Dundee City Council is preparing city support for refugees from Afghanistan.
A report to the policy and resources committee will outline the council’s response to the urgent request for assistance from the UK Home Office to accommodate Afghan former Locally Employed Staff (LES).
It builds on years of experience in the city in helping refugees and assisting them to integrate into local communities.
A well-established partnership and a robust planning model will be used to support and resettle people from Afghanistan.
The Humanitarian Protection Partnership includes representatives from health, social work, housing and communities including ESOL (English to Speakers of Other Languages) provision, employability, Police Scotland, education, DWP and the third sector with the Scottish Refugee Council and Project Scotland.
Councillors will be told that the local authority and partners have resettled 59 families since 2015 via the Syrian Vulnerable Person Resettlement Scheme and Resettlement of Vulnerable Children Scheme. These families are now well integrated in the communities where they live.
This local network will ensure that Afghan households relocated to Dundee will be welcomed and supported to settle here.
The new scheme will source suitably sized properties from the local private rented sector for LES arrivals, using the skills of the existing Homefinders team to ensure that accommodation is suitable and to the standard required.
Council leader John Alexander said: “We are already seeing community mobilisation across Dundee to help refugees from Afghanistan and that enthusiasm shows how much of a caring city we are.”
He added: “We have a strong and established partnership that has already welcomed and integrated refugees from Syria over the last five years.
“There is a real can-do attitude among our organisations and projects to help people whose lives have been devastated by catastrophic events like the ongoing situation in Syria and now the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan.
“We have achieved remarkable success stories and we can be proud of the way the city has taken these people in and protected them.
“There will be a similar response to this latest call and all of us will be looking for our city to assist people from Afghanistan who arrive here.”
The policy and resources committee meets on Monday September 27.
Dundee City Council
Dundee draws skilled workers from a 60-minute catchment population of 640,000 and has a local population of over 140,000. The availability of a large pool of highly skilled labour is a key feature in the Dundee economy. Flexibility in the labour force is currently more prevalent in Dundee than in Scotland as a whole. All forms of labour market flexibility - part-time, temporary employment, self-employment and shift work - are widely operational within the city. Labour force stability in the city is excellent, enabling companies to plan with confidence. Labour turnover levels are less than 5% and absenteeism averages 2%.
