasgow council has overspent its budget for homelessness by £26.5 million.

A protest in 2023 outside a hotel housing refugees in Erskine (Picture: Jeff J Mitchell) | Getty Images

“... current pressures facing the asylum system are unlike any that we have ever faced before... Without a remedy, I am very concerned that we could also see increased levels of community tension, and a breakdown of the public support that exists in Glasgow for this programme,” Aitken writes.

She hopes to persuade the Home Office that Glasgow should be given extra funding to meet the extra costs it is facing. If her case stands up to scrutiny, this is not unreasonable. Processing asylum seekers is a national responsibility and councils which go the extra mile to try to help should not be financially penalised for doing so.

For the UK to be a good citizen in the global village, it needs to take in its fair share of people fleeing war and other horrors that afflict the world. To throw up walls and insist other countries’ problems are nothing to do with us is to abandon our moral responsibilities.

If places like Glasgow, which have become havens for human beings who have been shamefully demonised in recent years, begin to turn against them, the problems for the government in fulfilling that duty will multiply.