Examination of Witnesses (Questions 580-585)
3 FEBRUARY 2004
MR RAJA
MIAH AND
MR DAVID
HOLLOWAY OBE
Q580 Chris Mole: The violence is an interesting
thing. Sometimes when there have been flare-ups, it might be a
turf war of who is selling where, yet it might be perceived as
a battleground between ethnically diverse communities.
Mr Holloway: It can work that
way because you have certain communities which control certain
drugs. Yes, it can turn this way. Something which is about drugs
and then reflects on community cohesions does happen; you are
absolutely right.
Q581 Chris Mole: Is there a role for
youth provision in trying to overcome some of these issues?
Mr Holloway: Of course; all the
way through. There is this thing about the Youth Service. If the
Youth Service had an awful lot more resources, maybe it could
do some quite fantastic things, but the Youth Service is actually
quite an isolated service within a community. It needs to work.
The Youth Service itself does not work closely enough with schools
and there is often a barrier between the school and the Youth
Service. Even where you have a Youth Service working in a school
they do not always work together and that has to happen. Connexions
services need to work together with all this. This joined-up thinking
really needs to happen. It gets talked about, but it does not
happen that much and it is not just a Youth Service concern.
Q582 Mr Sanders: You have both had experience
of Oldham. How have things changed in that town since 2001? Are
you optimistic that enough is being done to avoid any further
tension and disturbances in the future?
Mr Holloway: I have not been up
there for about a year and a half, but I have been in communication
with the people who work up there and we have been trying to get
the money to do twinning between London and Oldham.
Q583 Mr Sanders: Oldham and Newham!
Mr Holloway: Tower Hamlets, wherever.
It is slow, but things are happening. The people who were doing
work in a voluntary position are now community cohesion officers
doing it from a statutory basis. Things are moving on. They look
at the model we have. I phoned them up the other day and they
said the model we have with Tolerance in Diversity is fantastic
and they wished they could get to the same, having young people
training other young people. Things are perhaps speeding up a
bit; I do not know.
Mr Miah: I think that there is
finally recognition that there is a problem. For many years we
could not even get it to that stage. What is unfortunate is that
people are still scared of trying out ideas they might have, trying
out solutions they have in mind and putting into practice some
of the issues which are being debated. We seem to have been having
a lot of debate for an awfully long time with very little movement
in terms of delivery.
Q584 Mr Sanders: How do you measure the
impact of your work? It seems to me that what you are saying is
that it is difficult to measure the impact of your work because
not enough is happening.
Mr Miah: On an organisational
basis the impact we measure is very straightforward. We create
positive relationships, we work with young people who have never
had a positive experience of another young person from a different
background and we support an environment where that takes place
and hopefully the measurement of our work is how long-term we
can make the relationships and whether or not the relationships
become natural or not. In a wider context, the measurement is
easy, but the local authority would be setting itself up in many
ways to fail if it set targets. The issue of why we are here is
because people lead very separate lives and there are indicators
by which we can clearly measure that: the way in which we work,
the communities we live in, the schools we send our children to.
That is a baseline and we can measure from that. Whether anyone
is brave enough to do that is something else.
Q585 Mr Sanders: Is that how local authorities
and government should measure changes?
Mr Holloway: I think they should
go out there and measure baselines and they should look for movement
and then they need to measure it over a period of time and they
need to do it in different ways[7]They
need to look at the targeting methods and in a way quantity survey.
They need to look at the quality and in some ways it is the quality
which is more interesting. It is about what this community feels
like. It is the external impression. You stand on a street corner
and have a look at that community. Do they go to the same shops?
Do they use the same shops? Is there a calm atmosphere and what
are the things which show you that the atmosphere is calm and
that people are happy with each other? It is very normal and it
is anthropology which is needed out there. That sort of thing
is needed long term and people need to be able to see what is
working and what s not and that needs to be delivered inside the
local authority so that they can see what is happening in an area,
this is where the resources are needed, this worked here, let
us try it again there. It is back to the pod idea. It is a very
good idea if you have an infrastructure underneath, if you have
experts who can go in when there is tension. That is very necessary
and it can work very, very well. It all needs to be catalogued.
Very little is catalogued.
Chairman: On that note, may I thank you
very much indeed for your evidence.
7 Through participant observation and research as well
as assessment of target achievement. Back
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