Select Committee on Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 315-319)

17 SEPTEMBER 2003

FR PHIL SUMNER, FAZAL RAHIM AND MAHESH NIMAVAT

  Q315  Chairman: Can I welcome you to the final session of the Committee this afternoon and ask you to identify yourselves for the record please?

  Fr Sumner: I am Father Phil Sumner. I am a Catholic priest. I was the original Chair of the Oldham Inter-Faith Forum for a year.

  Mr Rahim: Fazil Rahim, Partnership Development Officer for the Inter-Faith Forum.

  Mr Nimavat: Mahesh Nimavat. I am a Hindu priest also working as Community Development Officer at the community centre.

  Q316  Chairman: Do you want to say anything by way of introduction or are you happy for us to go straight to questions?

  Fr Sumner: I sent the presentation and I presume that you have read that, so there is little point in repeating that information.

  Q317  Chairman: There is certainly little point in doing that but would you like to tell me a little bit more about what you see your role as in promoting social cohesion?

  Fr Sumner: Clearly some of the problem has to be identified with faith. I believe that we have got to get, the relationship between Christian and Muslim right, not just in Oldham but worldwide. That is a major problem for so many of us. We have the opportunity here in Oldham to do something about it. Faith has a major impact and the divisions and misunderstandings between people of faith have a major impact. Certainly here in Oldham I believe that the major conflict is not so much between people of colour; there are people from the BNP who would claim that they are very much in favour of the black community here in Oldham but their problem has been seen to be much more with the Muslim community and with Islam. We are working very definitely in response to Ritchie coming in and saying to us would we like to meet together first of all and then we came together as a group of so-called faith leaders in town. We decided that that was what we wanted to do, to meet together on a more regular basis, and that if we could not do that then we had little hope for other people from the different faith communities meeting together, so we do that in order to give some sense of leadership but also because we believe that that is what should be happening anyway. We do meet together at different times, as I have said in the presentation; we have prayed together, especially at the time when there was the war in Iraq, and that produced a very useful image. Just down the road here at the end of Union Street there is a Catholic church and we had Muslim, Hindu and Christian praying together, lighting candles (which is a very Catholic thing to do) in a Christian church praying for peace and then coming out. Unfortunately, at the end of this road there is a corner and the cars going round the bend often miss the bend and go through the wall of the church and it did cause some shock—I suppose because of attitude—as people came past and saw Muslims coming out of a Christian church, but I think it is a useful and important sign in itself just to see us praying together, to see us relating together on a regular basis. We eat together on different occasions. All that is important, just to be seen together.

  Q318  Chairman: So it is a visual thing. What else have you managed to achieve in Oldham in the just over 12 months that you have been in existence?

  Fr Sumner: So much really. Fazal is our faiths worker and that was not easy because of matching funding together. The neighbourhood renewal funding is for two years. We also had the church urban fund monies for three years. By the time we tried to get the two together, to correspond, so that we could employ somebody for three years, the money promised by the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund was running out. If we could not spend it before May of the first year, and we were getting up to March by this time anyway, then we had lost that money, so we literally had to spend £12,000 of money in the first week just to make sure we did not lose it, which was nonsense but we had to do that to enable Fazal to have a job. Even now we cannot guarantee that job for three years, which is what we want to be able to do, because we have not got enough money; in the last year it runs out. You take a leap of faith to enable that to happen. In the very climate therefore when you would think funding organisations should be supporting precisely what we are trying to do it has not been easy to get that together. We have had to take that leap of faith in the knowledge that there is that support eventually.

  Q319  Dr Pugh: You are all obviously eminently civilised and tolerant people who get together and I am sure it will do an awful lot of good, but beyond you there are communities who maybe have rather unenlightened views of religions other than their own. How do you get this spirit that you have got amongst yourselves out there in the streets? How do you spread it further? How do you make sure it permeates through the community because that is what you want to do, is it not?

  Fr Sumner: Perhaps Fazal could say something about the harvest festival and so on.

  Mr Rahim: There are people like us who are involved in working or in some capacity or in other voluntary organisations who we see everywhere. To involve people of Oldham we have organised events that people can go to and then make links with other religions. At Easter we held an Easter event and we linked it with Ramadan because people of the Christian faith fast before a feast and Muslims and Hindus, people of all major religions or people coming from any faith, fast during the year and in order to make a link with each other we invited them to this Easter event.


 
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