Across our cases, a first observation is to distinguish between the formal arrangement of national and local governance, before we can assess how this contains or is exceeded in the practice of housing provision. Building on an existing decentralized reception network, involving municipalities and third-sector organizations that have been in place since 1999, at the national level the Italian SPRAR system came into being in 2002 as an Italian Ministry of the Interior funded collaboration with National Association of Italian Municipalities (ANCI). In the SPRAR model, local authorities which choose to participate in the SPRAR network apply for short term (three-year) grants for projects to pursue ‘integrated reception’. This aspires to span education, employment, and cultural activities (Camera dei Deputati 2018). As one national level respondent it Italy outlines:
Since the National Asylum Plan, this system has been a bottom-up model. Some local administrations, which had already considered collaborating with the third sector associations, have promoted through ANCI the idea of a common front in the reception management. After a short phase of experimentation, the idea of a network, based in the provinces and municipalities, came forward [...] with a central office that would create common standards and maintain continuous dialogue with the individual territories across all projects.
This is the way in which the so-called integrated reception was conceived: facilitated by the national level Central Service, as a technical structure of the Ministry of the Interior, and allied to policy development in the territories. The multilevel dynamic is a key feature of what became known as ‘second reception’, as described by a local level another stakeholder as ‘working in collaboration with local and regional associations … to decide where to allocate the welcomed migrant according to their specific case and availability of places in territorial projects’.
According to the SPRAR Data Bank (2018), there are 35,881 people in the SPRAR system, of whom about 3500 thousand are unaccompanied minors. There are 877 active projects in Italy involving 754 local authorities, most of them municipalities. The number of migrants hosted within the SPRAR system is higher in the South than in the North and Center of Italy, and in the Locride area, a rural zone inland from the Jonic coast (where the reception of refugees has become an important part of local development). In those municipalities, the displaced migrant population is above 15% (ISTAT 2015). The Municipality of Cosenza has managed a SPRAR project since 2009. The main association responsible for implementing the services is La Kasbah cooperative, which provides services for asylum seekers and those recognised as requiring humanitarian protection, single men and families.
Recent political changes, however, have thrown the SPRAR model into uncertainty, and especially its capacity to move beyond the temporary ‘extraordinary reception centres’ (CAS). Until the 2019 ‘Salvini decree’, asylum seekers passed through reception centres and were assigned to a SPRAR project. Now, asylum seekers remain in a state of first reception, because only those in receipt of refugee status may leave CAS centres. The old SPRAR system has been renamed SIPROIMI (Protection System for beneficiaries of international protection and for unaccompanied foreign minors) and is aimed only at refugees who have already received a positive response to the asylum application (refugee status or subsidiary protection), or unaccompanied foreign minors. It is too early to anticipate the consequences of this, but it is widely recognised by local stakeholders that the reception system solution is inadequate compared with the accumulated good practice of the SPRAR approach (Algostino 2018).
The bottom up approach of Calabria is most obviously contrasted with more top down approaches in Malmö, though the latter has local imperatives too. The national level 2016 Settlement Law, for example, makes it mandatory in Sweden for all municipalities to receive refugees including organising their housing. In this fashion, the numbers of refugees received by the county and municipality is suggested nationally by the Swedish Migration Agency, but the decision on the form of reception is made by each county, and is related to the size of the population, prior experience of refugee reception and estimation of wok opportunities. It is important to note that most migrants settle themselves, without any state or local control, and that a large majority of the municipalities accepted organised settlement long before the Settlement Law. The main impact of the national level law has been a greater number of refugees in the municipalities with historically lower numbers of refugees. As civil servants at the national level Migration Board acknowledge:
Before 2016 the Employment Service made agreements with the municipalities. So they [municipalities] said “we can receive five” or “we can receive three” and so on. The number was never enough, so we never got them settled. There were people who remained in our [the Migration Board] systems for years and not out in the community.
Prior to this, the national government and local municipalities would negotiate the numbers of arrivals. The incentive for local government was economic, because they received funding for every settled refugee. More vulnerable refugees were deemed harder to settle due to the complexity of need. The central–local relationship after the 2016 law, however, is characterised more by directives than by negotiations. As another civil servant puts it: ‘Now there is nothing to negotiate. We cannot negotiate a law’.
The centralised nature of the law can be a misleading indicator of its impact, for it has been received very differently in each municipality, something reflected in housing standards, costs and the length and form of accommodation contract. So while it is true that ‘local integration policies must acknowledge that cities do not operate in a vacuum’ (de Graauw and Vermeulen, 2016, p. 990), and that ‘[n] ational policies have an impact on city policies’ (ibid), in this case the centralisation of power over settlement has resulted in a higher capacity but also greater differentiation in housing arrangements on the local level. Stakeholders in the County Administrative Board that coordinates and monitors accommodation settlement, acknowledge that many local housing solutions are short term, for ‘[m] ost [municipalities] have no sustainable and long-term solutions, perhaps just under half of them’ (interview). Indeed, municipalities tend to offer two or, like Malmö, four year temporary contracts, while others only provide solutions for one to 6 months. The key implication of the law is that it has required a shift of responsibility from a national to a local level, leaving concrete decisions and issues of equality of integration for local agencies to decide. It has moreover made visible a competition for resources. One of the consequences is that the needs of different categories of homelessness are set against each other, in some municipalities more than in others, in places where there is political contestation over housing of refugees.
This relatively straightforward landscape in Malmö becomes immensely more complicated when we shift our focus to Glasgow. Here responsibility for both the UK level Dispersal Scheme (which oversees the accommodation of asylum seekers) and the VPRS (which oversees the resettlement of Syrian refugees) is ultimately held by the Westminster Government through the Home Office. However, the schemes rely on noticeably divergent formalised arrangements between UK, devolved and local government for their implementation. The provision of Dispersal accommodation, once managed through a direct relationship between the Home Office and participating local authorities (in this case, Glasgow City Council) is also part of a profit seeking non-state actor partnership. Since 2012, contracts for accommodating Dispersed asylum seekers is have been awarded to private companies, which have subcontracted local private and Registered Social Landlords (RSLs) to provide and manage asylum seeker housing.Footnote 1 The privatisation of Dispersal contracts has not only removed the day-to-day provision and administration of housing for asylum seekers from local authorities, but also policy competences – i.e. the type and location of Dispersal housing, sizes of asylum seeking populations within locales, and housing standards – which would otherwise come under local urban planning remits. As a result, Glasgow City Council stakeholders observed, current iterations of Dispersal involve little policy consultation with local authorities, who feel removed from centralised decision-making processes. ‘I don’t know why they asked us for our input’, stated one stakeholder, ‘as if they were listening, because they weren’t’ (interview).
Though housing issues are devolved to the Scottish Government, matters relating to immigration are reserved to the UK Government. Here the multi-level settlement comes into tension, for because asylum is considered primarily an immigration matter the UK Government does not involve the Scottish Government in Dispersal housing issues. However, a notable exception to this precedent is the issue of asylum seeker homelessness and destitution, which can occur if an asylum application is rejected and a person is evicted from their accommodation in Glasgow. Recent enquiries have started to consider the extent to which destitute asylum seekers may fall under devolved policies; however, approaches are being made with caution. A devolved government stakeholder illustrates the dynamic:
And so we don’t get involved in their [Home Office] accommodation issues. But obviously if somebody’s gone through the system and hasn’t got a positive decision then the destitution sort of aspect of it will be [ … ] within the remit of Scottish Government but it throws up issues [ … ] But the position of Scottish Government can’t be that we fund directly provision for people with no recourse to public funds. It’s a reserved matter therefore we’ve got no locus or remit to actually act on it.
In Glasgow then, gaps in accommodation provision created by the formalised Dispersal governance infrastructure – such as the issue of asylum seeker destitution – have been highlighted and filled by robust third sector and grassroots networks. The more recently implemented VPRS has offered a slightly different governance dynamic to Dispersal. The Scheme is overseen and funded by the Home Office, but is run in agreement with participating local authorities, which have decision-making competences over housing type, location and suitability. This has enabled local authorities to mobilise their local expertise in housing provision and make it responsive to the needs of both refugees and the local area. In Scotland, this has resulted in a fairly localised approach to housing provision. For instance, where Glasgow City Council mobilises its existing homelessness infrastructure to house VPRS refugees, Aberdeenshire Council has utilised excess private accommodation, which has become available following a local economic downturn. Whilst the Scottish Government has ostensibly been more involved in responding to Syrian Resettlement, like Dispersal, the VPRS is primarily an agreement between local actors and central government.
In Nicosia, meanwhile, we find a further contrast of local-national enunciations, for when it comes to reception and integration policies, at the National level Cyprus seems to be the maintaining centralised asylum services. At the state level, the present national level Integration Task Force (UNHCR 2019) aims to ‘contribute to the development of a national integration strategy’. Its members include refugee associations, local authorities, and business community representatives. The initiative seeks to encourage 'open dialogue' with all actors involved and could prove crucial in the future development of a national strategy and action plan. At the moment then, national level integration policies in Cyprus are still centrally controlled by the government, and it is a centralised system that has engendered gaps in addressing the needs of asylum seekers and refugees. This is the point where local authorities and NGOs step in to play a crucial role in their integration. As one NGO representative describes:
The social welfare office that is supposed to be responsible for housing cannot meet the needs of asylum seekers. If someone calls the office and tells them, “I have nowhere to stay”, they cannot handle the case. Therefore, NGOs step in to find a solution.
Historically, Cyprus has had a relatively low number of asylum seekers due to its geographical isolation from mainland Europe, and its exclusion from the Schengen area. Consequently, the first asylum application was only registered in the late 1990s (Spaneas et al. 2018). The shift really occurred in the 2000s and more recently as other routes into Europe have become less accessible. As such between 2016 and 2018, most asylum seekers in Cyprus originated from the Syrian-Arab Republic, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Egypt.
The prevailing place of national level accommodation is offered in the Kofinou Reception Centre which is located in an isolated, rural area and is the only one on the island. At an earlier stage, the Asylum Service also established a temporary reception centre in the Kokkinotrimithia region with the help of EU funding. While Kofinou is meant for adults, a number of families with young children are also housed there, and are theoretically allowed to stay for a maximum of 6 months.Footnote 2 However, they are often forced to stay longer as private housing is difficult to secure. There are currently 5263 asylum seekers in Cyprus but the centre’s capacity is only 350 people, meaning that other than the 265 people hosted in Kofinou and the 130 unaccompanied children residing in special shelters, the vast majority of applicants live outside the centre. However, there are no statistics as to where and under what conditions asylum seekers live and other crucial data.
The centre is grouped into one area for families, and one gender-segregated area for individuals. The two family rooms have four beds each connected by a small hall and a private bathroom, while the individual’s area has two communal washrooms. The close proximity of these amenities has failed to consider gender based vulnerabilities, including the possibility of sexual harassment or assault. There are eight common spaces: four cooking units, a study room, a library, a children’s activity room, a clinic, and a playground.Footnote 3 The centre also provides two daily meals, breakfast supplies, free bus transportation, a social worker, a psychologist, and an interpreter (Spaneas et al. 2018). Residents of the centre have a card for free hospital care, while the children can attend school nearby. However, asylum seekers’ allowance is usually 2 to 3 months late and is insufficient to cover basics such as toiletries and school supplies (Spaneas et al. 2018). Recreational activities are organised sporadically by NGOs as the government doesn’t provide any funding outside the framework of their approved projects (UNHCR, Cyprus 2018).
State actors or non-state actors
A second feature that spans our respective cases, and which focuses on specific issues related to housing but in ways that distil our broader concerns with migration governance is the role of non-state actors. Amongst others, Ferguson and Gupta (2002, p. 989) discuss the ‘transfer of the operations of government’ toward ‘non-state entities’ in ways that are especially true of market dependent provision such as housing. One implication, as Blanco et al (2014, p. 3133) discuss, is how the role of non-state actors means that states can govern by ‘simultaneously retreating and advancing’ in so far as ‘withdrawal from direct service delivery [becomes] matched by its advance into regulation of service delivery by others’.
What has previously been empirically charted by others, including Esteves (2008), Campomori (2005) and Morén-Alegret (2002) focuses more on how NGOs, charities and third sectors organisations stand outside the state to provide ‘various services and offer political support for immigrants’ rights claims’ (Borkert and Caponio 2010, p. 19). This is a feature of our cases too but what is especially relevant is how these non-state providers function as almost actors in both the design, funding and implementation of their activities.
In Calabria, for example, third-sector organisations play a leading role in the identification of suitable accommodation, whether it comprises individual apartments or group accommodation, both small (about 15 people), medium (up to 30 people) and large (more than 30 people). This is especially the case in identifying “independent” accommodation solutions which, in Italy, are mainly managed by the private housing sector. However, the SPRAR project also tries to be involved in this, with the promotion, support and possible mediation between the beneficiary and the owner, during the negotiations on the rental contract (e.g., agreements with real estate agents, assistance in relations with the owners). Indeed, private apartments are mainly used, which represent 90 % of the available accommodations. In the apartments, refugees, asylum seekers and beneficiaries of subsidiary protection could stay for six months (extendable for a further 6 months) during which time they were supported by social workers to find an independent accommodation. A SPRAR operator explained:
I became a housing insertion assistant after being a beneficiary. Many times, I’m the first person to interact with the migrants who arrive in the SPRAR project. [...] We help to look for an accommodation even after the reception period but also we mediate with some small problems of cohabitation that may emerge within the community.
The direct transition from housing managed by the reception centre to independent accommodation can be difficult. Intermediate or temporary housing solutions are often used as a stepping stone (shared apartments with other guests, rented rooms, collective social housing). Unsurprisingly this varies according to needs and circumstance, as one stakeholder describes:
Generally, we have more problems in finding accommodation for families. It's easier for individuals. Our role is also to reassure people who rent an apartment about the regularity of payments and migrant assistance.
In Sweden, there has traditionally been greater resistance from civil society organisations to undertake what they see as the responsibility of the public sector. Nonetheless, a greater degree of participation from non-state groups in Swedish civil society is notable, specifically in the joint initiatives between municipal and civil society actors associated with the Refugees Welcome Housing project. This took inspiration from the German project Mensch Mensch Mensch, which matches refugees with landlords via a website and local meetings. The city of Malmö deemed this an example of best practise and started to collaborate more closely with the non-state partners involved, as described by the following respondent:
The city of Malmö realized that their housing solutions was insufficient. That they did not have enough, like in many other municipalities. And that they were looking for different possible solutions. And they thought our concept was interesting and contacted us. So we were approached by their manager in the labour market and social administration and asked if we were interested to work together.
Together, the city of Malmö, with a smaller municipality in the countryside and Refugees Welcome Housing applied for extra funding, which they successfully received. There is however a particular focus to this collaboration. This is that it tends to focus on those displaced migrants and refugees which the municipality has no formal responsibility for, such as families in need of more suitable housing, or asylum seekers and undocumented migrants. In many respects, this is an example of the multi-partner local network which pools skills to cooperate on cases that exceed the single capacity of one stakeholder. So even if there is formal cooperation with the city of Malmö, their activities are similar to other civil society organisations, who tend to prioritize the most vulnerable migrants that fall outside the formal responsibility of the public sector. From the perspective of the civil society there are, therefore, tensions in relation to what is acknowledged as part of a strong welfare state and a resistance to replace that responsibility with actions from the civil society (Osanami Törngren et al. 2018). Indeed, non-state actors more commonly assume a role through the option of residence in ‘own accommodation” where the person can choose a municipality to reside. The Swedish government had estimated that ten percent of asylum seekers would choose ‘own accommodation’ but in reality the figure is closer to 60 %. Many asylum seekers moved to the cities where family and friends resided, often to areas that are economically poorer. In 2018 the Swedish Government proposed that the own accommodation option would be reduced only to those who have the financial means and can prove access to housing (Employment Ministry 2018).
In Glasgow, the privatisation of Dispersal accommodation contracts has reshaped both vertical and horizontal governance dynamics. The model of governance under which the contracts operate has been described as ‘decentering’ (Darling 2016), a system in which central government retains decision-making power, whilst (1) outsourcing operational and political responsibility to local stakeholders without (2) providing a system through which local stakeholders can input into existing systems. As we note above, this model has led to frustration amongst both local government and third sector stakeholders, who feel that they have been left to resolve system issues without support, and in the knowledge that their solutions can be undercut by central government.
At the same time, the privatisation of Dispersal contracts resulted in a high degree of complexity to housing processes, involving multiple stakeholders from different sectors. This complexity has necessitated the development of relationships between private, public and third sectors, especially at points of transition. For instance, if an asylum application is successful, the new refugee (accommodated for now in private Dispersal accommodation) will be obliged to seek accommodation from local government. However, the transition between privatised Dispersal housing and social housing has been fraught, and has left new refugees vulnerable to homelessness, and placed both Glasgow City Council and third sector organisations under pressure. Other organisations have developed their own internal initiatives to combat the problems and gaps in provision left by Dispersal governance – for instance, Positive Action in Housing’s ‘Room for Refugees’ Scheme, a scheme similar to Malmö’s Refugees Welcome Housing Project, which asked volunteers to provide a spare room for asylum seekers facing homelessness.
This is in marked contrast to Cyprus where, local authorities lack a dedicated budget to implement integration activities in their daily work and are therefore restricted to working within the parameters provided by the national government. To get around this restriction, they participate in EU or national projects, implementing initiatives like language courses and other integration initiatives. As a municipality representative explains:
Municipalities sooner or later realised that they needed to find solutions on a local level and get over the legal restriction regarding access to funding. Therefore, they have begun to establish collaborations with NGOs or even started affiliated NGOs in order to access EU or Nordic funding to implement integration programmes … Unfortunately, as the available funding is on a project basis we always feel that the plug can be pulled at any moment!
As stated above, the funding is project based, therefore integration projects are often short-lived and unsustainable. Another municipality representative said:
The municipalities are designing projects from childcare services to language courses, but these are all projects with an expiration date, while the needs of refugees are ongoing.
NGOs are also paramount to the integration process, but funding remains a huge obstacle. The state essentially buys services from the third sector to implement key activities rather than encourage decentralised actions. The Local Council of Volunteerism of Kofinou (SKE) and social workers are in charge of the daily management. The SKE staff are not routinely trained on asylum-related issues or gender issues, and are not provided with psychological or other support, ultimately adversely affecting both the staff and the asylum seekers. Arabic-speaking interpreters visit the centre daily and a French interpreter makes weekly visits, but according to the UNHCR, this is insufficient. MiHub is a programme co-funded by the European Commission from the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF) (90%) and the Republic of Cyprus (10%) which aims to provide practical assistance, support and information to migrants. The project employs sixteen social counsellors in help centres across the four major cities in Cyprus, who have provided guidance to over 3000 migrants on issues such as employment, housing, education, and social benefits.