At the height of the refugee crisis, an average of 131,500 migrants arrived in Austria every month from September 2015 to February 2016. While many of them had other goals and wanted to move on to Germany or Northern Europe, for example, the federal government responsible for first aid had to accommodate those who wanted to stay here. At the time, however, the Ministry of the Interior was not prepared for the force of the wave. Precarious: As the Court of Auditors criticizes in a current report, one could not react much better today than in 2015.
Accommodation was needed to keep the many asylum seekers from becoming homeless. It was not always possible to find the most economical and legal solution for the Ministry of the Interior. Especially at the height of the migration crisis in 2015/16, Austria found itself in a predicament that weakened its negotiating position and increased the pressure to conclude contracts in a timely manner, the Court of Auditors sums up.
Since 2013, the Ministry of the Interior had concluded a total of 37 contracts in connection with the opening of new federal care facilities, mostly with private landlords. Of these facilities, only seven were actively used in December 2020! Three of them were reactivated in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. With 19, the respective contracts could be terminated. Explosive: Eleven care facilities were closed in December 2020 while the contractual relationship was valid; The Ministry of the Interior used three of them as depots. You still pay rent for eight vacant accommodations. And that for a very long time, in some cases up to the year 2030!
The Court of Auditors is critical of the fact that the Ministry of the Interior is bound to individual rental contracts for up to 15 years. Of course, this leads to high financial burdens. The options for reacting flexibly to changed framework conditions are limited. The Court of Auditors recommends: Evaluating the rental contracts for the care facilities, renegotiating and adapting them if possible in order to minimize adverse consequences.
The auditors of the Court of Auditors are also critical of the fact that the Ministry of the Interior has not established a process for crisis situations in which the number of asylum applications increases sharply within a short period of time and has not made any strategic provisions for this. It was therefore only able to react to the increased need for accommodation at short notice. During the 2015/16 migration crisis, various organizational units of the Ministry of the Interior were used to search for and check the suitability of objects. Responsibilities were not clearly defined. A suitable strategy would have to be developed: both for efficient crisis management and for the procurement of accommodation capacities.
