The Interior Ministry will request that its current funding for reception centres be doubled, in order to pay for the record numbers of people seeking asylum in Finland this year.

On Thursday this week the Finance Ministry will hear from other parts of government as it draws up a fourth supplementary budget for this year. Officials from the Interior Ministry, which covers the cost of accommodating new arrivals in reception centres and paying subsistence benefits, will ask for their asylum funding to be raised to 114 million euros, up from the current 54 million.

Ministry civil servants say this requirement will be adjusted depending on the number of people arriving in Finland seeking asylum at the end of the year.

Last year around 3,600 asylum seekers were registered in the country. Fresh forecasts put this year’s figure at closer to 50,000, with 20,000 asylum requests processed so far.

Insufficient resources

Jukka Aalto, head of administration and development at the Interior Ministry, said that the 34.5 million euros originally put aside for asylum costs in this year’s actual budget was known to be insufficient.

An extra 19.5 million euros were granted in a further budget, meaning the government has agreed to a total of 54 million euros for asylum costs this year, the same as last year.

Now a fourth supplementary budget is being prepared for presentation by the Finance Ministry on Thursday. At that discussion the Interior Ministry will put forward a request for more funding this year.

”The situation is alive the whole time. We’re having to follow it until the government makes its proposal to parliament. Then we’ll see what the forecast requirement is,” Aalto said.

The Interior Minister calculates that reception costs for one asylum seeker average out at 15,000 euros a year.

Another world

Meanwhile costs for next year’s budget have been estimated at 118 million euros.

”That forecast was made in August, when it was expected 15,000 people would come in a year. That’s another world to where we are now,” Aalto says, adding that the numbers are currently being updated.

Growing backlog

The Immigration Service, which makes asylum decisions, is hiring more staff to process the applications.

”The situation is that at the end of summer, numbers of arrivals grew. Their applications haven’t been considered at all yet, and many will now be looked at next year,” Aalto says.

”We’re far from a situation where we can make decisions at the pace that applications are coming in,” he said.

If a person is granted asylum, they then move out of the reception centre and become a client of the municipality. Integration programmes are administered by the Ministry of Employment.