Employees of the aliens police in Ter Apel will go on strike on Tuesday morning because of the high workload and scheduling problems that have increased in recent months due to the arrival of more asylum seekers. The staff of the Groningen application center for asylum seekers will stop working for a few hours.
The workload in Ter Apel has increased in recent months due to the arrival of Afghan refugees. The Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA) has great difficulty in housing asylum seekers with a residence permit. The shortage on the housing market makes it difficult for status holders to move from emergency shelter to a permanent home.
Recently, the number of asylum seekers who reported to Ter Apel regularly exceeded the capacity of the center. Asylum seekers were therefore forced to sleep on stretchers because there were no beds available. Earlier this month, the outgoing cabinet obliged the municipalities of Enschede, Rotterdam, Gorinchem and Venray to open emergency reception locations.
Also read: Crisis Ter Apel is a ‘national issue’
“The influx of migrants is one of the causes of the workload in Ter Apel,” says Gerrit van de Kamp, chairman of the police union ACP. Another main reason is that many police officers are retiring and there are few younger replacements available who have received appropriate training. As a result, staff from all over the country had to come to Ter Apel recently to alleviate the scheduling problems. “It is not accessible, so they sleep for a week in a hotel nearby. If that happens once, it’s not such a big deal, but now it happens almost structurally. We are dealing with a chronic capacity problem.”
coalition agreement
In the coalition agreement, the government has pledged to invest 200 million euros annually in getting the asylum chain in order; the money goes to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND) and the COA. In addition, the police also receive more money. Van de Kamp argues that more financial support is ‘part’ of the solution. “But we can’t go to a store and get new colleagues off the shelf there. It takes years to train them.”
The union also finds the duties of police employees too large, also in view of the number of colleagues available. With the strike, the organization hopes to stimulate discussion about this. According to Van de Kamp, politicians must make ‘tighter choices’ in this regard. “Now our people are being looted.” More actions will be taken in the course of this week, although it has not been announced what these entail.
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