REDDITCH could soon be welcoming two Syrian families after the county council agreed to take in 200 refugees across each of the six districts of Worcestershire.
The Government has agreed to house 20,000 refugees in the UK and Worcestershire has offered to take one per cent of this total, re-homing 200 of the Syrian people over a five-year period.
Councillor Bill Hartnett, the leader of Redditch borough council has been on Central TV this week speaking on behalf of the County Council on the refugee crisis.
He said: “These people are victims who have been through all sorts of horrors. Their homes, their villages have been blown up. These people have been seriously affected by war.
“We don’t know how big these families are going to be although we know that Syrian families are usually a lot bigger than families in the UK. We don’t know if the 50 people we are taking are from ten families or 20 but we roughly imagine we are planning on taking in two families.”
The county council last year did a U-turn on whether or not to take in any people fleeing the conflicts in the Middle East with the pressure group Malvern Welcomes Syrian Refugees at the forefront of the campaign to get the decision reversed.
All the funding for the refugees, who are currently in camps in the Lebanon and Syria, will be paid for by central government and no council taxpayers’ money or council houses will be used to accommodate them.
