Examination of Witnesses (Questions 153-159)
17 SEPTEMBER 2003
PAUL SHEEHAN,
RODNEY GREEN
AND BEN
BROWN
Q153 Chairman: Can
I welcome you to the second session of oral evidence into the
whole question of social cohesion which the Committee is looking
into. We have not only been taking evidence from people in Oldham
but also trying to compare what is going on in Oldham with what
is going on in other parts of the country. Can I invite our witnesses
to identify themselves for the record please?
Mr Green: Rodney Green, Chief
Executive, Leicester City Council.
Mr Sheehan: I am Paul Sheehan,
Chief Executive of Calderdale Metropolitan Borough Council.
Mr Brown: I am Ben Brown. I am
Assistant Director for Asylum Services in Haringey London Borough.
Q154 Chairman: We often let witnesses
have a chance to say something by way of introduction. Do you
want to do that or are you happy for us to go straight to questions?
Mr Green, would you like to say a few words?
Mr Green: No. I think if I started
I might talk for an hour so I am quite happy to take questions.
Mr Sheehan: I will take a gamble
on waiting till the end.
Mr Brown: I should like to say
that one of the major issues for us in Haringey is asylum services,
being the borough that in London has the largest amount who come
in, and how that affects social cohesion is very important to
us. That is the message that I am here to try and get across and
what I also wanted to say on behalf of Haringey Council is that
the last thing we want to do in coming north is to be seen in
any way as being competitive because there are clearly issues
for us to try to establish and address that go right across the
country.
Q155 Mr Clelland: May I ask you all,
what makes a cohesive community?
Mr Green: I think a cohesive community
is a community that has naturally many cross-links, where people
from different race, age, background, feel free and happy to mix
together in housing, in education, in leisure facilities. One
test of that in my experience in Leicester is the willingness
and ability to talk frankly and openly face to face about quite
sensitive issues. If your language in a community is very politically
correct, if you are treading on thin ice all the time and always
being polite, that is not a cohesive community; it is a careful
community. Let us take an issue which is fraught with difficulties:
marriage. You have a love match approach, so-called, in the west.
You have perhaps a three-generational family working together
to arrange a marriage in a different culture. You have the concept
of forced marriages. Can you talk frankly about these things without
ending up feeling that there is a row about to break out? In a
healthy, cohesive community you can. You can address very complex
issues: faith schools, ghettoes, choice. Masses and masses of
cross-links are at the heart of a cohesive community.
Mr Sheehan: I think dictionaries
define "cohesiveness" as a force which binds together,
so anything which tends to pull things apart could be seen as
a threat to cohesion. The textbook stuff that the LGA and the
Home Office and others have come up with is communities that have
a common vision, a preparedness and ability to work together towards
something of a common aim, and strong and positive values given
to different cultures, different attitudes, different opinions.
As Rodney has said, where these are tolerated and spoken of openly
and with fairness and equalness they tend to be indicators of
a cohesive community, so the things that bind rather than the
things that pull apart.
Q156 Mr Clelland: When you talk about
cohesion and integration, are they the same or are they different?
Mr Sheehan: They are different.
Mr Brown: There is a difference.
Staying with the theme of cohesion, there is no doubt that Haringey,
for example, has been a long-standing community in terms of its
diversity, and has seen many groups come in at different times,
where they have had to fit in for a variety of reasons. Doing
that to date in Haringey has been quite reasonable because people
have been fitted in and been able to understand where each other
is coming from. The problem now is that people have come in so
fast and in larger numbers that the indigenous population are
finding it hard to be able to understand some of the cultures
and mores of the groups that are coming in, and unless we work
on that and are able to pull that together better we are heading
for problems.
Q157 Mr Clelland: Is there a difference
between community and social cohesion?
Mr Green: I think there is a slight
difference in all these phrases. Whether they are important differences
I am not so sure. The emphasis in my use of social exclusion and
social cohesion (and everybody uses these words slightly differently)
is really on the economic and social dimensions. The community
cohesion tends to add to that; it is not different from it. Add
to that the race dimension and I think the idea of integration
can be interpreted, particularly by minority communities, as implying
a loss of identity, which is why I prefer the phrase "cross-links"
rather than "integration" because integration can mean
you are just absorbed into the lowest common denominator. These
nuances in debate can be very significant, depending on who your
audience is.
Mr Sheehan: There is nothing I
would add to that.
Q158 Chairman: Can I turn your attention
to Leicester to start with? It has been suggested that Leicester
is a success story. Is it a success story and, if so, why?
Mr Green: I think that is a very
unhelpful way of looking at community cohesion. All of us have
a sense of acknowledging that there but for the grace of God there
could be difficulties in any complex, diverse community. Leicester
is Britain's most diverse city. In many ways it is a success story
but if that implies complacency then that is an extremely destructive
and unhelpful basis. What have been the factors that have made
Leicester make progress over the last 30-odd years? Remember Leicester's
peculiar history: Idi Amin 30 years ago expelling very large numbers
of Asians who had generally an entrepreneurial background, who
were often prosperous business people, being relocated against
their will and choosing, for various historical reasons, to come
to Leicester. The big changes that Leicester faced 30-odd years
ago were with a very promising group of people from abroad who
have generally been successful in establishing themselves economically.
That may be quite different from other patterns of immigration
elsewhere in the UK. We see the black and ethnic minority community
in Leicester as a major asset to the city. Some of the children
perform at the very top of our educational attainment, and so
the construction of this community cohesion being a problem would
be an alien concept in Leicester. It is an asset that needs very
careful management.
Q159 Chairman: You are almost suggesting
that the issue in Leicester is the groups of people who came to
the town and that that is what has produced good results. Are
you saying that Leicester as a city managed things itself rather
well?
Mr Green: Not initially, no. The
record speaks for itself. Those whom we have interviewed in recent
years regarding the history of Leicester within living memory
recall when schools had to be released at different times in Leicester
30-odd years ago because of the potential conflict that would
arise between them. We have not had an easy run and what we have
done is to learn over 30 years where other communities in Britain
may have only had five or ten years to learn. This is not a simple
project. In my view community cohesion is a permanent feature
of life in Leicester. It is the single most important issue on
my agenda as the Chief Executive of the city council and it will
be for the rest of the foreseeable time. It is not a three- or
five-year project where, if you just do these five or six things,
somehow you will come to the end of it and you will have a stable
and cohesive community. The potential for that to unravel is always
there because injustice and inequality and commercial and economic
lowering in performance can begin to affect any city and re-stoke
these issues.
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