[Relevant documents: Sixth Report from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Committee, Session 200304, HC 45-I, and the Government's response thereto, Cm 6284.]
Motion made, and Question proposed, That the sitting be now adjourned.[Gillian Merron.]
Andrew Bennett (Denton and Reddish) (Lab): I am grateful to have the opportunity to talk about the Select Committee report on social cohesion. First, I would like to put on record the thanks of the Select Committee to Ted Cantle and Andy Forbes, our specialist advisers, who did a great deal of work in getting the Committee to understand the issues so that we could ask the right questions. I also record my appreciation of all those who submitted evidence to the Committee, and those who were witnesses. Good Select Committee reports are very much dependent on the quality of the evidence that they receive. We were certainly very grateful for that. I place on the record too my appreciation of Martin Wilson, the principal clerk to the Northern Ireland Assembly, who, as the Assembly is suspended and had nothing to do, came over to spend some time helping the Select Committee. We were grateful to him, but sad that he was not over there ensuring that the Assembly was working.
Having mentioned Northern Ireland, I will start by referring to that place. Some of the most interesting evidence came from people who talked about the parallel societies in Northern Irelandthe Protestant and Catholic societies. Perhaps those societies developed as a result of deliberate actions, particularly by the Unionists, in the '30s, '40s and '50s, but much developed almost by accident or because people looked at the little picture rather than the big one. Someone who was particularly concerned with improving the health of children would simply consider that problem without looking at the bigger picture, so people ended up making provision for a health centre in both communities, making the division between the societies that little bit worse.
The fundamental message coming out of the inquiry that I want to convey is that the Government, local government, health services and everyone else have to test everything that they do with the question "Is this particular action going to improve social cohesion or make the division in societies that bit worse?" Are they creating parallel societies where people do not mix or share the same schools or health services, and end up with different goals and no understanding of the problems and issues in the rest of the community living close by? That is the strongest message I want to convey. Every action of the Government must be focused on ensuring that what they do improves social cohesion.
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I would like to explain why the Select Committee carried out the inquiry. Following the disturbances in 2001, there was a great deal of activity and inquiry, and many promises were made that various things would happen. It seemed to the Select Committee in the summer of 2003 that it was a good time to look at what progress had been made as a result of those promises. We also recognised the fact that the issue was a wide one and that there was a danger that the Committee would not have a focus, so we decided to consider Oldham as a specific case study. In September 2003, the Select Committee spent a week there taking evidence. Having done that, it seemed important that we put that evidence into the context of the rest of the country, so in the spring of 2004 we took some further evidence in the House of Commons to supplement what we had seen in Oldham. On the whole, I want to concentrate today on the good news. We took a lot of trouble in the report to include 10 case studies of good practice, but there are many more examples of how communities ensure that social cohesion is effected in their areas.
I start with policing. One thing that was most worrying at the time of the disturbances was the reaction of the police force in some places. All the evidence from Oldham is that Chief Superintendent David Baines, who took his post after the disturbances, has made a huge difference. It is sad that, having spent three years in Oldham, he is now moving to another division in Greater Manchester, but everyone we talked to in Oldham was impressed with his efforts. I hope that Keith Bentley, who will take over as chief superintendent, will continue the good work.
When I spoke to my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Mr. Pike) about what had happened with the police in Burnley, he emphasised that there had been a significant change in their approach and that they were much better at understanding and addressing the problems. I am not quite sure of the position in Bradford, but no doubt my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, North (Mr. Rooney) will refer to it. One of the most positive things that has come out of Oldham and elsewhere is a better understanding by the police of the issues. In some cases, they have come up with imaginative responses in order to ensure that they work for social cohesion.
I draw attention to the opportunities for women centre, which we visited while going around Oldham. It works very hard to persuade women to return to education, to retrain and to gain extra skills. It works across the community and is doing very well. We were particularly impressed with the bus that it has provided in one of the ethnic minority communities to try to persuade women, particularly those who had come to marry in this country, to gain skills in English.
Another impressive service in Oldham is the post-16 provision. I suspect that it developed almost by accident. There is one sixth-form college and one further education college for the whole borough, so there are no divisions such as people from one ethnic background going to one school and those from a different ethnic background going to another. All the youngsters mix together and get an understanding of each other. I pay tribute to the people in Oldham. That borough used to have one of the poorest stopping-on rates, but the colleges seem to be doing extremely well.
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I pay tribute to the fire service in Oldham, which works hard to ensure that things such as smoke alarms are put into as many houses as possible. It has a multicultural approach and ensures that officers who are culturally sensitive go into homes to install them. There are many examples of good news.
I have slightly mixed feelings about school links. It is sad that in one school almost all the children are white and in another they all come from a different ethnic background. As far as I am concerned, it would be much nicer if the classrooms were mixed. However, given the way in which housing has become segregated, school links are at least an attempt to ensure that children from one school meet those from another two or three times a term and get some understanding of the issues.
Market renewal is another way to measure progress in Oldham; there is a problem, as there is in so many towns in the north of England, of empty and underused properties. I understand that there is quite a clamour in Oldham about the compulsory purchase of properties that are to be knocked down. It is interesting that indignation about the proposals comes from people of all ethnic backgrounds. There is not the feeling that one group of people is being treated unfairly or particularly advantageously. That is another example of the way in which things are improving in Oldham.
I was impressed with the evidence of the Leicester Mercury editor, Nick Carter, who worked hard to explain to the Committee his approach to journalism in Leicester and the way in which it appears to be increasing social cohesion in his community, rather than allowing one segment of the community to take action against another. That is also true of the chief constable of Leicestershire, who has a positive approach to social cohesion and race relations.
The West London Alliance also gave some very impressive evidence. There is a wide ethnic mix in west London, so rather than there being a majority and a minority, there is a wide spread of people from different backgrounds. The alliance takes that as a big advantage and makes sure that it uses in its community all the skills of people from different backgrounds, traditions and languages.
Today, I want the Minister to tell us about the current situation. The problem with a Select Committee is that it conducts an inquiry and comes up with recommendations, which the Government answer, but then things are forgotten if we are not careful. Sadly, in politics, one has to keep chipping away, so I will concentrate on the Government's response to the Select Committee report. In a way, I was pleased with the Government because they did not tell us to get lost and that we had got it wrong. They agreed with us on almost everything, and then said, "We are doing this, or that" to address it. I want to know how quickly they are doing those things.
My first question relates to recommendation 3, about the corporate assessment of local authorities. Will the Minister tell us where we are up to with that? One feeling that was put to us was that local authorities did not get much credit if they worked hard at social cohesion, and that they did not get much criticism if they did not. I understand that new details, to be announced next
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week, are to be put in the comprehensive performance assessments. Someone has hinted to me that they are still pretty feeble, and that the Government are not getting to grips with this issue. If local authorities are to be assessed, one thing that should be taken into account is how far, in all their activities, social cohesion is considered important.
A problem for Oldham is that its local authority is probably the least successful in Greater Manchester, and borders on being a weak one. The question is whether people should have been sent in to work on it. I understand that Oldham has just had its corporate assessment, and I hopefrom the rumours that have reached methat it will get some marks for significant improvement. It now has a pretty strong senior management team, which I hope will make some progress.
Ms Oona King (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab): On that point, I was delighted that my council in Tower Hamlets received beacon status last year for its work on community cohesion. The key lesson to be learned from Tower Hamlets is that, as my hon. Friend said, social cohesion must inform all service planning and service delivery, rather than being a bolt-on at which officers look when they are coming to the end of their delivery programmes.
Andrew Bennett : I accept that. My impression is that things are improving in Oldham, but I find it a little odd that the chief executive, Andrew Kilburn, who was in post before the riots, when the council was found to be doing so very badly, is still therethe Teflon man. I hope that the team he has put together will make things in Oldham much better.
I turn to recommendation 8 in our report and the Government's response, on what happens with local authorities and the local media. What was important in the evidence that we took from Nick Carter from the Leicester Mercury was that he understood clearly that the success of his paper would depend on its being read by people in the whole of greater Leicestershirenot just the city of Leicester but the whole area. He knew that he needed to work to encourage advertisers from the whole area and to encourage the readership. He appeared to be being very successful.
Oldham also has a local newspaper, the Oldham Chronicle. We are a little critical in our report because we are concerned that the Oldham Chronicle continues the practice of putting anonymous letters in its letters columns. Some of those letters are not good for social cohesion. When I pressed that matter with the editor, he assured me that he felt that free speech meant that letters should be put in. My view is that free speech is perfectly all righta good and laudable aimbut that people should be asked to stand up and be counted. If they want a letter to go into the paper, they should be prepared to put their name to it.
Richard Younger-Ross (Teignbridge) (LD): In some papers, letters are not only anonymous but from fictitious addresses. Some papers do not even go through the cursory process of checking that the people who have written to them actually exist.
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Andrew Bennett : Although I fully accept that views should be in the paper if they exist, the important thing is that we should require a name and address to them so that others can check their veracity. I hope that the Oldham Chronicle will think about changing its policy.
On the other hand, I have a great deal of sympathy for the Oldham Chronicle in that the British National party in Oldham has been threatening it by trying to create advertisers' boycotts. I am delighted that the paper has been standing up to that, and that the people in Oldham have very firmly seen off the BNP in the elections. However, I want to emphasise to the editor of the Oldham Chronicle that it is important that he sets out to try to capture the readership of the whole community and does not rely on the traditional white population of Oldhammissing a great opportunity to bring in the whole community.
I want to say to the people of Oldham that the Oldham Chronicle really is a jewel in Oldham's crown because it is a local evening paper. I represent a nearby constituency that is partly in Tameside and partly in Stockport, and I wish that there were a local evening paper there. The message that I have for the Government concerns their promise, in response to us, to consider how they can improve relations between local authorities and the local media. Their response says:
"The Home Office intends to explore this recommendation with local authorities and media representatives in the near future."
I am never quite sure when "the near future" is in Government-speak, and I should like to find out whether anything has happened in that regard.
Recommendation 17 is on multicultural schools. We were concerned that the performance in multicultural schools tended to be better than that in monocultural ones. However, there was not any actual evidence for that, so we asked the Government to do some work on it. We received a slightly snooty response, which said that the Department for Education and Skills
"does not need to commission a survey, as it already holds the necessary data to conduct this kind of research and will carry out the analysis as suggested. The Department has consistent policies in promoting community cohesion in schools."
I would just like to find out what the Government are actually doing on that.
When trying to find information for today's debate, I noticed that Burnley has a bid in for new secondary schools, and I hope that the Government will look favourably on that. One key question is where those two new schools are to be located. What will their catchment areas be? Burnley could produce two good multicultural schools or it could end up with one school with a preponderance of people from one background and another with people from a different background. I know that the Minister is not directly responsible for this issue, but I want to find out how far the Department for Education and Skills works to ensure that the catchment areas of new schools are designed to encourage multicultural education, rather than ignoring it.
On recommendation 20 and funding, an awful lot of the things that we saw in Oldham and that were presented to us across the country as successes are done with funding that is available only for a short or specific period. The assumption is that the funding will then be
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taken over as mainstream funding. That worries me a great deal. Too many projects in Oldham and elsewhere, which do some of the best work on social cohesion, are living from hand to mouth. The people running those projects are not quite sure where the next funding will come from. I hope that the Government will address that.
Recommendation 27 is really about the effectiveness of the Commission for Racial Equality. Over the past 20 years, the CRE has not performed the role that people intended for it. It may have been effective in bringing some prosecutions and helping people with discrimination cases, but I regret that it has not done a lot more in a positive role. I just hope that the changes that I am told are under way will mean that the CRE plays a much more positive role in future. All public bodies now have to produce race relations strategies, but I hope that we shall not be just ticking them off and saying, "Yes, you've got a strategythat's okay." We must look firmly at the quality of those strategies.
Other members of the Committee and I were concerned about choice-based lettings, which the Department has pressed hard. In their response, the Government explained at length why they thought that choice-based lettings were working. However, at the end they admitted that they were not absolutely certain what impact choice-based lettings have on race relations and social cohesion. Can the Minister give us an update on how choice-based lettings are working?
The experience from Stockport is that choice-based lettings are not working terribly well with groups of constituents who have particular views on lifenever mind in terms of race relations. Some tenants can be quite keen to get their friends into a vacant property next door. It is fairly easy for people to make a noise and to look as though they are not the nicest tenants when others come round to view the property before the applications for choice are submitted. That way, people who might want to move in and who might have more points qualifying them for the house can sometimes be discouraged from making an application. If that can happen in a community where there is no ethnic tension at all, it could be worse where there are such tensions. I therefore ask the Government to look carefully at choice-based lettings.
Recommendation 43 is about the trials in 13 police forces. Can the Minister give us an update on that?
Finally, I draw attention to the problems with languages in some communities, particularly those that people enter as asylum seekers. The conclusion to the Government's response, entitled "Cross government discussions", says:
"The Criminal Justice Service teams . . . are leading on a cross-government sector working group, which includes DH, to consider the scope for sharing interpreting resources and have organised one meeting to discuss the opportunity for joint working."
I hope that since the response was published they have had a second meeting, and I hope that on those points the Minister can tell us what progress is being made.
I stress the point about language skills. Places such as Burnley, Oldham and Bradford have a pretty good record of meeting the language needs of the local community, but they have often received a significant number of asylum seekers. For many, from different
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parts of the world, there are no people locally with the language skills to help them access services. There is concern that some strain has been put on the health service by having to find people with the language skills to ensure that someone receiving medical treatment is informed of what the doctor intends. There is an argument for making extra resources available nationally to meet the needs of those areas that have taken in significant numbers of asylum seekers and where the health service has had to provide translation services.
The Committee saw and heard from communities whose members come from a range of racial backgrounds, and in many there were no problems at all. In fact, some communities embraced that diversity of ethnic background with enthusiasm. I argue very strongly that if Britain is to be successful in the world economy, we must develop the skills of everyone in the nation and take advantage of the opportunities afforded us by our multicultural society. There are ample examples of good practice throughout the country, but sadly a few communities are not grasping those opportunities. They become inward-looking and allow themselves to become more divided. It is important that we appeal to those communities to see the advantage of developing a socially cohesive community. Finally, I say to the Government that every part of their every policy ought to be proofed to see whether it will encourage social cohesion or reduce it.
Ms Karen Buck (Regent's Park and Kensington, North) (Lab): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Bennett) and the Select Committee on producing a rigorous, thoughtful and informative report that will do a great deal to guide us when considering this important issue. I was pleased to hear him mention some issues in the south of England, although the report was motivated primarily by issues affecting northern towns and the explosion of tensions within them. I am pleased that the Committee considered the different aspects of social cohesion as they affect different parts of the country.
I want to concentrate my remarks on aspects of social cohesion that affect London and my constituency. As has been said, we do not have parallel societies there. We have a multiplicity of societies that are profoundly different from each other but that are often bracketed together under the broad title of black and ethnic minority communities.
The challenges of social cohesion are rooted in social change. We need to develop a wide range of social, economic and cultural responses to that social change and to ethnicity within it. I have discovered two particular dynamics: diversity and mobility. We have yet properly to recognise diversity in public policy terms. It is fundamentally different to work with and to deliver services to a society where 300 languages are spoken in the homes of residents, as is the case across London. In my constituency, 90 languages are spoken at home. The public policy mechanisms have progressed a long way over the past 20 to 30 years in response to modern Britain, but they have yet to reflect those differences.
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For example, resource allocation often brings into play recognition of the number of people in minority communities and those with particular language needs, but has yet to take on board the challenges presented to those delivering services by that incredible range of backgrounds and experiencesnot just languages but cultures and other issues. Housing management is probably the single biggest issue. It is possible to have a whole debate about how schools are affected. We are not discussing that, but it clearly needs to be recognised. It is not informing resource allocation or policy delivery in the way it should.
Mobility is beginning to be discussed and to be rewarded with resource allocation, but not to anything like the extent to which it should. Mobility and diversity are two sides of the same coin. In a society that is diverse, there is clearly likely to be a high population turnover. My constituency has the second highest population turnover in Britain. It is not uncommon for London constituenciesand possibly for city constituencies in other parts of the United Kingdom, although I stand to be correctedto turn over at least a third of their electoral register every year. The electoral register is nothing like an accurate gauge of population mobility, because the most mobile populations will be those who never get on to it. To engage with a society with that level of mobility places demands on almost every part of public service and public life, which we must rise to. Those issues are the real underpinnings of the social cohesion agenda in cities, particularly in London and in areas such as my own.
What it all boils down tothis is the common thread with northern townsis the battle for scarce resources. The total of scarce resources is different in London and the south-east from the total in northern towns, by and largewe are always generalising, but I think that that is true. However, the tensions that arise when one is battling for scarce resources are the same, although, as I said, diversity and mobility are the drivers of the pressures.
We end up with the poorest black and minority ethnic community residents and the poorest white residents, whether long-established or new arrivals, in intense competition for access to particular services. They are frequently locked together in some of our weakest neighbourhoods, which are least likely to create circumstances where they can lobby effectively to have their needs met.
I want to spend a moment or two talking about the good news. My hon. Friend was right to talk about good news, and there is a great deal. When it comes to the agenda of community safety, which is integral to effective social cohesion, we have moved so far from when I entered public life as a councillor 14 years ago that it is almost impossible to recognise what is happening on the ground.
I pay warm tribute to the policing delivery and policing strategy of recent years. It has made a remarkable difference. Even in the past few months, the introduction of neighbourhood policing in London wards, sometimes backed by Government-funded warden schemes introduced under the neighbourhood renewal fund, has quickly galvanised communities into becoming involved in community safety. One can see a palpable difference in how the safety agenda is being delivered.
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That change is due not only to the police bearing down on crime and antisocial behaviour, important though it is, but to the fact that the recruitment and retention of the newer police teams, police community support officers and wardens more closely reflect a diverse community than traditional policing. That is enormously important, and if it starts feeding through into a more diverse police force, it will be welcome.
It is worth putting on record that, even at a time of increased tension in our Muslim communities because of anti-terror legislation over the past year or two and because of an increase in the stopping and searching of Muslim youths, the Muslim cultural heritage centre, one of the leading centres in my constituency, reports enormously positive relations with the police. I am always anxious to gauge the centre's concern, and glad to find that it is not a problem. That is very welcome.
The area-based work being done through a number of initiatives that have come on stream over the years is paying off. It is taking time, and only relatively recently have we begun to see some real feedback on its value. I think of the new life for the Paddington single regeneration budget programme, a number of other small single regeneration budgets, the Sure Start programmes, the children's centres, and the education action zones. Particularly important is the work being done by the two arm's-length management organisations. Taking a step away from council control, they have been much more responsive. They have stepped beyond the traditional bricks and mortar and rent collection functions and become more integrally involved in the social cohesion agenda.
On the Westminster side of my constituency, we have recently seen the development of neighbourhood forums, which are grassroots-based and proving their worth in terms of individual participation. It is not on the scale that we would like. None the less, it is much more representative.
I pay particular tribute to the neighbourhood management programme. One of the Government's neighbourhood management schemes is being run in Church Street, the most deprived ward in my constituency and one of the most deprived single output areas in the country. That sort of work is critical in creating a strategy for tackling social exclusion and building social cohesion in a diverse community.
All that is wonderful, but it leaves us with a couple of critical problems. My right hon. Friend the Minister for Housing and Planning will not be remotely surprised to hear me say that housing is the single most important problem, and that housing resources have reached the crunch point. That is where the tension occurs between minority communities and white communitiesand, indeed, settled black communities. It is each against the other because of the pressure on scarce resources. Housing supply has plummeted in the social rented sector over the past 20 years, homelessness has risen dramatically, and the number in temporary accommodation has risen, with more than 60,000 in London.
Overcrowding is soaring out of control and, most critically, it is concentrated in black and minority ethnic communities. Homelessness has risen twice as fast among black and white minority ethnic communities as in the rest of the population. Twice as many black and
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Asian families as white are in properties unfit for human habitation. Overcrowding is six times higher among black and minority ethnic communities.
A powerful local study was undertaken in my constituency. If my right hon. Friend the Minister has not seen it, I ask him to read it as a special favour to me. It was carried out by the North London Muslim housing association, and a copy can be found in the Housing Corporation library. It is called "Understanding the Housing Needs and Aspirations of Muslim Communities". It was researched in north Kensington and it makes such depressing reading that it makes one's ear bleed. It shows an incredible concentration of disadvantage in that 90 per cent. of Muslims in north Kensington live in social housing, and more than half live in overcrowded housing.
However, importantly for the social cohesion agenda, at present and in the foreseeable future, there is a powerful sense of community and of family ties within the Muslim communities and also among white, black and other families with children growing up. They want to stay rooted in the area. A housing policy that is based on increasing mobility and moving people out to meet their housing needs will increase social fragmentation, disadvantage and resentment. When a familywhether it is a white family, a Moroccan or an Iraqi familyare living in chronically overcrowded housing with no means of escape, or in temporary accommodation with no hope of that coming to an end, if they feel that their housing predicament is in part caused by other people getting preference, or if they are required to leave the area to have those needs met, that builds quite extraordinary resentment.
If we are to take further steps forward on promoting social cohesion in areas such as mine, we need to take a fresh look at housing supply and the characteristics of those communities, and to make a clear commitment to meet those needs in communities across London and the south-east, rather than simply moving people into lower-cost or growth areas in particular pockets.
Clearly, there are issues of concentrated poverty, discrimination, disadvantage and unemployment in those neighbourhoods that are most fragmented, polarised and diverse. We have not yet found good ways of overcoming that on the scale that is needed. In particular, we need to worry about some of the strategies that we employ in areas such as child care delivery and employment service delivery. We are in serious danger of hanging so many of our policies on labour market participation that we overlook the needs of the very poorest and most disadvantaged, who are not currently in employment.
We are not making enough investment in outreach, community or neighbourhood-based development strategies to meet the needs of those communities. One of the examples is the fact that, of the 120 employment service districts across the United Kingdom, only a third work with housing providers to get into local communities and to reach people where they are. The corollary of that is that those households that are in social housing are least likely to be in the labour market. That is partly because we are not reaching them through all the different mechanisms that are available to us.
I want to talk about where we need to go in the future. In terms of future funding to meet social cohesion and social exclusion goals, it is a worry thatI do not know
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whether the Minister will be able to respond to this pointas we reach the end of projects such as single regeneration budgets, we are not replacing them with schemes that tackle capacity building in communities. Again, the projects are very labour market based. While I am in favour of anything that we can do to increase labour market participation, if we do not continue with the resources that underpin those neighbourhood forums and that support the more neighbourhood and community-based aspects of the work, we are in danger.
An aspect of that is the worry that, unless resources are increased, as we roll things such as the neighbourhood renewal fund and children's centres away from the most deprived communities, the spread will undermine the intensity of help that we can deliver in the most deprived communities. We have certainly not yet reached the point at which our most deprived communities can say that we have lifted them to an acceptable level of service.
I, like others, for shorthand, talk about black and minority ethnic communities. For me, the largest, fastest growing and the most disadvantaged communities are Muslim, but it is very important that we get beneath the skin of these communities, do the numbers and produce the needs assessments that we do not yet have.
In Muslim communities in my constituency, which are defined by faith but not by ethnicity, there are Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Moroccansin fact, most of Britain's Moroccan communityYemenis, Kosovans, Somalis, Sudanese people, Egyptians, Algerians and Libyans. Almost every nationality on earth is represented. There are also greatly varying levels of participation in faith as well as no participation. We know next to nothing about the subject. Even in Kensington, North, we have no reliable assessment of how many Moroccans there are in the Moroccan community.
We cannot assess the needs of these communities if we have no assessment of how many types of communities there are, who they are and what their particular needs and issues are. The Moroccan community, for example, would have an entirely different agenda from the Kosovan communities, which are Muslim but tend not to be faith-based. We cannot tell the difference from the figures.
The Government need to make progress and to require local agencies to carry out much more rigorous assessments of the building blocks of all our different communities, so that we can be sure that we are meeting all those individual and very disparate needs, even if they tend to come under the single umbrella of disadvantage.
Ms Oona King (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab): It is always a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck). She began by reiterating the diversity and mobility issues of modern-day multicultural Britain. Our diversity has increased but our social cohesion has decreased, and part of today's debate is about seeing how we can reverse that trend.
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I start by paying tribute to my former colleagues on the Urban Affairs Sub-Committee of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister for another thought-provoking report. It manages to reflect some of the raw frustration felt by the communities, yet also manages to be jam-packed with policy proposals. I know that the Committee was well served by Ted Cantle in his capacity as adviser. The report clearly reflects some of his frustration at the slow progress in implementing the recommendations detailed in his taskforce's report into the summer 2001 disturbances in Burnley, Bradford and Oldham. The excellent report produced by Ted Cantle and his fellow community cohesion review team members in December 2001 should have enabled us to make better progress than we have. No one imagines that there are quick fixes or short cuts to developing community cohesion, but we can and must do more.
I want to return briefly to the subject of my intervention. My local authority, Tower Hamlets, has been awarded beacon status for its work in supporting community cohesion. The key lesson for Tower Hamlets has been that social cohesion needs to be built into and to inform all service planning and service delivery. However, I am not here to say that we have got this cracked or that we know all the answers. Clearly, we do not. The riots in Burnley, Oldham and Bradford act as a wake-up call to us all. They certainly forced me to look even closer at the community that I represent and in which I live.
East London has many advantages that are not shared in the towns that experienced those riots in the summer of 2001. We have the City, the west end and docklands on our doorstep, along with all the employment opportunities that they bring. We have a longer history of large-scale immigration, from the French protestant Huguenots in the 17th century to the eastern European Jews in the late 19th century, and our tradition started with the Normans at the Tower of London quite a long time before that. Yet both the Cantle report and the Select Committee inquiry found that Tower Hamlets has problems of racial segregation similar to those in many northern mill towns. In the early 1990s, there was huge resentment about Liberal Democrat-promoted regeneration of predominantly white estates. Now that some of the predominantly Bangladeshi estates are finally being regenerated, there is resentment among a significant part of the white community. We have a continuing undercurrent of racially motivated violence, harassment and verbal abuse, which leaves the most vulnerable living in fear and misery. Those who suffer are white as well as black, Christian as well as Muslim. That is why we recognise that we have no cause for complacency.
I want to talk in detail about three key issues that were mentioned in the Committee's report: education, youth provision and housing. Before I do so, I must commend the Government's commitmentindeed, the renewed personal commitment of the Prime Ministerto outlaw incitement to religious hatred. Taking a strong stand on that will harm extremists on both sides, from Abu Hamza to people such as Nick Griffin of the BNP. The issue should have been dealt with during the passage of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000. As it stands, the law allows right-wing extremists to incite hatred against faith groups. That legal loophole has been exploited mercilessly to incite hatred against the
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Muslim community in particular. The new law will not stop that overnight, and it will certainly not guarantee that my Bangladeshi and Somali constituents do not face Islamophobia and bigotry in future. However, it will help us to weed out and challenge those who peddle their racist message of hatred towards Islam and to individual Muslims. It will also be a signal to the Muslim community that it is not fighting racists alone. The overwhelming majority of decent British people want to see Muslims treated as equals, and stand with them against the racists, just as the overwhelming majority of decent Muslims stand with British people such as Ken Bigley when extremists bring so much grief to communities around the globe.
Five years ago, a racist exploded a nail bomb in Brick lane, in the heart of Britain's Bangladeshi community. It was designed to maim and kill men, women and children. It was also designed to provoke a reaction from Muslims in east Londonto start a race war on the streets. Many have been astonished that it did not provoke such a war. In fact, it was the mature, wise and measured reaction of the whole Muslim community, particularly those in positions of leadership such as in the nearby Brick lane mosque, that helped to bring east Londoners of all ethnic backgrounds together in a stand against racists, rather than allowing themselves to be driven apart. Outlawing incitement to religious hatred will give the state the tools that it needs to tackle those who spread hate through this legal loophole. Ultimately, it will have a practical significance on the ground.
Turning to education, I have mentioned before in Parliament my shock at visiting two schools next door to each other soon after I was elected in 1997. They shared a playground with a fence down the middle. On one side of the fence there were white children playing with a smattering of Afro-Caribbeans, and on the other there were brown, Muslim and Bangladeshi children. Perhaps it is because my father was brought up in the segregated south that I was so horrified by that; I could not believe it. We read about such things, but when we see them in Britain, we must think that something is seriously wrong. Everybodythe Select Committee, the Government and others who have considered the issuerealises that there is something very wrong with that. One of the key tools that we have for trying to deal with that problem is a more cohesive education systembringing together children who are currently kept apart by education policy, as they were previously by housing policy.
I want to draw attention to the Select Committee's recommendations 18, 19, 20 and 23, which address that matter. Recommendation 18 highlights the
"conflict between parental choice and social cohesion"
that can sometimes occur. Recommendation 19 says that the Department for Education and Skills
"should provide additional guidance to faith schools on how to address social cohesion",
"No new faith schools should be approved unless they are committed to promoting a multicultural agenda."
I should say that that needs to apply to new Christian schools, new Islamic schools and new Jewish schoolsobviously, any faith school, not just one in particular.
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Recommendation 20 asks the DFES and local education authorities to see twinning initiatives between schools
"as part of core funding for schools",
and to put those on a long-term basis. That is very important because one-off contacts do little to move beyond initial stereotypes. Recommendation 23 is on Ofsted inspections, and asks Ofsted to consider
"the way social cohesion is addressed by education authorities and also within schools."
I support all those recommendations, and hope that the Government will take action on them.
On youth provision, the Cantle report stressed the importance of youth services, both in promoting contact between youngsters from different ethnic backgrounds and in reaching out to those who are disaffected. It recommended something for which many of us have been calling for a long time: that youth services be put on a statutory footing. The Select Committee repeated that recommendation. The report also highlighted the need substantially to increase funding. I shall turn to housing in a moment, but I have to say that much of the previous Parliament and Labour's first term in government was characterised by Labour Back Benchers stamping their feet and banging their fists together, demanding that more money go into housing. The Government responded to that in a significant way. Were there to be a third Labour term in governmentI sincerely hope that there will bethe issue of youth provision would need to be at the very top of the agenda.
The Government's response to the recommendations is another matter that I think needs a second look. The Secretary of State already has a statutory power to intervene if he feels that a local authority is failing to deliver sufficient services. In Tower Hamlets, for example, we spend the most money per pupilor, rather, per young personof any London borough, yet I can say as the local MP that we do not have anything approaching sufficient youth provision. That has been recognised by the Home Office. It gives us what we might term emergency youth provision in the summer months because it recognises that all hell might break loose if it does not do so.
We acknowledge that the potential resources available from the youth and community sub-block of the local education authorities' education spending settlement have increased by an average of 5 per cent. on last year. This Government have always increased resources for local authorities in a way that, frankly, has not happened since the second world war. Yes, they have done incredibly well if we measure it against that provided under former Governments, whether Conservative or Labour, but they still have not done well enough. It is clear that local authorities are tailoring their services in line with the Government's limited ambition for expanding youth services, and I implore Ministers to take a much stronger lead.
Ms Buck : Given what my hon. Friend has said, and given that schools and neighbourhoods do not necessarily coincide and that schools that draw from a wider catchment area may not be drawing children from their own neighbourhood, does she agree that perhaps the Government should carefully consider how the extended school model will develop? If the out-of-school
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activities are to be based on schools, we will need to be extremely careful to ensure that they do not miss the needs of disadvantaged groups in the neighbourhoods.
Ms King : My hon. Friend points to an important aspect of the Government's plans for providing, among other things, extended child care facilities, and for using schools as a mechanism for delivering some type of social cohesion in the neighbourhood. If schools in areas where there are segregated communities just replicate the segregation, we will not certainly achieve what the Select Committee report encourages us to do: reduce social exclusion.
We do not need youth services just during the summer months when young people are most likely to be out on the streets. Likewise, we do not win over the hearts and minds of young people if the services grind to a halt in the first week of September. We must extend the provision that is available during the summer holidays to the whole year.
Moving on to housing, the Cantle report noted the pivotal role of housing and identified in particular that the
"impact of housing policies on community cohesion seems to have escaped serious consideration to date."
It is certainly true that the shortage of affordable housing is a key factor causing tension between different communities. My hon. Friend has just outlined the negative impact that it can have. The Government's £22 billion communities programme is changing the situation, but lack of affordable housing and its entanglement with social exclusion is not a new issue. As I said, we in Tower Hamlets are still trying to deal with some of the consequences of allocation policies that prevented overcrowded and homeless Bangladeshi families from getting the homes that they needed. We have been thinking about the impact of housing allocations on community cohesion for longer than most councils, which is why on this one point I am less supportive of the Select Committee's criticism of the new choice-based lettings scheme for social housing.
I was a little reassured to note that the Select Committee's criticism is not quite as outspoken as it was represented in the press. Unlike Ministers, I would not necessarily disagree that there is a
"tendency for freedom of choice to lead to greater segregation",
but I do think that the days of telling people that they can take the flat that they are offered or lump it must come to an end. That is part of the rationale behind the new housing choice programme.
It is true that many of my constituents feel that they do not have a choice. When there are between 17,000 and 20,000 people on the housing waiting list, in reality there is no choice. None the less, Tower Hamlets is successfully piloting choice-based lettings. The process is still frustrating for many families, but it is better than what went before.
There is merit in the Select Committee's recommendation that states:
"Any choice-based lettings policy should include a strategy which included encouragement for greater integration by offering support to tenants moving into areas where they might be in a minority."
I hope that the Minister will say todayor write to me if he cannot do sowhat more the Government plan to do to help councils put into practice that recommendation, which suggests that families who move into areas where they might be a minority should be offered greater support. In my constituency, that would affect families from all communities.
I wish to end by mentioning inequality. Catalyst has published an excellent pamphlet. It argues cogently that countries with high levels of inequality have lower levels of social cohesion. In other words, it is not enough just to do what we have to date been successful in doingincreasing minimum standards for the most disadvantaged. If we are serious about reducing social exclusion, we must also consider the negative impact that extreme inequality has on social cohesion. There are only three countries in the pre-enlarged European Union that are less equal than the United Kingdom. They are Spain, Portugal and Greece.
Britain has, as its aim, an inclusive society. That is what the Government want and although the issue wouldI hopebe a subject for another debate, I leave hon. Members with the thought that if we are to tackle social cohesion over the long term, in the next decade or so we must also reduce inequality in Britain.
Mr. David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op): I am delighted to comment on the report. I am sure that some hon. Members will think that I have a cheek to do so, because it deals with urban deprivation and the riots, but I make two simple points.
First, the problems that the report identifies are exactly the same problems that rural Britain suffers from. I speak as a member of, but not on behalf of, a Labour committee of Back-Bench rural MPs. There is a great myth out there that urban problems and rural problems are distinct. I do not say that the problems in my constituency are on anything like the same scale as those in Oldham, where the riots took place. I do not even say that we can use the same policies. However, the problems are common and we must get away from the notion that they are very different.
One of the problems creating the different perception, which is related to the way in which the excellent Select Committee operates in looking at the urban side of things, is that we have our own Departmentthe Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairsand a Select Committee to shadow it. To our eternal shame, by the time we have dealt with farming, fishing, environmental issues, foodyou name itrural affairs have, as some of us feared, been shunted down the agenda. To be fair, the ODPM Select Committee has done a much better job at evaluating and highlighting what is happening in its domain than we have. That is a pure apology for the fact that we are, to some extent, letting down our communities. I hope that there is a dialogue and, although I do not want to labour the point, that is why I am speaking.
My second point is that there is a myth that there is greater cohesion in rural Britain. I do not say that all rural communities are divided. We have our views on hunting and that is no doubt a debate that anyone could take sides on. However, I represent some rural communities that are far from cohesive and that are
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becoming less so for the simple reason why it is becoming difficult for anyone of lower means to live there anymore. In one sense, those communities are indeed cohesive, because we have excluded people on lower incomes. However, there is a dysfunctionality in parts of rural Britain and if we ignore it, we will be as guilty as we would be for over-blowing the same problem in urban Britain. Those are the reasons why I want to speak. We must look at our country in a way that makes sense of what is happening.
The scale of the problems in rural Britain is different and the way we deal with them must inevitably involve different degrees of sensitivity. However, we must always exercise commonality in approaching such problems.
For example, everyone thinks that the education in rural primary schools is much better. Lots of people try to get their children out of primary schools in my more urban areas into rural primary schools. That is fine if they have transport or are middle class with money. If not, the children go to the local primary school.
Many things influence us politicians, but rarely do we feel shocked. One of the things that shocked me in my early days was talking to the head of a relatively small rural primary school. He talked me through the situation. One of his biggest problems was that, when the SATs results came out and the teacher assessment was done, the results were, in some years, not as good as people thought they should becertainly not as good as middle-class parents thought they should be who sent their children to the school.
That is because there was a block of council houses in that community. Many people in the community never went down that street. They never identified with those children, who were good, traditional farming kids, whose view was that, while they would do what work they needed to, they knewat least, they used towhere they were going in employment terms. However, the level of pressure on the head to pretend that it was a cohesive school where everyone came from a middle-class background, and then to explain to people that not all children at the school were middle class, was threatening. Schooling is just one of many issues.
My right hon. Friend is the Minister for Housing and Planning and I could go on about housing, but we have had exclusive access to one another in recent weeks, so I will give him an easy time. The classic points centre on which difficulties we face. Because there is much rundown housing in rural Britain, we presume that that is where people of lower means are able to afford housing. Of course, the opposite is happening. Much of that housing is being alteredtwo cottages are being knocked into one and larger properties are being restored. Therefore, there are problems of access and affordability. We have debated that on other occasions.
Local services are an interesting issue. In the same way that there are problems with the Post Office in urban and suburban Britain, there are problems in rural Britain, except that it is much more difficult in rural areas because the service starts from a much lower base. That is why we feel that pain as much as, if not more than, our urban colleagues. The point about local services is that it is even more important that communities own them because once they disown them there is no return. That is also in contrast with what happens in more urban centres.
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I speak as an MP who represents five market towns. To people who live in the villages, that is urban Britain. That is still true, not so much in the Strouds of this world, butdare I say itin the Forest of Dean. When I taught in the Forest of Dean, there were 11-year-old children who had never been to Gloucester. We always think that people are worldly-wise and have been to many places but it is a bit of a myth. People are still locked into their local cultures.
Let me address the issue of race. It is easy, and I would love, to launch an immediate attack on Trevor Phillips. From my experience of Trevor, he would not know a rural area from one end to t'other. I do not want to rehearse the arguments, but he made the point that there is evidence of racism in rural Britain. Much of that evidence is totally anecdotal, but, if one considers the figures for my constituency, which are in the Libraryanyone can identify themone discovers that the ethnic minority population is very small. Those that are there have settled well.
It is easy to say but, in terms of the Government's asylum policy, there is an argument that goes, "Why not let more asylum seekers into rural Britain?" People forget that I live in a community where, on the back of our problems in Egypt in 1956, we built a block of houses for those who had to get out of Egypt because of the Suez crisis. They still live in my community. In fact, I am still trying to get one of them citizenship because she does not have a passport, but that is another matter. In previous times, we have brought people into rural communities in Britain. The sad thing is that an implicit racism exists in the sense that it is more difficult for people of different cultures to arrive and settle.
I have two brief stories. It cheered me up that the black church in Stroudthere are not that many black faces in Stroudwas able to work with other Christian communities to establish itself eventually. That is one of the most moving stories one could hear. There is a small Muslim community in Stroud, which is trying to find a place to establish a mosque. I will just say it is not easy. That is a matter not just of attitudes, but of money and finding a suitable location. Such problems exist, and let us not pretendas some do when they talk about racial tensionsthat it is a white, working-class problem in urban areas. I sometimes have to be very deaf to the views of better off people concerning what should happen to asylum seekers. If those comments were made in Oldham, they would be undoubtedly considered as straight BNP bigotry. It is not quite the same in rural areas, but there are problems.
We should not divide our society up into an urban part, with all its problems, and a rural part that takes care of itself. It is not like that. I could launch into a whine about how resources are allocated; rural areas traditionally think themselves under-provided for. That is a bit of a myth because we do very well. There is cross-subsidisation, but the problem is that, for the same amount of money in rural Britain, one can buy an awful lot more than one can in urban Britain, so there are not the same economies of scale.
The report has highlighted a dysfunctionality very clearly that we must analyse across the board and deal with in slightly different ways, but deal with it we must. The Government have a good record in rural Britain. I know that we will be attacked by other parties on that,
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perhaps even today, but we have tried to do things differently. Nevertheless, the problems have been common, which is why I have spoken today.
There are some good things, such as the local strategic partnerships, which in Stroud's case have worked very well. That is down to the Government encouraging us to carry out community development differently. We must do that. It is up to rural communities in Britain to take the lead, as it is for communities in urban Britain, but let each always hold out the hand of friendship to the other. People move between rural and urban communities, and it is important to note that. That is why I have spoken today, and I make no apology for it. I hope that it was meaningful, and that the two Select Committees might carry out parallel investigations, so that we can learn from each other.
Mr. Terry Rooney (Bradford, North) (Lab): It is very unusual to speak from this position, but I am glad to take part in the debate on the Select Committee report. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Bennett) on the report. I should highlight one glaring factual error, which I pointed out this morning. Page 8 says that Herman Ouseley produced a report on the Bradford riots. He did not. He was commissioned a year before to produce a report on race relations in the city. The riots happened on 7 July 2001 and his report was published on 12 July 2001. It has been generally presumed that that was a report on the riotshow he could have done it in four days, I do not know.
Nevertheless, 7 July 2001 was a black day in the history of Bradford. The pictures that were flashed around the world were tragic. They massively damaged confidence in the city, drove away potential investors and appalled members of the public in Bradford, whatever their background.
When people come to Bradford, they are often told that we have a proud history of welcoming immigrant communities going back 150 to 200 years. During the 1850s and 1860s, Irish people came and, in the late 19th century, so did east European Jews. After the second world war, Polish, Estonian and Lithuanian people arrived, and subsequently, people from the subcontinent and the Caribbean. In the early 1970s, significant numbers of Vietnamese refugees came into the country.
Refugees have not always been welcomed, however. In the 1850s, St. Patrick's church on White Abbey road would have been the first Catholic church in Bradford had it not been burned down several times by rioting Anglicans who were determined to stop a papal invasion. In the late 19th century, when east European Jewish people came over, the synagogue that they were trying to build was burned down three times by people who were trying to stop them settling in the city. It has not always been pleasant. Nevertheless, those communities were established and they integrated in society. They had one big advantage, howeverthey were white. They did not stand out. That has not been the case over the past 30 years.
The Cantle report struggles to define social cohesion or community cohesion, and no doubt a number of PhD theses are being written about that throughout the
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country. It is difficult to identify. One thing that concerned me in the report was its discussion of segregated communitiesas though some external force akin to South Africa corralled people into particular areas. That is just not true. As with all migrant communities, when people came from the subcontinent, they moved into the cheapest housing; it is standard for all migration around the world. They have never managed to escape from that poorest housing.
In Bradford, 26,000 occupied houses, largely in the inner city, are unfit for habitation. There are authorities in the northI am not complainingthat are receiving market renewal money compulsorily to purchase and demolish empty properties that are blighting the market. Those houses in Bradford are unfit for habitation but occupied, and often over-occupied. The prevalence of diseases associated with over-occupation in such communities is high. One can understand when communities wonder why those matters cannot be dealt with.
The report talks a lot about schools. We must recognise that 99 per cent. of parents send their child to the nearest school. We have schools in Bradford where the catchment area is two or three streets around the school, and then it is full. I am not complaining, but the problem has been exacerbated by the limit on class sizes for five, six and seven-year-olds30 kids in a class and if another one comes along, they have to find somewhere else.
We also have the problem that appertains to two or three years ago. A huge area of the inner city was not in any secondary school catchment area. Inner-city children were left with the places at schools that no one else wanted to go to. They often had to travel some seven miles, and that does not inspire migrant communities to think that they are welcome and valued. They think that they are being put at the bottom of the barrel.
I am not making a political point, but undoubtedly the breakdown between the Government and the teaching unions in the mid-1980s was a tragedy for social cohesion. The ending of school sports, culture and arts activities and exchanges meant that schools became ever more isolated from each other. The Government have introduced a programme of community physical education, with 40,000 coaches, which will go a long, long way. However, most competitive sport in schools is aimed at boys. Girls must be included as well. Through the avenues of sport, culture and arts, we can achieve engagement between schools and children, and get some contact going.
The Bradford cricket league is widely regarded as one of the best in the country, going back decades. Virtually every test player from Yorkshire started in the Bradford league. About 60 per cent. of cricketers in the Bradford league are from the Indian subcontinent. Not one of them, despite their skills and abilities, has ever been adopted by the Yorkshire county cricket club, even at trainee level. They have gone to other counties. Those have taken them on and they have gone into the first team. One or two have played at international level.
There is only one name for that: deep-rooted, embedded racism in Yorkshire county cricket club. If we bear in mind that the club has not been particularly successful in the past 10 or 20 years, it is not a right good
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policy either. There are resources in our communities that are not being used and that reinforces the sense of a second-class community.
The report examines at length something that was a particular issue in Oldhamregeneration and area-based initiatives that set one community against another. The history of the single regeneration budget was of each community having to prove that it was more crime-ridden, more debt-ridden, more poverty-ridden and had more ill health and disease than the next one. As an exercise in building self-esteem, that is not very good.
That situation lasted seven years. Every year, two communities, usually a black one against a white one, would bid for that year's round. That did not do anything to engender good community relations. I am glad that we are moving away from that and considering things more thematically. The themes that are relevant to one community are often very different from those that are relevant to another. It is not a simple solution, but it would be a move forward.
We need to recognise that, probably since the original community programme of the 1970s, which people who were around in those days may remember, successive Governments havethere is no nice way of putting thistried to buy off trouble by throwing grants at minority communities. That has patently failed.
Too often, it has been the old story: a grant for three years means having to find someone to pick up the funding afterwards. Sometimes, local authorities took it on. Sometimes, they did not. If they did, it lasted for three years and then it was out of the way. However, it seemed to people on the outside that the chance of accessing those funding streams was several times higher for people in a minority community than for people in a white community. The record will bear that out quite a long way.
Where do we go to take things forward? We need to try to get something across to people. I had a brief chat with my friend the Ministerand he is my friendthis morning. We need to engage with communities, so that people recognise their commonality of issues and problems. The issue is much more to do with class than race. I know that that sounds a bit old Labour and is perhaps old-fashioned, but it is a fact.
The problems that people have on poor white council estates equate to those of the poor Bangladeshis, Kashmiris or other people who live in our inner cities. They include poverty of aspiration and ambition, lack of educational opportunities and discrimination in the workplace. There are no end of addresses on council estates in Bradford where, if someone tries to get credit, they are immediately ruled out once they give the address. They do not even go through the credit scoring. The address is taken and that is a no-no.
We need people to realise that they are essentially in the same boat, but that different, additional pressures apply in each community. We need to have avenues that allow people to talk and discuss things with each other. In Bradford, we have a neighbourhood forum system, which works pretty well. Conveniently, communities overlap in a number of areas. Among the people who engage in the process, we get a great deal of understanding and progress. The trouble is that not enough people take part, and we need to see how we can expand that.
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The more people talk to each other, discuss things and realise that they have not got two heads, or nine wives, or whatever the myths are, the more we can take things forward. However, we have an incredible problem in this countryI do not know how we can deal with it, and it is one area in which I will disagree with the Select Committeewith the way in which the media have portrayed asylum seekers and have demonised communities from around the world, and with their whole agenda about Islamophobia, terrorism and everything.
Not once in the 30-odd years of trouble in Northern Ireland did anybody say that Catholic terrorists were responsible, yet news programmes repeatedly use the phrase "Islamic terrorists". We have a situation where white communities think that every Muslim is a potential terrorist, Muslim communities think that every white person will attack them because they think that they are a terrorist, and resident communities feel threatened by the reaction of the media and of other people to incomers who are asylum seekers. That is not a recipe for people being at ease with each other. It is a recipe for social uncohesion, not for cohesion.
How do we get the media to be more responsible? The report suggests that
"local authorities and other local agencies use their advertising and promotional budgets to encourage the local media to promote social cohesion".
That sounds a bit like blackmail, like saying, "If you don't print this, we'll withdraw our advertising." I may have misread it, but that is a bit of a dodgy way to go. Something needs to be done about the way in which the media, particularly some of the red tops, portray the issues. One used to expect a higher standard from the broadcast media, not least because of the regulations, but some are slipping a long way from what one would regard as acceptable standards.
Andrew Bennett : I think the Committee was keen to emphasise the evidence from Nick Carter of the Leicester Mercury, who made it clear that, for his newspaper to succeed, he had to appeal to the whole of the community. In appealing to the whole of the community, he was after their advertising and after their readership. He wanted more good stories about social cohesion, rather than bad stories, and his experience was that that sold newspapers.
Mr. Rooney : We need to impress on people the economic benefits not only of a resident mixed community, but of employing and engaging with those communities. About a year ago, I hosted an event in Bradford attended by 250 companies. They were quite staggered to learn of the purchasing power of the minority communities in Bradford. Organisations such as Tesco, Sainsbury's and Morrison's realised long ago that, if they were going to attract customers from those communities, they needed to have people working for them who were from those communities: it was not altruistic, but economic. In a number of banks, building societies and similar organisations, we now see at least as many ethnic minority faces as indigenous. There are all sorts of levers that we should use that are not about legislation. Legislation has a role, but all that it can do is to punish people if they do not do what we want them to, whereas we need to change people's minds and attitudes.
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My next pointI see that the Minister has his defence all readyis that last year, the Government gave £539 million to local authorities nationally for youth services, but local authorities spent only £300 million: 60 per cent. of what the Government gave them. I do not know about my colleagues, but I get extremely fed upI nearly used a word that I should notwith every patch of grass in the constituency having a "No ball games" sign on it. Kids are being driven away from areas on which people have played for decades. I am not boasting about this, but I grew up in a poor family on a white council estate with a patch of grass in front. In the winter months, that was our Wembley, and in summer it was our Lords. If we had not had that, I do not know what we would have done, but I do not think that we would have been up to much good. If we continually deprive children of places to play and meet, we will reap the reward that we will deserve.
Bradford city councilGod bless ithas just decided to take somewhere between £2.3 million and £3 million, depending on how one looks at it, out of its community budget. Notionally, that is a local authority decision and, therefore, not the Minister's responsibility, but actions such as that impact on the community plan, the neighbourhood renewal plan and the local strategic partnership plan, and undermine lots of initiatives that are about building social cohesion, so it is an issue for the Government. I hope that representations are being made through the Government office that it is a direct dereliction of the commitments that councils have made to the Government to deliver on floor service targets in poor areas.
In our authority area, there is a ward called Ilkley, of which lots of people have heard because of the Yorkshire anthem. It is the 35th richest ward in the country, whereas 12 of our wards are in the bottom 10 per cent. A few years ago, Ilkley decided that it did not want to be associated with Bradford and that it wanted to move to the North Yorkshire authority, but that campaign stopped dead when Ilkley found out that the subsidy on the lines from Ilkley to Leeds and to Bradford exceeded the council tax income of the whole town. We pour money into the 35th richest ward in the country for commuting, while we leave inner-city communities desperate and desolate. Inequality, whether for reasons of race, income or whatever is a non-starter. We will never achieve anything with social cohesion until we seriously address those inequalities.
Richard Younger-Ross (Teignbridge) (LD): First, I must declare an interest, as I do in all these debates, as my wife, who works for Devon county council, is currently seconded to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. She is thoroughly enjoying her work.
It has been an excellent debate. I think that it has been excellent because we have an excellent and challenging report to work from. We have heard a lot about housing. The Minister for Housing and Planning is present, and he will probably say in his defence that the new draft Housing Bill will change the quality of accommodation. It certainly contains good measures, which we have debated at length in the pre-legislative
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scrutiny committee, but the housing issue will not be resolved unless we start to build more homes. Until the Government tackle that programme and come up with proposals to build properties, whether in inner cities or rural areas, the tensions will not be relieved. They will persist until we have enough homes of good quality, because newly arrived communitiesusually those from ethnic minoritiesand the poorer people will always end up in the homes that are not fit for habitation. Sadly, the Government have failed to tackle that issue so far. Perhaps in his response the Minister for Housing and Planning will enlighten us on how we are to have more homes that are fit for habitation.
The hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) sounded half apologetic for speaking in the debateunnecessarily, because he made some good points. Like him, I represent a south-west constituency and, probably like him, I was contacted by my local papers after Trevor Phillips made his comments a couple of weeks ago. I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman recalls that some years ago The Observer published a document about racial hatred and racial abuse in the United Kingdom. What surprised most people was the fact that if one is from an ethnic minority, one is more likely to be racially abused in the south-west than in London. There are a number of reasons for that. Partly, it is because many people are racists, and in our areas there are fewer people for them to abuse, so each person's chances of being targeted are higher. It is a problem.
In addition, there is a tendency among councillors of all parties to believe that racism is an inner-city problem. They have seen what has happened in Bradford and Oldham and elsewhere and they think, "That is their problem, not ours. We are glad that we live here; we do not have such problems." However, we do. Some excellent work has been done in Devon and Cornwall by a former Labour councillor, John AnthonyI hate to tell the Minister, but he has left Labour; it is not that he is no longer a councillorwho works on racial equality. Excellent work is being done in building links between communities in Exeter and in south Devon, so that we do not suffer problems in the future when we try to integrate people.
To give an idea of the problems that we encounter in rural areas, let me tell hon. Members that when I first contested Teignbridge in 1992, I was out canvassing Widecombethe place, not the right hon. Lady of a similar nameand came to a typical small cottage. The lady who came to the door was stereotypical of a Devon character. She was fairly short and fairly round, with rosy cheeks; she had on a pinny and she stood on a flagstone floor. My previous campaign had been fought in Chislehurst, where I had regularly come across National Front members in the outlying areas close to Lewisham. The first thing that that lady said to me was, "It's all the fault of the foreigners." Usually, when somebody starts like that I, like most politicians I suspect, back track as fast as possible and move on because there is no point in having the argument.
However, it was the end of the day and I was slightly tired, so I spoke to her for a little longer. I had not seen any people from ethnic minorities in Widecombe; there were none there in those days, and it turned out that her complaint about the village being destroyed by foreigners referred to the fact that people had moved in
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from Newton Abbot, about six miles down the road. If somebody who is just from a different place is seen as an outsidera "foreigner"how much more difficult will it be for somebody who is demonstrably different, whether gay or with a slightly different skin colour, to settle into such a community?
I do not criticise those communities, they are wonderful places where if something goes wrongone's house floods, for examplethe neighbours will work hard together to help. They are very supportive. However, what comes with that is that they can also be frightening or intimidating to outsiders. That is why it is important for councils in rural areas to recognise that the recommendations and points made in the Select Committee report apply to them and not just to inner-city areas.
I hope that the report is part of an ongoing process and not just a one-off. If we are to tackle social cohesion, we must have an understanding of the matrix of society. We must also be in touch with the zeitgeistthat is a terrible word and I hate it; I should say with the spirit of the time. We must have a clear understanding of structures and interrelationships, and of how people feel.
Parts of the report recommend that more research should be done, and it is important that the Government act on that. Without going through all the recommendations one by one, I hope that the Minister will say, "Yes, there is good reason to do that."
I have to confess to slight disappointment by this debate. It is wonderful that the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Housing, Planning and Local Government Committee undertook the report, but it is a cross-cutting matter and it is a shame that Ministers from other Departments did not have the opportunity to hear this debate. We have concentrated on housing, but we have touched on education and health, and it is important that those Ministers implement the report. Paragraph 13 states:
"Social cohesion should be seen as a long term issue to be considered by all agencies."
That is entirely right and very important. To effect that, the Government will have to work harder in their cross-cutting Departments. What seems to happen at the moment is that the cross-cutting teams try to impose the central will and the Departments try to resist it. Somehow, the Government must resolve the blockage between the different civil service Departments in cross-cutting areas. Unless we have joined-up governmentall Governments have tried to achieve that and have always had difficulty in doing so, so the problem is not newwe will not get to the bottom of the matter in time.
I want to make a couple of points about recommendations 4 and 5. Recommendation 4 states:
"Local authorities and other public agencies need to develop a vision for the provision of services which ensures that they serve different communities . . . Any decision on the funding of a new initiative and the location of a new public facility needs to be tested to ensure that it will promote social cohesion and avoid segregation."
"All funding applications for new . . . facilities such as schools, hospitals, leisure/community centres, etc, should be closely scrutinised from a social cohesion standpoint."
That is entirely right and, again, I hope that the Minister accepts that. However, the implicationthe Minister may comment on thisis that if a school is built in a
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location that covers the catchment area of different communities, whether those communities are ethnic, on a white council estate or in posh suburbs, that might not be the cheapest or most convenient location in which to construct it. The funding formula that follow projects must be able to take account of additional costs that may accrue by enacting that recommendation.
I was a member of the Standing Committee on the Fire and Rescue Services Bill, and I notice that the report contains a couple of good examples of where the fire services are working with the community. Page 18, on the case study of Oldham community fire station, says:
"Initially the brigade funded a single uniformed community cohesion outreach worker to develop a network of contacts within other organisations working in the various communities."
A few pages later, paragraph 75 says, on youth provision:
"Other public agencies including the fire and police services have also become involved in promoting social cohesion among young people . . . 'Fire service personnel have also been recognised as possessing unique qualities, which they can bring to the process, by virtue of service provision to all, regardless of colour, religion, age or social classification.'"
When we considered the Fire and Rescue Services Bill, we were approached by the chief fire officers with a request that the new combined fire authorities should have the general power of well being. We pressed that as an amendment to the Bill, and it was rejected. There is a danger in the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004 that fire service chiefs do not believe that they can undertake that work because it is outside their remit. It is very important that the Government make it clear to the fire services that they can undertake such work, because they are in some ways in a unique position to help social cohesion and resolve problems in that regard.
On education, the report highlights a dilemma and a problem in current Government policy on faith schools. The Government have been on the record as saying that they want to see more faith schools. There are Members of different persuasions who have different views on that, and there is a body of opinion on education that says that there should be no faith schools and that schools should all be the same, although that is not my personal standpoint. There are some good examples cited in the report, and it highlights a couple of important issues. Recommendation 17, on paragraph 58, says:
"The Department for Education and Skills should commission a survey into the relative performance of multi-cultural schools aimed at dispelling any concerns that they perform any less well than mono-cultural or single faith schools."
I am not too sure whether, if the Department does that research, that will necessarily be shown in all cases. There are unique reasons why single-faith schools can be high achieving, although I am aware of a single-faith school in my constituency that had a very bad Ofsted report a few years ago.
The report goes on to say that of the single-faith schools,
"few tended to promote social cohesion unless there were determined policies to promote integration through the curriculum."
That is the absolute nub of the matter. If we are to have single-faith schools, it is important that they work to integrate and bring about social cohesion. It is
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absolutely vital that they are part of the community; they cannot just separate themselves off as if the community does not exist. In my constituency, there are good examples of Catholic schools that have a large intake of non-Catholic pupils, and vice versa, which is the division that tends to be found there. My mother is a Catholic, and I remember when I was young the prejudice against Catholics that the hon. Member for Bradford, North (Mr. Rooney) spoke of earlier. Such prejudice is relieved only by having people of different faiths, different communities, different races and different ethnic backgrounds learning together and playing together. I hope that the Minister has not prepared his entire response in advance and that he can enlighten us on the Government's thinking on faith schools.
Finally, on asylum and the National Asylum Support Service, Committee recommendation 46 states that
"any review of asylum policy by the Home Office should incorporate an examination of those cases where the current dispersal policy is alleged to have damaged local communities."
The Committee did not go far enough on that point.
A private care home in Teignmouth, named Dun Esk, used to house elderly people, but because the care in the community policy did not provide sufficient elderly people to send there, the owners decided to turn it into a place for asylum seekers. At the time, it was a controversial move. However, once under way it was successful. Having overcome the reaction of the local bigots, the faith communities worked together to provide education and support. They also needed to provide clothing, because the allowances were never adequate for people who arrived in nothing but what they stood up in. However, under the Government's and NASS's policy, it was decided that the home was in the wrong place, and they stopped sending people there. As a result, the home eventually went bust and had to close.
The Government need to reconsider their asylum distribution policy. They need to consider whether the places where people want to set up homes have the support of the communities. If they do, such people should be encouraged; we should not be hidebound by regulation. We should not use the regulations to say that someone is doing a good job but in the wrong place, and that they can no longer continue. That is nonsense. My one criticism of the report is that it needs to go further on that subject.
Mr. John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con): Social cohesion is vital, and it is the subject of a lengthy report and an interesting debate. Given that the hon. Member for Teignbridge (Richard Younger-Ross) declared his wife's interest in Devon and the Deputy Prime Minister, I should draw attention to my own entry in the Register of Members' Interests. My wife also works very hardnot least, and disproportionately so, in taking care of my two beautiful little boys.
Social cohesion depends on what unites people. In the opening speech from the Chairman of the Select Committee, we heard that it can depend on what people share. At the apex, perhaps, is the sense of a common identity, which springs from the idea and reality of
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community. Communities are not accidents. They are not the artifice of Ministers, not even one as diligent as the Minister for Housing and Planning. They are natural things that spring from the sense that people have of the things that unite them.
I suggest that communities are built on three pillars. First, they are constructed on the collective consciousness of the people who reside and work in particular placesa manner, mood and local culture inspired and informed by the collective wisdom of ages, transmitted from one generation to another. They are embodied in local institutions, customs, language and folklore.
Secondly, communities are the result of the familiar touchstones of enduring certainty. They are about aesthetic experience, the built environment and landscape, but also about communal facilities. They are about shops, recreational opportunities, parks and libraries, local doctors, schools and newspaperswe have heard how important they can beand about pubs and clubs and all those other things that people enjoy in their locality. Communities are also about institutionschurches, local councils and the host of little platoons of community groups, charities and voluntary organisations, each with its own intricacies, civilities and courtesies, which collectively the building blocks of civilised life.
Thirdly, community is about the ability of settlements to adapt to change and to assimilate incoming residents. Community is about the social mobility that springs from that acceptance of newcomers. Robust and confident communities appreciate the opportunity presented by blending long-established and new populations, but change should, ideally, be incremental. The built environment is as good an example of that as any. All that we build should add to what is there. It should be in scale and in character with the established settlement. It should be appropriate and should often be vernacular. It should always be determined by the people of the community.
Sadly, the modern history of our towns and cities is one of the growth of soulless, ubiquitous townscapes incapable of generating the shared pride and communal investment on which cohesion is built. I am sad to say that journies to towns across Britain will reinforce that impressionthat reality, for many of us.
The report illustrates the fact that Government and local government have an important part to play in reinvigorating our towns and cities and in rebuilding social cohesion where it has been lost. That is about what the Government do and do not do. My greatest criticism of this Administration is that it is always there when we do not need it, with another petty regulation and another tax rise, but never there when we do, when a community needs support or when we need to see a local policeman.
Mr. Hayes : The hon. Lady may say that that is ridiculous, but it is pretty hard to find a policeman in many of the villages in my constituency. They are a rarity. The local police do a fine job, but their resources are overstretched. For that reason, the relationship between the law and the people is in jeopardy, because
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people's fear of crime becomes exaggerated, and the response to crime, when it occurs, becomes ever more uncertain. It is therefore important to say that people should have a reasonable expectation of those sorts of public services, but people in many of our communities are becoming more and more disappointed about their delivery.
Ms Buck : There is a lot of common ground between us, but if he is to be absolutely fair, the hon. Gentleman must concede that the delivery and scale of public serviceswhether we are talking about crime and policing, education, or many other services delivered by local governmentand the investment in communities to which he referred are evidently greater than they were several years ago.
Mr. Hayes : We could have a wide-ranging debate on that subject alone, but with your perspicacity and diligence, Mr. Deputy Speaker, you would quickly call me to order. Let us explore it for a moment, however, with your indulgence.
It is undeniably true that investment in a whole range of services has improved. It is, however, more questionable whether, in the experience of many of our countrymen, outputs reflects that greater investment. I draw the hon. Lady's attention to comments made by the hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew), who always speaks with insight and charm in these debates. People in rural areas are probably rather less happy about
Mr. Hayes : The hon. Lady shakes her head, but people in rural areas are probably less happy about, for example, response times from the necessary services. It is very hard to deliver effective public services in a sparsely populated rural community, and I am yet to be convinced that the Government, or previous Governments, have taken sufficient account in their allocation of resources of such challenges. That might apply to various health services; it certainly applies to policing. I had a meeting with the chief constable and the chairman of my local police authority only yesterday, just a few yards from this place, about exactly those challenges, and they expressed the most profound concerns about the resources that they have to deliver high-quality public services in the very rural county of Lincolnshire.
Ms Buck : I am conscious of the wise words of my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) that we must be careful not to draw too rigid a distinction between urban and rural communities. However, let us take an example that has been dear to the hearts of rural and urban communities: post offices. There is a danger of a mythology building up that rural communities are harder done by, because it is an inevitable geographical fact that rural dwellers have to go greater distances to get to services. However, London has had a significantly greater share of post office closures than anywhere else in the country. If we investigated a number of public services, we would find that, despite the sparsity debate, it is urban areas that have greater deprivation, greater need and a lower level of service in comparison with that need.
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Mr. Hayes : I take the hon. Lady's point about post offices. She is right that urban post office closures have been a real concern across the country. I suppose that the response to her point was embedded in the point itself when she said that access to facilities in rural areas is often more difficult simply because of where people live and the sparsity of services. That is exacerbated for the most vulnerable citizens. Half of rural parishes do not have a bus services. Many villages in my constituency do not have one. People are particularly disadvantaged if they do not own a car, or cannot share one or get a lift, and if their village has no shopas a number of my villages do notno church and none of the facilities that I have described as being some of the vital components in building community life and delivering social cohesion.
I am not saying, however, that this is a simple matter. The picture is much more complex than that. I am simply reinforcing what the hon. Member for Stroud said: some of the problems faced by rural areas are as profound, in those terms, as urban problems are. The problems may differ in detail, but they are certainly not different in degree. I know that the hon. Lady, with her usual generosity, will be willing to accept the measured compromise that I have expressed in those few words. [Interruption.] I think that we can take that as an acclamation.
In addition, the Government need to be careful about their current preoccupation with choice, freedom and opportunity, which seems to permeate every speech and announcement that we hear from them these days. I know that the Minister is at the centre of Government and is new Labour personified, and I think that he needs to be careful about that, too. There are real issues about the balance between those important things and things such as entitlement, security and certainty, which are also important elements in delivering individual fulfilment but also collective contentment and social cohesion. I simply warn the Ministerhe may say that he does not need warningthat there will be difficult decisions to make about choice. I say no more than that. He will probably be able to elaborate on that in his no doubt thorough winding-up speech.
What rings true from the report and the response to it is that the Government can be an important facilitator of cohesion in bringing together disparate groups within a community. I think in particular of the voluntary sector and private sector. Often what people do is duplicated and there is an apparent barrier to sharing information and good practice. The Government can be helpful in that respect in a variety of ways.
Housing was mentioned a number of times in the debate, including by the hon. Members for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) and for Bethnal Green and Bow (Ms King). I do not want to be too complimentary about them, because last time I was nice to one of the hon. LadiesI cannot remember which oneI was accused in the press of flirting, and I have never understood quite what that meant.
Both hon. Ladies identified housing as an important aspect of delivering social cohesion. If social mobility and the mitigation of disadvantage are important elements in delivering social cohesion, housing must lie at the centre of our considerations. The acquisition of housing, both to rent and to own, is an important element in giving people a feeling that they have a stake
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in their community. The issue is not solely about home ownership, although it is partly so. We know that between 85 and 90 per cent. of people want to own their own homes, and it is important that we provide as many of them as possible with the opportunity to do so.
Ownership lies close to the centre of the issue, but we must also deal with the unacceptably significant problem of homelessness. I know that the fact that we have now reached the dreadful figure of 100,000 people in temporary accommodation weighs on the Minister's conscience every night when he goes to bed. That figure really is not appropriate, and I am sure that he will want to do something about it. However, it is vitally important that we address the issues associated with homelessness and hidden homelessnessI draw attention to Crisis's good work and report on that subjectas a means of delivering a greater sense of shared identity and a greater feeling among people that have a real stake in their communities.
I make no bones about the fact that I would like the Minister to consider shared equity as a way of dealing with affordability. I would like him to create a more flexible and fluid housing market so that people can move more easily from social housing into market housing, thus freeing social housing for the homeless. I would like the Minister to be more innovative and imaginative in his approach to housing. I know that being in government is tougher than being in opposition, but it is time for fresh thinking about those issues and that has a direct bearing on the consideration of the report and its aftermath.
We also heard about diversityI mention the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow again because she summed up the issues clearly. She said that as diversity had grown, simultaneously, cohesion had often reduced. That is an interesting observation, and we must be bold in addressing it. The real question is whether those trends are coincidental or whether one is the consequence of the other. If they are consequential, how do we overcome the challenge?
I do not have any great solutions, but I suspect that the right way forward involves trying to emphasise the things that unite us, so that they become more significant in our considerations, than the things that divide us. There are a lot of ways we could do thatfor instance, through education, by building good links between communities, through aspiration and housing, as I have said, or through employment practice. The process must not be top-down, however, but bottom-up, with the Government acting as a stimulator and facilitator.
It is probably true that in communities that have experienced problems for a long time, in the way that the hon. Lady described, some of the lessonsI put it no more strongly than thatare better understood and have been learnt more effectively. It is interesting to compare, as she did, the experience of east London and its long history of assimilating new groups with the history of Oldham, which is highlighted in the report and which was mentioned by the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Bennett), who is the Chairman of the Select Committee. Perhaps we need to be better at exporting good practice and sharing across institutions some of the knowledge and understanding
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that has been gleaned in communities where things work as well as they can. I am not sure that the mechanisms for that are well developed. I often think that cross-authority, cross-organisation work of that kind is not as well founded as it might be, not even the sharing of good practice across local authorities, let alone across health, education and social services, the voluntary sector, the private sector and local authorities, in different geographical areas.
Ms King : The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. I just want to underline the fact that various other local authorities are using the practice developed in Tower Hamlets, but he is right that we need to improve and extend best practice.
Mr. Hayes : I take the hon. Lady's point, which does not require further comment.
I was in Wandsworth last week to look at that excellent borough's work on hidden homes. I know that the Minister is familiar with it. That outstanding project has made available many new social flats and houses for homeless people. I went into some of them, and they were absolutely superb properties that, frankly, anyone would be happy to live in; I certainly would. I ask the Minister to consider whether that example could be exported. Wandsworth estimates that there may be as many as 10,000 properties across London. I cannot validate the number, but the programme is certainly worth considering. It is another example of the kind of shared practice to which the hon. Lady draws attention.
I expect that the Minister will want give us a long and detailed summary, so I shall just review some of the specific points made in the report. I note the comments about youth provision, which are timely, given that the Prime Minister did not seem to know what the youth service was during Prime Minister's questions. He was asked a question by my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) about the youth service but did not seem to understand what it was, which is slightly worrying.
The youth service is important. Youth provision is heavily associated with the objectives of social cohesion, which, as the hon. Members for Denton and Reddish and for Bethnal Green and Bow, and others, said, must intrinsically transcend all the agencies of the Government and local government. As has been said repeatedly, it must be not a bolt-on but an intrinsic consideration in the formation and delivery of a range of public policies. Recommendation 25 deals with the youth service.
In recommendation 30, the Select Committee draws attention to the importance of social cohesion in major strategic Government initiatives, and it mentions the Northern Way. I spoke on social cohesion at the Northern Way conference in Leeds recently. It seems slightly remiss that it is not at the heart of that initiative, although it is mentioned, and that it does not play a large part in the sustainable communities plan, which seems peculiar. The point was identified by the Committee, and I hope that the Minister will address it.
Several recommendations42, 43, 44 and 45deal with policing. I do not wish to go into great detail, except to say that under successive Governments there has been a kind of policing that is, in essence, target and
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crime-driven. That did not begin in 1997, of coursethe assumption is more deep-rooted than that. However, the result of that has been that non-adversarial policing has become harder, because of the resource implications.
Essentially, crime-driven targets, which lead to the areas with the greatest crime getting the most resources, perhaps, understandably, mean that all the work done by the police in reassuring people, going to schools and working with all the agencies that comprise communities is hard to justify against national objectives and targets, and hard to fund because of the way resources are allocated. They do that work, but it is increasingly difficult for them. We need to take a close look at how the police are funded and how we can improve their opportunity to become involved in what might be called non-adversarial police work.
Andrew Bennett : I hope that perhaps the hon. Gentleman will take a little time to consider what has been happening in Oldham. As I understand matters, one thing that Chief Superintendent Baines did was to try to make sure that the police did much more of the kind of work he has described, including reassuring communities. Some of the spin-off was that the police got far more information back from the community. As a result, they achieved their targets for reducing crime.
Mr. Hayes : That is exactly that point. When the police become involved in that kind of preventive policing, they do not simply reassure the community and deal with the fear of crime. They also develop an effective intelligence-gathering operation, which helps to prevent future crimes. In addition, they take on an educational role, particularly for young adults and children, which helps to change the culture connected with lawlessness.
The trouble with those approaches is that some are hard to measure. They have an effect but it is not immediatethere is no direct cause and effect. We need to examine the ways in which the Oldham experience, and that of other towns and cities that have gone about the same task, can become a regular part of policing assumptions. Police authorities still do not universally adopt that kind of proactive and imaginative strategy.
Ms Buck : I agree wholeheartedly with what the hon. Gentleman says, but can he assure me that in future he and his colleagues will not pore over newly published crime statistics for any that are moving in the wrong direction and then use them as a stick to beat current policing practice ?
Mr. Hayes : I could not possibly make a commitment on behalf of my colleagues in the shadow Home Affairs team, because they are wiser and better informed than I could ever be. I will say that we need a measured approach to criminal statistics. They can often be interpreted in many ways. Indeed, that is probably true of most Government statistics.
I want to raise another issue before I finish. It is almost the dream that dare not speak its name, and it certainly has not spoken its name in the debate. I mean the dream of assimilation. We have heard a lot about diversity, which is important. It is good that we have
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heard a lot about it. However, at some stagetoday is not the day, because there is not time and a thorough and considered debate is neededthe House should talk about the issue that Trevor Phillips put on the agenda as effectively as anyone could have done a few months ago. That is the issue of whether we want an assimilated societyone that he described as placing greater emphasis on cohesion than seems to happen now.
I mention that because it is an important debate that is needed. I draw no conclusions and am not making bold statements today, but the House needs to talk about it much more openly and honestly than we have done so far, because it has great ramifications.
For me, the greatest purpose of politics is the mitigation of disadvantage. The issue of poverty has been raised. I do not think that social cohesion is possible while there is extreme poverty. I do not think that social cohesion is possible unless there is a real sense of social mobility. I think that that must be acknowledged.
The hon. Member for Bradford, North (Mr. Rooney) speaks too rarely. We should hear more of him. I think that the Minister has been a little unkind in not letting his able assistant give forth to the House more regularly. I think that the real reason is that the Minister thinks that he might be put in the shade.
Mr. Rooney : I hope that the hon. Gentleman is not flirting with me.
Mr. Hayes : I do not know what that means. I am not even off base camp when it comes to flirting.
As I said, for me the greatest purpose of politics is the mitigation of disadvantage. The greatest challenge in assisting human happiness is to repair where there is damage and sometimes to recreate social cohesion through social renewal. That means family. It means community. It means strong values and shared pride. All those things are necessary if we are to have true social cohesion.
The Minister for Housing and Planning (Keith Hill) : I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Bennett) on securing the debate and on bringing the important subject of community cohesion to the attention of the House. I am pleased to respond to the debate, not only, properly, as a Minister in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister but as a Member of Parliament who represents an extremely diverse constituency in south London. The 2001 census showed that almost 40 per cent. of the residents in my constituency are from a black or minority ethnic background.
It has, generally, been a good debate, wide ranging and well informed. I am sure that the House will forgive me if I single out the excellent contribution by my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, North (Mr. Rooney). It was a superb vindication my choice of him of Parliamentary Private Secretary.
Many important issues have been raised, and I will seek to address them. Where I am unable to respond to a specific issue, I will write to the hon. Member concerned. It goes without saying that Ministers in other Departments will follow our proceedings carefully.
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I pay tribute to the Select Committee and its Chairman for the thorough and thoughtful way in which they approached the inquiry and explored a number of issues important for the future of our society. The Committee's report is a constructive contribution to the debate and makes a number of interesting recommendations on which I shall continue to reflect. Following the disturbances in Oldham, Bradford and Burnley in the summer of 2001, social cohesion became a key priority on the Government's agenda. I welcome the opportunity to emphasise its importance.
For the sake of clarity, I want to use the Government's preferred term, which is "community cohesion", rather than "social cohesion". We believe that it recognises that people lead local lives and that local communities must play an extremely important part in finding solutions to local problems. None of us can be complacent about community cohesion. Cohesive communities are strong and safe communities and are able to address issues affecting the social and economic well-being of all their residents.
Since 2001, we have taken numerous measures to tackle the causes of the disturbances, and we welcome the Committee's recognition of the progress that we have made. We worked in partnership with colleagues from across Government, the wider public service, the private sector and voluntary and community organisations to develop a good understanding of how to create the context in which cohesion can grow.
Since the disturbances, Bradford, Burnley and Oldham have all received significant additional funding and a range of other support from central Government and the regional government offices. All three areas have put in place robust community cohesion plans, developed by local agencies working together. We are encouraged by the commitment that they have shown. I visited the Bradford home hunter scheme, which has seen a sevenfold increase in the number of black and minority ethnic households on the housing register and a 68 per cent. increase in lettings to that group. The scheme was devised after research highlighted a lack of knowledge among people from black and minority ethnic groups about how to access social housing and negative perceptions about council housing. An action plan was drawn up that focused on, for example, reforming the allocations system by adopting a choice-based lettings scheme; improving direct communication between social landlords and black and minority ethnic communities; improving the condition and image of council estates; combating racial harassment; and promoting cross-cultural awareness.
The House will be aware that both Oldham and Burnley are benefiting from the housing market renewal pathfinders, which provide £53.5 million to the Oldham- Rochdale partnership and £68 million to east Lancashire. Cohesion has been emphasised in both partnerships. In response to a precise point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Ms King), a good example of how pathfinder money has been used to promote cohesion is the extension of a council arm's length management organisation called First Choice Homes, which provides support to people moving into homes in areas not traditionally associated with their own community. Tenants are provided with a
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package of support that includes an out-of-hours call service to housing officers and the police if they suffer any racially motivated incidents; visits by housing officers in the initial stages of their tenancy; and security measures. It is an interesting and important project. If it is an approach that proves successful, we will encourage its roll-out nationally.
Since the Government published their response to the Select Committee in July, work has continued across government to take forward this important agenda. Notably, the first part of updated Local Government Association guidance on cohesion will be published next week at a community cohesion pathfinder event. That practical guidance will be followed by strategic guidance early next year.
Andrew Bennett : Will my right hon. Friend assure me that it will be much more effective than the existing guidance?
Keith Hill : It will be, as a result of the importance that my right hon. Friend's Committee has attached to proposals of that sort. In light of the disturbances of 2001, debates such as this and his Select Committee's report, which have seized the agenda, I can assure him that the Government are already responding in a positive and practical way to many of the issues he has identified. I can also assure him that, with an expectation of early delivery, much work is continuing within government.
I was pleased to launch a joint Home Office and ODPM guidance document for those working and living in area-based initiatives last week. With reference to those initiatives, my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, North said that the guidance document was particularly pleasing as it provides helpful, practical guidance and real-life case studies for those making ABIs work on the ground. The Committee recommended that local authorities and local agencies should agree concordats with local media, setting out how they would work together. I assure my hon. Friend that those concordats will be launched soon. The launch will be deliberately low profile, so that it does not have a counter-productive impact.
As a Leicester lad, born and bred, I was interested and pleased to hear my hon. Friend's observations about the attitude of the Leicester Mercury and its editor, Mr. Nick Carter. My hon. Friend's account of its approach is very reassuring, all the more so because historically it was not always thusfar from it. I congratulate the Leicester Mercury and its editor.
My Department said that it would carry out a race impact assessment of the housing allocations legislation, and that work is being taken forward. We have also commissioned long-term research into the impacts of choice-based lettings to which we committed ourselves in our response to the Committee's report.
Further progress has also been made on the Government's community cohesion and race equality strategy, which will be launched later this year. We acknowledge that there is still much work to be done but we are determined to build on the progress that we have already madefor example through the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000. That is why we have decided that this is an appropriate time to develop
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a Government-wide community cohesion and race equality strategy, which is due to be launched at the end of the year. That will form the basis of a renewed programme of action across Government and more widely to build community cohesion and reduce race inequalities.
The strategy will emphasise that although there is a key role for all central Departments in promoting community cohesion, it is organisations at local and regional levels that will be the key drivers of change. We need strong local leadership from all sections of the community, and we recognise the need to incentivise local authorities to break down barriers between different communities. That is why we have taken various measures, such as revising the comprehensive performance assessment framework from 2005 to assess a council's approach to promoting community cohesion as part of the safer and stronger communities judgment in the corporate assessment.
Mr. Hayes : What specific steps have the Government taken to encourage the communication of good practice between authorities and the sharing of information between other agencies? That is fundamentally important, as various hon. Members have said.
Keith Hill : The hon. Gentleman will recall my reference to the fact that only last week, I launched a good practice guide on the basis of the experience in community cohesion contained in area-based initiatives. That kind of guidance, and the drawing together of good practice, will be part and parcel of all Government initiatives in this field. It is fundamental that we draw on what has succeeded so that it can be as widely communicated as possible.
On the CPA process, although we do not propose to weight cohesion in the way that we weight some of the major service areas, we expect that cohesion will be a consideration in any judgment on each service area, where it has been identified as a weakness. For local authorities where cohesion is identified as a problem, we expect to see improvement plans in place throughout all service areas. In other words, we want to encourage what might be termed a golden thread of cohesion running through all improvement planning.
Indeed, we strongly believe that community cohesion principles need to be embedded in all mainstream services and that that is not just about special projects. As I have already mentioned, we have revised the CPA framework from next year to assess a council's approach to promoting community cohesion. At local level, various authorities including Calderdale and Blackburn with Darwen have cohesion targets in their local public service agreements. Oldham has a target on fairness in employment and service delivery and a second target on building cross-cultural links between schools.
In particular, my Department has been working to incorporate community cohesion in mainstream policies in the fire service, which was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish and the hon. Member for Teignbridge (Richard Younger-Ross). We have encouraged the fire service to play an increasing role in that agenda, including through local strategic partnerships and in partnership with neighbourhood
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wardens. Firefighters have been working with young people through a range of schemes, and community fire stations have made their facilities available for community use. Beacon status with funding was awarded to Cheshire fire authority in recognition of its wide-ranging work to promote community cohesion.
Furthermore, we have worked with the Local Government Association, the Home Office, the Audit Commission, the Commission for Racial Equality and the Inter-Faith Network to revise the LGA guidance on community cohesionanother example of the ways in which we are trying to spread good practice. That was raised by the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes). The first of two documents will be published in November, and it sets out practical steps that local authorities and their partner organisations can take to build community cohesion into their policies and delivery of services, as well as providing examples of good practice. The second publication will provide strategic guidance to local authorities and their partners and will be published early next year.
We all recognise that central and local government and all our partners have more to do in order to build community cohesion. That means finding new ways to work together so that we can deliver even more efficient and effective public services. Local area agreements represent a radical new approach to improving co-ordination between central Government and local authorities and their partners, working through the local strategic partnership. Bradford will be one of the 21 pilot local authorities. That is a positive development, because local area agreements will simplify the number of additional funding streams from central Government going into an area, help to join up public services more effectively and allow greater flexibility for local solutions to particular local circumstances.
Community cohesion is a cross-cutting issue that concerns several central Departments. It is a key priority for my Department because of our commitment to sustainable communities. The Select Committee report expressed concern that many regeneration initiatives target very local areas and have generated resentment among residents in other areas who feel that they are losing out. However, we believe that the national strategy for neighbourhood renewal places regeneration within the right framework to ensure that it does not cause such tensions. It recognises that community participation is vital in regeneration projects, in order to be able to empower local people and to explain why different choices are made. It also enables local strategic partnerships to allocate funds according to local priorities, working across neighbourhood boundaries if they consider that appropriate. The Government's aim of narrowing the gap between the most deprived areas and the rest should also reduce the potential for tensions that can cause conflict in local communities.
We strongly believe that area-based initiatives can stimulate community cohesion if adequate support is provided. The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the Home Office have worked together to issue guidance both for those designing area-based initiatives and for those delivering them.
My hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) raised the issue of capacity building. I absolutely take her point about the
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long-term need for it, but I must point out that the neighbourhood renewal fund provides funding for capacity building to community empowerment networks, which are represented on the NRF local strategic partnerships. Community engagement is central to the national strategy for neighbourhood renewal.
Andrew Bennett : Does the Minister recognise that capacity building has to go on and on? One of the sad things in many cases has been that as capacity has been built up, and people have gained skills, they have used half those skills to help the community, and the other half to move on to different communities. Therefore, we have continually to increase the supply of people with skills in each community.
Keith Hill : My hon. Friend is entirely right. That is what I acknowledged in my response to my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North. The point is very well taken, and I undertake to take it back into my work as a housing and planning Minister. The issue of housing was raised by my hon. Friends the Members for Denton and Reddish, for Regent's Park and Kensington, North, for Bradford, North and for Bethnal Green and Bow. Overcoming segregation in housing is central to building community cohesion. One of the Select Committee's key recommendations for the ODPM was to review our present policies on choice-based lettings. We do not necessarily agree with the Select Committee that there is what it calls a
"tendency for freedom of choice to lead to greater segregation."
However, we recognise that that is a legitimate concern, and that is one of the reasons why we have embarked on a race impact assessment of the allocations legislation, including choice-based lettings. That will be completed and published by the end of the calendar year.
We are committed to giving all social housing tenants more choice over where they live, as we believe that is the best way to build communities that are stable, viable and inclusive. Choice in housing should not be restricted only to those who can afford to rent or buy their homes privately. We are pleased that the evaluation of our pilot scheme has indicated that the introduction of choice-based letting has been widely welcomed both by applicants and the pilot authorities, and that it has led to increased participation by members of the black and ethnic minority communities.
Perhaps I may now pick up one or two points made in our debate. My hon. Friends the Members for Bethnal Green and Bow and for Bradford, North raised issues about education. There is no doubt that the long-term solution to preventing social tensions from developing in the community lies partly in the classroom. Understanding other cultures is the starting point to promoting greater tolerance, which is why we developed the citizenship curriculum. This programme of study specifically provides for pupils to be taught about the diversity, origins and implications of national, regional, religious and ethnic identities in the UK, and about the need for mutual respect and understanding.
Our education policies are all about trying to improve the quality of education provided for all children, and about giving all parents choice about their child's
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education. However, we acknowledge that achieving these aims alone will not necessarily achieve greater community cohesion, which is why we have developed a range of initiatives to ensure that community cohesion is a key factor in all admissions policies.
Local education authorities are required to publish an annual composite prospectus that gives details of all the maintained schools in their area, including each school's admissions policy. Many schools also use open days and taster days for prospective pupils as a means of dispelling misconceptions. Furthermore, the code of practice on schools admissions encourages faith schools to give priority over at least some places to local children of other faiths or of no faith.
My hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish specifically referred to new schools. As highlighted by the Select Committee's report, the building of new schools provides an excellent opportunity for making real progress in tackling segregation. This Government have invested an unprecedented level of capital in school buildings, and we are pressing LEAs to ensure that full advantage is taken of this opportunity to provide facilities that serve all communities in an area.
In its guidance on building schools for the future, the Department for Education and Skills specifically asks LEAs to consider their plans alongside other key local strategies such as those for regeneration, and to consult the widest range of local partners and communities. Similarly, the DFES has been working to ensure that new school designs incorporate areas that will enable community activities to take place and be inviting to members of the local community.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow laid heavy emphasis on the importance of youth provision. I shall, if I may, add a personal observation, which is somewhat risky for a Minister. I totally agree with her that youth provision should rise even further on the Government's political agenda. Funding for the youth service comes from the youth and community sub-block of a local authority's education formula spend. In 200405, that provides possible resources of £539 millionan increase of more than 5 per cent. on last yearalthough I take the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish that that available spend is not always deployed. Let me add, however, that a youth Green Paper for 14 to 19-year-olds is being drafted, which is evidence that I hope will reassure my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow that policy on young people is clearly a priority throughout Government.
I have already talked about housing but, with the indulgence of the Chamber, let me pick up on a couple of other issues in the limited time available. We are committed to mainstreaming community cohesion in housing policy. This issue is obviously a key concern for us. As my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish said, Ted Cantle considered segregated housing to be one of the main causes of the 2001 disturbances.
In addition to choice-based lettings, we are developing various initiatives to ensure that community cohesion is mainstreamed in housing policy. First, we have also developed the housing market renewal pathfinders to tackle low demand for housing in deprived areas. These are beginning to make excellent
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progress in areas of low demand and should contribute to overcoming segregation in housing by providing a larger selection of housing types.
We have also developed an action plan on lettings and cohesion. It focuses on research that is being undertaken and on pilot projects that are looking at the causes of conflict and the barriers to cohesion. The output from those work streams will inform the development of a more strategic approach to housing and community cohesion. The action plan is a starting point for that process. It brings together in one place the actions that ODPM, the Home Office and others are taking to develop the community cohesion and housing agenda.
Ante-penultimately, I turn to policing. We recognise the important role that the police can play in supporting local communities. Home Office Ministers have provided strong support for police activities in relation to communities and community cohesion. We have heard a positive account of the role of the police in Oldham and Burnley from my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish. The Home Office is working closely with the Association of Chief Police Officers to promote learning and best practice examples. The Metropolitan police's step change programme is a good example of a neighbourhood approach to policing, and the Home Office has supported its development.
Within the national policing plan for 200407, cohesion is supported by the key priority to provide a citizen-focused service that responds to the needs of individuals and communities and inspires confidence in the police, particularly among minority ethnic communities. My hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish referred to the pilots already going forward under the national centre for policing excellence, which is currently piloting work around the police response to community cohesion. The work is being carried forward
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in eight areas: Leicestershire, Burnley, Bradford, Bournemouth, Ilfracombe, Tower Hamlets, Newcastle and Edinburgh. The results of the implementation and trial phase will form the basis of guidance to the police service, which will be delivered by the NCPE in autumn 2005.
Penultimately, on translation services, which my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish raised, the Government's response to the Select Committee highlighted a meeting of the cross-government working group on translation service, which is being led by the Home Office, which has been tasked by that group to devise a set of concrete proposals for sharing translation and interpreting services. We expect that work to be completed next year and the group will meet again to discuss how to take the proposals forward.
Today's debate has provided an excellent opportunity to reinforce the Government's commitment to a better future for our communities, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish for raising this important subject and permitting me to set out the Government's policies.
Andrew Bennett : By leave of the House, Mr. Deputy Speaker, may I thank you for chairing our proceedings? I also thank my hon. Friends and Opposition Members for their participation and the Minister for answering so many of our questions. I assure him and the hon. Member for Teignbridge (Richard Younger-Ross) that the Select Committee will return to the issues in due course because, if Select Committees are to be effective, they must keep nagging at the Government.
Question put and agreed to.
Adjourned accordingly at twenty-four minutes past Five o'clock.
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