Examination of Witnesses (Questions 480-489)
27 JANUARY 2004
MS STELLA
MANZIE, CLLR
JOHN MUTTON,
MR DARRA
SING AND
MR MARK
TURNER
Q480 Christine Russell: In your opinion,
you have just mentioned Indian groups, why do Indian groups not
consider council housing as a viable option for them?
Mr Singh: You have stumped me
there, I am afraid. I think that is a very good question. It is
perhaps to do with levels of aspiration and background, I am not
sure, and also to do with opportunities through performance in
the education system to be able to access income and then access
owner-occupation, rather than relying on social rented housing.
Those are some of the factors, but that is not a particularly
precise answer to your question.
Q481 Mr O'Brien: In earlier questioning
you referred to deprivation and allocation of regeneration funding.
What mechanisms have been put in place to ensure that the allocation
of regeneration funding is targeted in such a way as to avoid
allegations of inequity in the authority?
Ms Manzie: Certainly the way in
which funding has operated in recent years has been that we have
had the very close involvement obviously not just within the Council
but of partners outside the Council. For example, now, in terms
of our discussions with the Coventry Partnership, which is our
Local Strategic Partnership which has all the major players in
the city involved, including health and housing, and so on, those
agencies have a very major level of involvement, in either any
bidding mechanism we are going for or Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy,
or whatever it happens to be. The other people who are involved
very closely are the voluntary sector and community sector, through
various representative mechanisms, and they are also involved.
Clearly it is something as well that all councillors are conscious
of, because councillors represent a whole range of wards within
the city, some of whom naturally tend to benefit from this kind
of regeneration money and others who do not. That comes back to
the point made in my previous answer about ensuring that, where
possible, if there are fragmented groups or communities who fall
into the category of being deprived, for one reason or another,
even though it is on a relatively small area basis, we have tried
to focus that regeneration strategy money very carefully in those
areas and not just en bloc in very obvious areas. For example,
in Coventry, much as in many other areas, we have identified 31
priority neighbourhoods, but the key is, and I think Darra referred
to it in a previous answer, one cannot take one's eye off the
ball, as a council, off mainstream services. You have to ensure
that you are trying to performance-improve mainstream services
right across the city, in order to be able to justify to all the
community the additional funding that is going into those specific
deprived areas.
Mr O'Brien: In December last, a few weeks
ago, the Home Office published guidance on how social cohesion
should be addressed in Area-Based Initiatives. How should the
Office of the Deputy Prime Minister take this forward, have you
any views on that?
Q482 Chairman: Come on, give a thumbs
up or thumbs down, fairly quickly?
Mr Singh: Thumbs up.
Ms Manzie: Yes, definitely thumbs
up.
Mr Singh: I think the trick is
going to be to see how that can be rolled out through implementation
at a national level and indeed at a local level.
Q483 Mr O'Brien: How are you trying to
address those recommendations?
Mr Singh: The big point on that
is actually to start off from discussions with communities about
understanding the solutions and working up solutions with local
community organisations and then using funding to tackle deprivation.
That is one of the measures that we have taken. Just one example,
in Dallow, one of the wards in Luton, a local group of different
communities got together and set up a learning trust, and accessed
SRB funding plus Objective 2 European funding and have developed
a multi-purpose learning centre, which they run themselves now
as a group. That is capacity-building put into that group to enable
them to understand and organise themselves and access resources
and use those effectively, as well as actually running a centre
which is really very positive for local people.
Q484 Mr O'Brien: Coventry referred to
a comprehensive look at the authority and their mainstream services
being applied in all areas. What is Luton doing about that?
Mr Singh: I touched on mainstream
services earlier on. Our starting-point is to look at how we perform,
as a council, and how we ensure we design services which are relevant
to all local people from a variety of different communities, and
we encapsulate that in our vision, in our long-term strategy.
That gets translated into annual plans, in which we look at the
community cohesion issues as well as other issues, social inclusion,
tackling deprivation. We work with our partners through our Local
Strategic Partnership, the Luton Forum, which has 11 members elected
from the Luton Assembly, which is a group of 600 voluntary community
organisations, working across the town, from a range of different
backgrounds and dealing with a range of different communities
and needs.
Q485 Chris Mole: What percentage of your
Council's workforce is from the BME communities and how does this
affect the make-up of the local community?
Mr Singh: In Luton, our assessment
is that the economically active minority ethnic community stands
at around 25%. Our workforce, the percentage from minority ethnic
communities is 16.6%. Of equal importance is looking at the grade
at which people find themselves, the level within the organisation.
Of the top five% of earners at the Council, eight% are from visible
minority ethnic communities. Our target was to get to 15%, so
we have exceeded that by 1.6%. We have now set ourselves a target
of 20% and we are driving towards that.
Q486 Chris Mole: Within how long?
Mr Singh: Within the next three
years.
Q487 Chairman: What is stopping you getting
there, or doing better, is it the difficulty in recruiting people,
and is that just that there are not enough people with those qualifications
in the country?
Mr Singh: There are recruitment
shortages, staffing shortages, across the range of services that
we suffer from, which I know is echoed in other local authorities
in other parts of the country, so whether it is occupational therapists
or social workers or planners, or whatever, there is a range of
challenges for us. I think there is an issue about local government
being seen to be attractive as an occupation and as a profession,
and I think we do need to do more on that. I think some work that
the LGA are looking at, and the IDA, in terms of graduate recruitment,
for example, is important. We have got an advantage in that we
have got a local university, Luton University, which is quite
a strong local access university, particularly to young Asian
women, whose parents may not be as keen for them to move away
to get a higher education, or further education, and that is a
benefit, and we are tapping into that, in terms of working closely
with them, to help.
Q488 Chris Mole: What is the basic situation
in Coventry?
Ms Manzie: We have got a very
similar situation. We are not doing well at senior levels of the
organisation, in terms of reflecting black and minority ethnic
groups. It is better at lower levels of the organisation but still
does not reflect the economically active level of the population.
It is one of the things that we are taking on board as a priority
for the forthcoming year. Certainly we believe that some of it
is, one of the points Darra made, about making the Council generally
attractive to apply for posts there. We think it is about targeting
advertising in a much more sensitive and intelligent way than
we have done, and also getting people to go out from the Council
to talk more to a whole range of communities about the opportunities
that there are available. If you took any cross-section of people,
young people or older people, and asked them about what councils
do, people are pretty hazy about that anyway, a lot of the time,
and it is a question of getting those messages over to a much
larger group of people. Much like Luton, we are very fortunate
in that we have two universities, one of which, Coventry University,
is very much focused on taking a lot of local people, from a whole
range of communities, particularly in the inner-city. That is
certainly proving helpful in terms of upping the number of graduates,
particularly in areas like social work, that is assisting us considerably,
where we have managed to increase the numbers of people from black
and minority ethnic backgrounds in that particular area.
Q489 Chris Mole: It is positive action
rather than positive discrimination, and how do you ensure that
you do not end up as a Daily Mail horror story?
Mr Singh: By recruiting, essentially,
on merit. That is the short answer. I apologise if I sounded glib,
I did not intend to, if that was what came across. One point I
would come back to you on, if I may, Chairman, is that, in terms
of teachers and the school-based workforce, but particularly in
terms of teachers, there is an issue where there is a lower level
of representation of minority ethnic teachers. That is below ten%,
which is an issue for us, given the school profile, in terms of
visible minority ethnic communities, at 43% of pupils, it is just
under ten% of teachers.
Chairman: At that point I have to stop
you, so can I thank you very much for your evidence.
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