The secrets of refugee central

Geoff Howard is a likeable man but he's also a deeply frustrated one. Some might call him a middle-aged racist, a white bigot (he is neither) or just downright insensitive. "Just look at this," he says, reaching over to unearth yet another large file of papers from his desk.

The file in his hand is entitled Financial Implications Of Asylum Seekers. It's a report Mr Howard himself has compiled from official council figures on the real costs of asylum seekers and refugees in Slough, Berkshire - one of New Labour's "dispersal towns". Mr Howard, 54, has lived in the area for more than two decades.

He is a local magistrate and was a Labour councillor before defecting to the Tories.

Not your cardboard cut-out racist, for sure. But one of his reasonsfor crossing the council floor was his anger over what he sees as a cover-up in relation to the true cost and impact of settling asylum seekers in Slough.

"And what is making it worse," he says, "is that it isn't PC to talk about any of this. That's the problem. You can't debate it properly.

But this is the real cost. You can't escape it. It's all here."

As he scans a long column of figures from the council's own scrutiny committee, he recites a litany of hidden costs: £14,000 to run one walk-in centre for a year; £200,000 shortfalls on council budgets; £265,000 from the local social services' budget to care for asylum seekers' children; £150,000 on one medical centre for asylum seekers; tables of grants, budget projections, expenditures, deficits - hundreds of thousands of pounds running in tight little columns, page after page. "Don't tell me this community isn't suffering," he says, reaching for another file.

Within walking distance of Mr Howard's office is the home of Dawd Abute. He is a 36-year-old African Muslim from the Sudan. He lives in a former dentist's surgery - an airless bunker of a flat next to a town centre by-pass. It is home to Mr Abute, his wife and two small boys, aged three and one.

Mr Abute fled tribal warfare in the Sudan having lost a child and a sister to Islamic fundamentalist butchers who attacked his village. He has just been granted residency in Britain, the pot of gold at the end of a bureaucratic rainbow.

"I am here to work," he tells me. "To work. For my family, for me, for this country, for Britain. I am here to give something back. I want to. I have to."

Mr Howard and Mr Abute are two sides of a controversial coin. They have never met.

And yet the bureaucratic umbilical cord that joins them is a frustration with a system that is failing - of bureaucracy run rampant; of cases of wilful incompetence and waste; of local social services, schools, GPs and Job Centres unable (or in some cases, unwilling) to help; and of a community left to carry the cost, and the scars, while central government buries its head in the sand.

It's the tale of a community that means well but hasn't really got the means to do enough, or to do it properly.

Slough is unique in the South-East: apart from the coastal towns of Kent, it has the largest concentration of asylum seekers and refugees outside London, almost 3,000. It's a united nations of horror stories, neglect and - at times - naked defrauding of a benefits system gone to pot.

And what you see here on the streets of this amorphous town encapsulates what is so terribly wrong with the present system of settling vast numbers of people in already overstretched communities: people like Geoff Howard, incensed by wastage and indulgence; school teachers finding asylum seekers' children literally dumped on their doorstep; doctors' surgeries over-run with patients; social services grappling with claimants; charity workers trying to juggle the demands of a refugee from a war-torn African state and the grievances of a local community indifferent to their plight.

Andrew McDonnell is chairman of the Slough Refugee Support charity. A loquacious Dubliner, he is a no-nonsense, straight-talking man, not an archetypal "do-gooder" too easy to pillory.

One of the major bones of contention locally, Mr McDonnell says, is the fact that asylum seekers are seen as lazy and mercenary. He adds: " People talk about asylum seekers living off benefits, being lazy. Fair enough, there are some that do. But I tell you, almost every day I see people who want to work, they genuinely do.

"If they have applied for residence status to the Home Office and been refused but given leave to appeal, they actually can't work. They're not allowed to. And how long does that appeal process take? I've seen cases where it can take as long as four years for the Home Office to decide. Think about that."

With an eye to assuaging some of the prejudice to the people they care for, Mr McDonnell and the charity's fulltime worker, Linda Chanan, have started a weekly job club. It's full of trained vets, engineers, teachers. Mr McDonnell says: "The local Job Centre tells these people to go and become security guards or cleaners. But give them the language skills and they can do more for the community. Believe me: they want to work."

When you talk to the local people here - and, interestingly, none would be named or photographed, whether they be white or Asian - the grievances are predictable. "When I go into my local supermarket, I'm the only one paying cash: all the asylum seekers have their vouchers," a married (white) mother of two told me. Why won't she go public?

The owner of a car repair business said: 'I'm not talking about refusing them money. But come on: we see the Romanians, gangs of mums and kids, going to the station every morning to go and beg in London. Don't tell me they're not on benefit."

Geoff Howard rolls his eyes at the sheer scale of the problem, saying: "You are talking about, say, 1,900 asylum seekers, 23 languages, 500 children needing education - the overall figure has yet to be calculated but I am convinced we are talking about £15million in this area alone over the last, say, six years. The truth is that the people of this town are being penalised."

According to Mr Howard, the cost of supporting the influx of asylum seekers adds £70 a year on council tax for every paying resident.

"And there are other costs on top of that - the courts, policing, fire brigade, ambulance services. I have been a magistrate for eight years. One day last week I had two cases of asylum seekers up in front of me, for theft and begging. It's the same every month, every week."

Mr Howard, as a financial adviser and letting agent himself, knows of a case in which a property was let to a family of asylum seekers. The house cost £700 a month to rent, paid for by local agencies. But when the family moved out, almost £6,000 worth of damage had been done to the property, money Mr Howard is trying to recoup from the council.

'There were ripped carpets, ripped wallpaper, nail varnish on the sofa, doors off hinges, windows cracked. And in this instance, the husband was supposed to be running a TV repair business on the side but the money will have to come from the council to pay for the damage. And that's even after having found boxes of brand new mobile phones and children's toys on the premises."

Stories like this one hardly help the cause of assimilating asylum seekers. "It's what people will say in the pub," admits Mr Howard.

AT the same time, a refugee like Dawd Abute is hardly fleecing the system: as a refugee, he and his wife qualify for £59.26 a week as a couple; plus £33.50 for each of their children. On top of that, there are a smattering of other benefits.

But it would be facile to condemn him as "a sponger".

"I only want to work," he says. And, to be honest, I believe him. In his smart grey suit and spotless lilac shirt and tie (yes, bought on benefit), he is eminently employable and, frankly, more charming and palpably honest than a lot of the commuters at Slough station every morning who paid for his outfit.

Near Mr Abute's home is a man who knows about persecution. Rasminder Vig is a Sikh whose family fled Africa for Britain in the late Sixties, when Idi Amin and his cohorts were killing Asians. In the mid-Eighties he qualified as a teacher and is now headmaster of Lea Junior School in Slough.

Mr Vig is perfectly honest about the impact of asylum seekers on his school. In one academic year, he had 62 new arrivals in a school of 400 children. They literally turned up on the doorstep one morning.

" Of course resources are squeezed," he says. Despite a central government grant of £70,000 a year (and that's for ethnic minorities as a whole, not just asylum seekers), Mr Vig has to top that up with £40,000 from his £1million school budget.

"It's never enough but that's what we get and what we have to do. I look at the budget and have to decide how we top it up - in terms of books, games, IT, music - and I have to take a top-up out of school funds to pay for trips and uniforms so the children feel part of the community."

He introduces me to two children who have successfully settled at the school. Mary Mgenge is from Burundi and Mercy Mateura from Zimbabwe. They are both 11. They came here last year.

Such has been their ability to learn English and work hard that they have both been made permanent monitors. Mercy's mother is a student nurse, her father is trying to set up his own business. She wants to be a teacher. Her friend Mary, a pilot.

You would be hard-pushed to find two more impressive children; perhaps they are the "acceptable" face of asylum: ambitious, God-fearing, eloquent. Interestingly, it is the "white" East European refugees who cause most local resentment, as they are allegedly the main culprits when it comes to car theft, burglary and begging.

But it would be a hard heart that denied the two girls from Africa the means and the opportunity to better themselves.

LIKE Dawd Abute, Mary and Mercy are as much victims of the present system of "dumping" asylum seekers in British towns as the people - such as Geoff Howard - who wince at the cost and impact on the community. And there's the rub. Slough became notorious this year when a doctors' surgery was opened just for asylum seekers. The small premises isn't far from Dawd Abute's home. The man in charge is Dr Hemantha Kumar. A reticent figure, Dr Kumar will defend his practice and the need to cater to the 1,000 patients - mainly Romanians - on his books.

"We cost only £70,000 or so a year to run," he says adding that the money has to stretch to two doctors, two receptionists, one counsellor and a midwife. "The patients have to wait like anyone else. They're not treated differently," he argues.

But the surgery caused a great deal of local anger. Geoff Howard says: "It would be wrong to say it isn't costing us in lots of ways. It is. A lot of the asylum seekers have arrived with TB, other problems.

Hospitals and clinics around the town are also fully stretched."

Maybe, but they have little choice. With the Government's policy of dispersing asylum seekers, and no central medical or application screening of asylum claims, it is communities such as Slough that have to bear the cost and tensions.

No one doubts the rights of persecuted people to make Britain their home. Mr McDonnell says: "As an Irishman, I was a kind of refugee."

Mr Howard, equally emphatic, says: "I'm not saying they shouldn't be here."

The sad truth is that New Labour has created a bureaucracy to deal with a problem, a bureaucracy that leaves local communities to carry the cost. Racist attacks in Slough are few but the windows of Mr Abute's home were smashed recently.

So the tensions are increasing, as are the costs. And, until central government changes the system of relying on local services, those tensions and costs - those real grievances - will only get worse. When you talk to the people here - residents, teachers, doctors, charity workers, refugees - it's as if they are all about to release a silent scream of frustration and anger.

For the likes of Dawd Abute, for Mercy Mateura, it is incumbent on a decent, civilised society to offer them a chance to learn and work. It's right to offer them a home.

But there's no point - for the locals living here and those sent here - building that home on sand.