Teams to cope with migrant influx

12 April 2012

The first specialist team designed to help local councils cope with the massive influx of immigrants will begin work this summer.

A rural council in Norfolk will receive three experts from the Department for Communities and Local Government to ease the problems associated with new arrivals from abroad.

Communities Secretary Hazel Blears said she was confident that the specialist cohesion teams would successfully tackle immigration related problems.

The first pilot team will begin working in Breckland district council in the summer and will remain there for about three months. Ms Blears also indicated that she did not believe that individual hospitals and police forces should receive money from a new fund raised from a levy on immigration applications.

Instead, the cash should be spent on integrated websites for migrants, on English language training or other, broader, projects, she said.

"I think we can make the most of it by not providing bits and bobs to individual hospitals and local police forces," she told an audience in north London.

Ms Blears' statement is the first indication of how money from the new fund, first announced in February, may be spent by the Government.

It is due to operate from next April.

Cambridgeshire chief constable Julie Spence indicated earlier this year that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith had said police forces struggling to cope with an influx of migrants may have been entitled to some extra cash from the fund.

Speaking at the launch of a strategy designed to manage the impact of migration, Ms Blears said Breckland council saw its population rise by more than 1,300 in 2005/06, almost entirely due to the arrival of immigrants from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Portugal.

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