For those requesting details and facts earlier in the thread. This is a pretty comprehensive break down of one councils struggle to absorb too many people too quickly and highlights in stark detail how much trouble, Blairs ill thought out polices affected this country.
People had to live through the below, they were real people dealing with this. Its hard to have empathy with this situation unless you were that woman in labour unable to get into your chosen hospital or the child with sen who had extra helped pulled to support numerous other dc with no English at all.
I don't expect anyone to read the whole thing.
publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200708/ldselect/ldeconaf/82/7121107.htm
- There are many direct impacts resulting from significant migration to a local authority area such as pressures to schools coping with the influx of new intake, labour market distortions, housing, policing, fire prevention and refuse collection. However, the most significant impact remains an indirect one resulting from poor management systems within the UK and an unresponsive centrally controlled mechanism for local government funding.
- Poor measurement of local populations in "hyper-diverse" communities has serious consequences to the management of migration at a local level. The failure to track migration accurately to and within the UK results in inaccurate population estimates with corollary under-funding for those areas where official statistics prove inadequate. This in turn results in pressures to all services, community cohesion risks and poor central and local planning of services. The council has published incontrovertible evidence of a population undercount in the town due to the inability of official statistics to measure current migration movement accurately (see Appendix A).
There are many direct impacts resulting from significant migration to a local authority area such as pressures to schools coping with the influx of new intake, labour market distortions, housing, policing, fire prevention and refuse collection. However, the most significant impact remains an indirect one resulting from poor management systems within the UK and an unresponsive centrally controlled mechanism for local government funding.
- At the 2001 Census Slough's population grew by 14% to 120,600. However, census returns were low at 86% and there is a possibility this growth underestimated the true population of Slough.
The council has evidence of a rapid increase in the numbers of households of multiple occupation (HMOs): Slough's own database now holds in excess of 1,050 records of small HMOs. Officers calculate that it will cost over £400k of new funding to license Slough's HMOs in line with the new Housing Act 2004 requirements.
-
"Sheds with beds" (as described in a recent Panorama investigation Migration: How we lost count July 2007) have been constructed in the back gardens of properties in Slough. These temporary structures house large numbers of migrants on their arrival to the town. These structures do not have planning permission for residential use. The council needs specific funding in order to deal with the enforcement of regulations and with the consequences of "closing down" these inappropriate and dangerous forms of accommodation.
-
However, because the government use flawed population data in its own projections of housing need the official estimates for Slough show some perverse results. The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) has recently published[9] new projections of households for England and the Regions up to 2029.
-
These housing projections show a complete disregard of the reality on the ground of the impacts of migration to places such as Slough. As more "sheds with beds" appear in the town central planning using flawed data suggest the town needs zero extra households. As such the concerns of the council and bids for extra resource have fallen on deaf ears.
-
The council has responded innovatively to the sharp increase of children new to the UK accessing our schools. It was proving increasingly difficult to place new migrant children, particularly at secondary level, into our schools as a lack of recorded educational need of the children meant they were largely an "unknown quantity". It is essential to place children in an education stream where they can succeed and where existing pupils will not be disrupted. In response to this and in partnership with our head teachers we established the Slough Assessment Centre at Beechwood School at which new migrant children spend time having their educational needs assessed before mainstreaming.
-
During the summer holiday period 2006, 89 secondary aged pupils arrived in Slough from other countries. The Assessment Centre can only cater for a maximum of 8 pupils at a time, although 4-6 provides a more effective teacher: pupil ratio.
-
The nature and mix of migration in an 18 months' period is demonstrated on school rolls. 888 pupils from non English speaking countries moved onto Slough school rolls over that time. 200 were from Poland, 185 from Pakistan, 104 from Somalia and 91 from India. The remainder were from other African, European or other Asian countries. Two primary schools in Slough have had to take in 60 Somalian and 50 Polish children respectively in just one term.
-
The centre also provides support for newly arrived parents. Many families new to the country have complex needs and require a level of information, advice or support that cannot usually be met by schools. By consulting new arrivals and their parents about their experiences and needs, the Assessment Centre has been able to provide comprehensive and accessible information. The cost of this, not least translation expenses, is considerable.
-
This single centre costs £92,000 a year to run but is proving to be insufficient. The council estimates it needs additional staffing for the Secondary Assessment Centre to enable more pupils to be admitted during peak times of the year. Two Primary Assessment Centres are also needed to improve the admissions process for younger new arrivals, help them settle in more quickly to the English educational system and provide comprehensive, accessible information for parents.
Unaccompanied children
-
From 1 January to April 2007 it is estimated 400 newly arrived Romanian Roma individuals (including children) arrived in Slough. Families shared often overcrowded and sub standard accommodation.
-
88 unaccompanied Romanian Roma children between the ages of 10-17 years were presented to Slough children's services requesting support in the same period. A temporary dedicated team had to be set up by Children Services. The Roma team provided support to 52 children. 36 were refused support as they have been assessed as being over the age of 18 or the council located family members in the UK.
^^ Just some excerpts but this translated as services being pulled eg meals on wheels, dc suffering in schools that could not cope, hospitals over whelmed with labouring women turned away. Small charities or resources to help the most vulnerable literally un able to cope.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7215624.stm
The NHS is spending £350m a year to provide maternity services for foreign-born mothers, £200m more than a decade ago, the BBC has found.
Immigration has raised the birth rate so fast that some units have closed, so that midwives could be moved to areas of urgent need.
A unit in Ascot, Berkshire, shut for two months in 2007 because staff had to be transferred to Slough.
The NHS says it is working to "build in" the extra capacity needed.
Other maternity units have turned expectant mothers away because they could not cope with unprecedented increases in the local birth rate.
When Labour came to power, the NHS spent around £1bn a year on maternity services, with one baby in eight delivered to a foreign-born mother.
Ten years on, spending has risen to £1.6bn, with almost one baby in four delivered to a mother born overseas.
While the number of babies born to British mothers has fallen by 44,000 since the mid-1990s, the figure for babies born to foreign mothers has risen by 64,000 - a 77% increase which has pushed the overall birth-rate to its highest level for 26 years.
In central London, where six out of every 10 babies born has a foreign-born mother, senior consultants and health managers blame the lack of resources to deal with the pressures of migration for unacceptably poor standards.
Professor Philip Steer, editor of the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, said: "The Department of Health has been taken by surprise. The demographic change, the sheer numbers, has in some areas increased very substantially without there being any forward planning really to allow for that."
charlie's parents were told their local birthing unit was full
In a statement at the time, local health officials said they "reluctantly took the decision to temporarily close the delivery suite at Heatherwood Hospital for two months so we can ensure we offer mothers-to-be a safe, high quality service at Wexham Park Hospital."
The knock-on effect was experienced in nearby Reading where the local maternity unit could not cope with the extra demand.
Tharlie Cooper was supposed to have been born in Reading, but when mother Lavina went into labour two weeks overdue she was told that, despite her being booked in, her local birthing unit was full.
Tharlie's father Dean was furious. "Basically we got turned away and the reply I got on the phone was wherever you ended up is where you end up", he said.
He drove his wife to Basingstoke in neighbouring Hampshire where doctors conducted an emergency caesarean.
www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2017/07/jeremy-corbyn-wholesale-eu-immigration-has-destroyed-conditions-british
CORBYN on the destruction of construction industry
Mass immigration from the European Union has been used to “destroy” the conditions of British workers, Jeremy Corbyn said today.
The Labour leader said that after leaving the EU, there would still be European workers in Britain and vice versa. He added: “What there wouldn’t be is the wholesale importation of underpaid workers from central Europe in order to destroy conditions, particularly in the construction industry.”