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


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 500-508)

27 JANUARY 2004

MR GARETH DANIEL AND MS JOYCE MARKHAM

  Q500 Mr O'Brien: What about community centres provided by the local authority?

  Mr Daniel: The local authority funds community centres, which are accessible to all groups in the community, and they are promoted to all groups in the community, but they are not the property or the possession of any one particular group.

  Ms Markham: I have to say, that mirrors the situation in Harrow as well. We do not have the funds to provide centres for all the groups that want them, but we do promote, through the use of our own premises, whether it is libraries or schools, a comprehensive letting process which enables all communities to share the facilities and maximise the facilities that are there. I would add also that, in Harrow, just before Christmas, our Hindu and Muslim communities signed a friendship protocol about joint work they wanted to do to benefit their communities and share facilities. I think there is a huge amount of positive work going on between those communities, some of which comes from the communities themselves, and all we do is provide them with some facilities so they can formalise that.

  Q501 Chris Mole: Has the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 made any difference to the way the councils in your partnership treat race issues?

  Ms Markham: I have to say, I think not. Because of the complexities of our communities, it is an issue which has to be at the front of our minds all the time, and, whilst we have done a lot of work ourselves, with our local CRE, and nationally with the CRE, to use the legislation to check our forward procedures and policies, in terms of the way we interact with communities, I do not think there will be any discernible difference. If I may say so, what is a little more concerning to us is, whilst there are many good things happening now, particularly between ODPM and Home Office, in a joined-up approach, there is still a lot of split language used. Very recently, the Home Office have used social cohesion, community cohesion, civic renewal, there is a whole variety of language there, I think, which is making some of these issues very difficult to deal with practically.

  Q502 Chris Mole: What is your view of the hypothesis that councils are still focused on the equal opportunities agenda rather than the community cohesion agenda?

  Ms Markham: That paints a picture of local authorities as they were 20 years ago, but every local authority that I have worked in, in that period, has moved well into the diversity agenda, and a lot of them now are embracing community cohesion wholeheartedly, so I do not recognise the picture, I am afraid.

  Q503 Christine Russell: How serious do you think the problem is that people do not really understand what community cohesion is all about? Is that a real problem? You seem to be hinting that it is. If it is, what are you doing to improve the understanding, particularly perhaps with young people, and what more do you think the Government should be doing?

  Ms Markham: I think it is a piece of language which has not been helpful to us with our Pathfinder, quite frankly. At the very early stage, we got signed up a definition and a vision of community cohesion, but most people at least nod and say, "Yes, we can see this," but then we have moved people into saying "This is more about a concept and a series of commissions to move into things," which is where we started to get some enthusiasm going. I am afraid we recognised we had a problem and we parcelled it up and slightly pushed it to one side, because it is an incredibly complex issue for people to get their minds round, and frankly we did not want people worrying about that. I did not want people worrying about that in our Local Strategic Partnership. Last night, they signed up very readily, as part of their work programme for next year, to needing a community cohesion reference group to check out some of the work that is happening through that. I was very pleased that 12 months' plugging away, thinking about community cohesion and its issues, did not flag up the question on what is that now, because I had forgotten. At least I think some of the concepts in it are starting to embed, but I think it is a very difficult issue, but we should not shy away from difficult issues, I think.

  Mr Daniel: In terms of your question about what more the Government could do, could I just add, the issue about the language and the terminology is an important one, but I do not think it should distract us from the bottom line, that what we are trying to do is build successful, prosperous and harmonious multi-racial communities. If you have all of those things in place then you will get community cohesion. I think sometimes the language is a barrier to popular understanding of what it is we are trying to achieve. We are trying to ensure that all members of the community, regardless of their race, gender, religion, background, sexual orientation, or whatever, feel fully engaged in the community of which they are a part and in which, for the most part, they are taxpayers and council taxpayers. In terms of Government initiatives, I think we welcome the fact that the Home Office and the ODPM and others are putting an emphasis on community cohesion. Probably what we do not need is too many more 18-month, bolt-on programmes which tackle issues in a rather short-term way. Most of what local authorities do all of the time is about community cohesion. I work in a borough where there is an ethnic majority population and we are the only local authority in the country which has an ethnic majority workforce. I think that is contributing as much to community cohesion in the borough as any nationally-driven programmes. I think we could always do with a little bit of extra money as well.

  Q504 Mr O'Brien: Further to the previous question about social cohesion in your boroughs, how are you measuring what you do in terms of promoting social cohesion? The Home Office issued some directive on this. How are you doing that?

  Ms Markham: I think there are three aspects to this. In terms of the local indicators that the local authorities are using, we have started to put some emphasis on looking at different communities and their attainment levels in schools and their take-up of particular programmes, and whatever, I think as described by the delegation from Coventry. We have been working on that. If you have only some short-term issues to deal with, in terms of the Pathfinder itself, in achieving the objectives of the Pathfinder, in our case these are linked very strongly to the communications theme and to embedding things in a sustainable way into mainstream work. The third area is, and I think this has been touched on by other evidence you have heard this morning, this is a long-haul issue and it is about a lot of very small steps. As a previous witness feared, I have a lot of reservations about the Home Office guidance on collecting information about community cohesion.

  Q505 Chairman: Alright. The Home Office have got it wrong, what will be the alternative?

  Ms Markham: I think we need a far more sophisticated series of measures about different communities' access to services, funding, their attainment, about how local authorities are going out and talking to communities.

  Q506 Chairman: That is about them getting equality of service, which obviously is important, but I thought the idea was to see how cohesive a community is, so surely that must be the interaction between those communities?

  Ms Markham: I agree. It is about the interaction of those communities, but I think you can get a lot of sense of these indicators from looking at the pattern of school admissions, school selection procedures, selection procedures in a whole series of other things, if you want to try to collect hard information. As other witnesses have said, I think some of the key indicators here are some of the soft indicators about what is happening out in communities and listening to those communities.

  Q507 Chairman: Briefly, regeneration. Plus or minus for social cohesion?

  Mr Daniel: It is a very definite positive. Over the years, I think, all the West London authorities have accessed every conceivable competitive funding regime which has ever been invented by the United Kingdom Government or the European Commission. We are experts at putting together these perverse beauty contests, where we try to demonstrate how really awful it is living in our communities, in order to access the money that we need. Because we do not have the residential segregation, there is not in West London generally, I think, an issue that some communities feel left out and other people are benefiting. Because we have very mixed communities anyway, that means that poor people live side by side with poor people of different colours and races, as well as affluent people living side by side with people of different backgrounds. There is not the same competitive edge, I think, that you have identified, and which Ted Cantle's Report identified in some northern communities, where there was a feeling that some people were being left out. There is a real issue though, and this is where the community cohesion agenda is particularly important, about recognising the needs of disaffected white communities, particularly on some of the more marginalised, more peripheral council estates, where I think there is a real issue about ensuring the community cohesion initiatives tackle the entire needs of the community and not just the perceived disadvantaged minority.

  Q508 Chairman: All these special funds, is that much better than giving local authorities a bit more to start with?

  Mr Daniel: We would prefer the money through our main programmes, thank you very much.

  Chairman: On that note, can I thank you very much for your evidence. Thank you.





 
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