Examination of Witnesses (Questions 548-559)
3 FEBRUARY 2004
MR RAJA
MIAH AND
MR DAVID
HOLLOWAY OBE
Q548 Chairman: May I welcome you to the
Committee, to the second session of our inquiry today into social
cohesion and ask you to identify yourselves for the record, please?
Mr Holloway: My name is David
Holloway. I am Director and Treasurer of Tolerance in Diversity.
Mr Miah: I am Raja Miah and I
am the Senior Officer for Peacemaker.
Chairman: I always give witnesses the
chance to make a statement, or if you are happy we will go straight
to questions. Straight to questions.
Q549 Mr Betts: It is two years now since
the Cantle report and one of the things that urged in particular
was that young people should be the focus of a new debate about
social cohesion. Do you think there are any signs of that starting
to happen?
Mr Miah: I think young people
were involved in a debate about social cohesion long before any
of the disturbances took place. What I think is really unfortunate
is that young people continue to debate, continue to have ideas
but in terms of practical support, nothing really happens. There
is very little movement in response to the debate young people
continue to have.
Mr Holloway: I would endorse that
entirely. They are actively involved in that debate on the street,
they are involved by other people in that debate as much as having
a debate themselves. They are often in the hot seat. I find that
young people are often manipulated by all sides of race arguments
into a position and a lot of the time they often end up being
the victims of that position but are seen as the perpetrators
because they are in the frontline of something which is hidden
underneath. There is an iceberg situation there.
Q550 Mr Betts: So your view is that young
people are debating these issues, but perhaps the systems are
not allowing them to take that forward. From my experience, just
looking at it, yes, there may be debate going on, but the groups
who are debating, particularly the teenagers, are groups of white
teenagers, groups of teenagers with Asian backgrounds, black teenagers.
There does not seem to an awful lot of mixing in those discussions.
Mr Miah: The mixing we are involved
with is all very much artificial. Our young people do live completely
separate lives. They grow up in completely separate and different
communities and that bringing-together is artificial.
Mr Holloway: In London it is slightly
different, because the communities are much more mixed down here.
Those debates happen in schools and are beginning to happen more
and more within the citizenship curriculum. However, I think that
most of their teachers do not have the training and are also afraid
of the issues. A lot of the time I am told, and that goes for
when I go up North and do any of this work, that these are very
sensitive issues, maybe we should not raise the question, it is
better left alone. That is what I find. So it is adults and that
is why we work through young people. Young people can open those
debates and have those debates a lot more easily. We find professionals
and adults in the community, very frightened by those debates.
Q551 Mr Betts: Is there a role then for
organisations, for local government to try to create opportunities
for more relationships to take place, whether school twinning,
through joint sports activities, through joint community developments,
creation of youth parliaments and a whole range of different things
which the Cantle report suggested might be ways forward? Is that
happening and should it happen?
Mr Miah: Absolutely; it should
happen. How is it happening? There are different levels at which
it takes place. On a far more cynical level, what we see is some
twinning projects which go on very, very artificially, the one-off
coming together of two groups of young people and then they go
their own separate ways. It is about trying to create that meaningful
relationship and that takes far more time and commitment than
many of the things I have seen over the last two years.
Mr Holloway: I would echo that.
It depends. We work in schools a lot of the time and this is a
young person's organisation. They go out and make the links in
schools and go out and do the workshops. Where we are invited
back over time, there is a bit of impact and the impact starts
to percolate within the school or into the community. It rarely
seems to work in communities[1]
rather in schools and colleges. I think you need a certain amount
of social manipulation to bring people together. Yesterday I was
involved in a local community where they had a community play
and the play was just very, very white. The people putting it
on were colour blind; they had not made it white or anything like
that. We had to go out and talk to schools and ask how we actually
sell it to some of the black parents and black young people in
the schools and how we do that sensitively and bring them in.
We are working up to bringing them in.
Q552 Mr Betts: I am trying to crystallise
what you are saying. There is a role for various organisations,
governmental, etcetera, to play in trying to create the opportunities
for young people to come together. However, they should not try
to impose their view on young people, but facilitate, make sure
people who have ideas receive support in carrying them forward.
Mr Holloway: Young people need
to work out their own ideas and that is fundamental to the way
we work. You can say anything you like in the workshops in which
the young people participate. There are ground rules around that,
but they have to work it out.
Q553 Chairman: You are saying to us that
it works because you have the framework of the school. In a sense
you have got over that artificial problem, the school is there
and the pupils in the school have to co-operate. That may be alright
in parts of London where you have a pretty mixed group of children
in the school, but there are some northern cities where the schools
are almost totally segregated anyway. How do you deal with that
situation?
Mr Holloway: If you look at the
specialised schools agenda at the moment, I am involved in schools
in Hackney where they are gradually specialising and what you
have there is schools taking students from one school to another.
There is no difference in taking different groups from one school
to another. I have done this in Bradford and it works. We have
taken from a school which is predominantly Asian to a school which
is white, or a group from each and make that happen. You can do
it in communities, you can do it in youth clubs, that sort of
thing, but you have to have the will to do it. You also have to
have the money to do it and you have to have the expertise and
these things are very rare. You do not find a lot of it. You do
not find a lot of it in the schools, etcetera.
Q554 Chairman: If you do it in that situation
of taking pupils from one school to another, does that actually
last after you have done it? In other words, is the contact between
those groups of youngsters maintained after the slightly artificial
situation you have created?
Mr Holloway: Not if you do not
create it in a long-term situation and build it up. In the schools
where we have worked, it works and people carry on. I have never
done it with two schools and been able to spend that much time
on continuing it, but I am certain it would work. It is just a
matter of maintaining the project and doing it over a period of
time and allowing the young people to do it themselves and take
over the process. You may set up the forum situation, but then
allow them to take it forward.
Q555 Chris Mole: Both your organisations
are working to break down barriers between communities. What would
you describe as the single biggest barrier which you have to overcome
in addressing that problem?
Mr Miah: I think recognition of
the complexity of the problem amongst people who are involved
in decision-making. We have not reached the situation overnight
and the solution is not going to be found overnight. Simply bringing
groups of young people together by facilitating twinning programmes,
working in communities, will not overcome the problems we have.
Our problems, especially in the towns where we operate, are very,
very clear. The fact is that people lead very separate lives and
we need to move from that to a situation where people lead lives
which are more interwoven. It is the recognition that we are not
going to get there overnight and trying to get there in small
stages with small steps. That recognition does not exist and that
is a failure there.
Mr Holloway: It needs concerted
effort. It needs the money. The money we have in the organisation
in which I am involved is incredibly short-term, local funding.
It is not enough to do it. There is also a huge reticence on the
part of councillors, church people, various schools. The government
seems to be moving forward and to have reasonable policies. Those
policies need to happen at a local level. I find, going outside
London and going up to Oldham and anywhere like that, that I am
going back about five years. I find it much more difficult to
do that work there. There is much more reticence about it, much
more fear, nobody has done it[2]or
few people have done it.
Q556 Chris Mole: When we were in Oldham
and in evidence we have heard from other places, a question was
being raised about whether segregation is reinforced by different
cultures being served by different facilities. There might be
a Pakistani community centre and none of the other cultures uses
that. Is that a problem which you think can be overcome?
Mr Miah: Yes, it is straightforward
to overcome that problem for anyone who is brave enough to tackle
it. The issue is single group funding; the issue is funding black
community groups to take care of black people. You take away the
responsibility from the mainstream service providers to service
those communities and often there is an inside layer of local
politics involved in that.
Mr Holloway: Absolutely. It needs
a determination. I would certainly support single issue groups,
single race groups at times, but there has to be a very good reason
for that. If it is a faith group and it is a faith which is actually
specific to one culture, then okay, it is their own community's
response, but certainly if anything is funded by local government
or any sort of state institution, it should ask those questions.
Why should it be? What is the institution doing which is being
funded? Is it reinforcing that segregation or is it overcoming
it? Is there a good reason for it? Is the overall, long-term aim
going to work towards a cohesive society?
Q557 Chris Mole: Is it not the problem
though that we are responding to a demand from minorities because
they were not being serviced by the mainstream?
Mr Miah: Of course it is and that
is why the issue of single group funding should not be seen simply
from a defensive point of view, in essence from black and minority
groups, but should be seen as an opportunity for mainstream service
providers who had previously failed to access these communities
to change the way they service these communities.
Q558 Chris Mole: Once you have that in
place, how do you then move back to that individual institution
becoming part of the mainstream again?
Mr Miah: In the issue of single
group funding, black and minority ethnic group organisations,
surely they are there to support members of their communities
to access mainstream services. That should be their primary responsibility.
They also have a cultural responsibility and a religious responsibility
and they will maintain that responsibility, but their aim should
not simply be to service their own communities it should be to
capacity build their communities to access mainstream service
provision.
Mr Holloway: I often feel that
there is a sub-agenda. Often there are community leaders who are
not actually community leaders. If you actually talk to the community
without those community leaders there, you get a very different
story. I have worked for an awfully long time in the Asian community
and most of those I have worked with push towards going for integration
because they feel they need it for their economic and their social
development. They are very aware at the same time of losing their
identities and it is a complex situation, but they certainly do
not want to be segregated and they certainly do not want that
in the majority in schools and in those types of situations.
Q559 Mr Clelland: Are you saying that
voluntary organisations such as your own are the best agencies
to deal with the problems of social cohesion, or are you saying
these things ought to be the responsibility of the mainstream
services?
Mr Miah: The responsibility is
shared, but the leadership should come from the local authorities
in the towns where we operate.
Mr Holloway: Ideally they would,
but what you get is people like me, probably Raja as well, and
other people, putting loads and loads of voluntary effort in because
we have a passion, because we believe that things are wrong and
we have seen so many things going wrong. Very few people actually
support us in that. I cannot get a lot of money to support the
work I do. Ideally it is mainstream services and it is mainstream
services backing that up. If the voluntary sector within a community
has an understanding of what is going on, they[3]should
be funding it. If they have expertise, they should be funded.
Ideally it is mainstream services because that is where the bigger
money is. Social cohesion work is not mainstream in Tower Hamlets,
where you would think it would be. We do not get funding from
the Connexions Service, which is the biggest funder in the area.
We do not get funding through the Youth Service. You would have
thought this was bread and butter for those people. Slightly more
is done in the northern towns than is done in London in that way,
certainly when I have worked up there. Even so, it should be a
mainstream Youth Service issue, it should be a mainstream Connexions
service issue.
1 Sustained workshops. Back
2
Remedial work. Back
3
The statutory sector. Back
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