Types of accommodation

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Asylum seekers are accommodated in facilities of different size and capacity. A quota system requires the federal provinces to provide places according to their population.^[1]

Each of the 9 federal provinces has a department responsible for administering Basic Care. This department searches suitable accommodation places, and concludes contracts with NGOs or landlords, owners of hotels or inns, to provide a certain number of places and Basic Care provisions. Regular meetings of the heads of the provincial departments and the Ministry of Interior take place to evaluate the functioning of the Basic Care system and the level of financial compensation for the federal provinces. According to the Basic Care agreement between the State and the federal provinces, the latter have to cover 40% of the expenditures, while the Ministry has to pay 60% of the costs. This share of the Ministry of Interior could rise to 100% if an asylum application is not processed within due time. It remains to be seen how the system will change following the establishment of the new Federal Agency (BBU).

Federal reception capacity

The initial reception centre serves as centre for asylum seekers with an admissibility procedure likely to be rejected. The 2 initial reception centres in Traiskirchen and in Thalham are therefore reserved for asylum seekers in the admissibility procedure and for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children as long as they are not transferred to reception facilities of the federal provinces. Instead of streaming all asylum seekers to the initial reception centre, they should have their first accommodation in the so-called distribution centres (VQ), which should be set up in 7 federal provinces. Traiskirchen serves as a VQ too. The reception centre in Fieberbrunn is used for rejected asylum seekers, and another former reception centre that was opened at the Vienna airport serves as a departure centre. NGOs report that the VQ in Ossiach/Carinthia hosts rejected asylum-seekers too. The Ministry of Interior announced in October 2018 the closure of 7 of the remaining 20 reception facilities, including the special care centre in Upper Austria and the distribution center in Styria-Graz Puntigam. Due to the low number of asylum seekers two more federal centres have been closed in 2019. As of July 2019, there were thus 11 federal reception centres with a total capacity of 2,203 places, out of which only 868 were in use in July 2019. The average cost per person accommodated in a federal centre is €183 per day.[2]

Newly arrived asylum seekers stay only 4 to 5 days in the distribution centres according to information from the Centre in Ossiach. From January to May 2018, asylum seekers spent an average of 19 days in the course of the basic admission procedure in federal care facilities.^[3] More recent data is not available.

Only a few asylum seekers are provided care in distribution centres (VQ). The number of asylum seekers in the initial reception centre of Traiskirchen, which reportedly has inhuman living conditions,^[4] has also sharply decreased, from 5,000 asylum seekers to about 500 at the end of 2018.^[5] At the end of 2019, 844 asylum seekers were accommodated in Traiskirchen.[6]

As already mentioned, as of July 2019, there were 11 federal reception centres hosting a total of 868 persons.^[7] The law allows the Ministry of Interior to open reception facilities in federal provinces that do not fulfil the reception quota. Such centres may be opened even when the facility is not adapted to host asylum seekers specifically as long as special safeguards apply like fire protection or building regulations.^[8] Since 2018, however, such centres were not needed.

In case of larger numbers of arrivals and difficulties in transferring asylum seekers to reception facilities in the federal provinces, the Federal State may host asylum seekers even after their asylum application is admitted to the regular asylum procedure for a maximum period of 14 days.

Reception capacity at provincial level

In practice, most federal provinces do not provide the number of places required under their quota, which is partly due to the fact that provinces such as Vienna exceed their quota (177,16% of the quota agreed). At the end of 2019, the entire Austrian reception system hosted a total of 30.878 persons (including beneficiaries of international protection and rejected asylum applicants), out of which 18,313 were asylum applicants. The distribution across the federal provinces is detailed in Freedom of Movement. While Vienna continues to exceed its relative reception share, other federal provinces have had several empty places. Consequently, several centres have free capacity and are planned to close as they are not able to cover the general costs of rent, heating, staff etc.

NGOs or owners of hostels and inns, who run reception centres under the responsibility of the federal provinces, have contracts with the governmental department of the respective federal provinces. While in some federal provinces almost all asylum seekers are placed in reception centres (e.g. 82% of asylum seekers in Styria and 94% in Burgenland), private accommodation is more often used in others states such as Vienna, where 71% of applicants lived in private accommodation as of 1 January 2019.^[9] More recent figures are not available.