UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 45-ii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

OFFICE OF THE DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER:

HOUSING, PLANNING, LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND THE REGIONS COMMITTEE

SOCIAL COHESION

Tuesday 3 February 2004

MR F MAGUIRE

MR R MIAH and MR D HOLLOWAY

MS M McKEE, MR S McALEAVEY and MS F McCANDLESS

MR C BAIN and MS H HERKLOTS

Evidence heard in Public Questions 509-636

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister:

Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Committee

on Tuesday 3 February 2004

Members present

Andrew Bennett, in the Chair

Mr Clive Betts

Mr David Clelland

Mr John Cummings

Chris Mole

Mr Adrian Sanders

________________

Memorandum submitted by Emmaus Church of England

and Catholic Primary School, Liverpool

Examination of Witnesses

Witness: Mr Frank Maguire, Headmaster, Emmaus Church of England and Catholic Primary School, examined.

Q509 Chairman: Good afternoon. May I welcome you to the further session of the Committee's inquiry into social cohesion? Could you introduce yourself for the record, please?

Mr Maguire: I am Frank Maguire. I am Headmaster of Emmaus Church of England and Catholic Primary School in Liverpool.

Q510 Chairman: We have had your evidence. Do you want to say anything by way of introduction or are you happy for us to go straight to questions?

Mr Maguire: I am happy with the paper you have in front of you.

Q511 Mr Clelland: It is obvious from your evidence that you are proud of your school's academic successes and so you should be. How do you achieve a balance in the classroom between the attainment of pure academic standards and an awareness of all the different communities in our increasingly diverse and complex society?

Mr Maguire: Firstly, there is complete unity between the two denominations in the class, so all the children are educated together in collective worship in assemblies and everything else. We do also introduce the children to other faiths by visits to synagogues and to mosques and we have people who come in and talk about Judaism and other such things. We try to bring in multi-cultural aspects to all of their studies and introduce them to successful and responsible black and ethnic minority role models throughout the curriculum.

Q512 Mr Clelland: Are you able to measure how successful your efforts have been in order to get your Christian children to understand other faiths and to accept other faiths?

Mr Maguire: I would say it is difficult to measure that. On the behavioural aspect and how children inter-relate with each other, it seems to be very successful.

Q513 Mr Clelland: It "seems" to be successful. How do you know? If you cannot measure that, how do you know?

Mr Maguire: We do not have any racist incidents at all that I can recall. Children like each other well. In simple terms, they work well with each other and respect each other. Nothing has ever been brought to my attention where someone has referred to another person from another background in any derogatory fashion. We introduce children to good role models from other areas and we have not had anything at all which has been a problem in that area.

Q514 Mr Clelland: When the school was set up, did it affect the other schools, particularly perhaps with falling rolls in the area?

Mr Maguire: One of the reasons the school was so long in coming into being was because the Liverpool City Council were loath to open a new school at all, because they said it would affect the contraction in numbers round about. The children were actually travelling to 64 different schools before the school was opened, so it seemed reasonable, if you had to travel, three, four, maybe five or six miles to a school, that you should have one of your own. It was only because of the working party, which was led by the Church of England vicar and a Roman Catholic priest, that the archdiocese picked up the baton and ran with it. Only later on, when permission was granted for a school by the DfES, did the City Council give some form of backing to it. Two schools were affected directly by the opening of the school: one about three miles away and one in another education authority where parents had actually driven to take their children. Now things seem to have settled down into a normal situation.

Q515 Mr Cummings: Could you tell the Committee why the churches decided to set up a multi-denominational school? What were the challenges you faced in developing a school which spans two religious denominations?

Mr Maguire: It came about because in the centre of the estate is St Cuthbert's church, which is Church of England. The vicar at the time was the Reverend Trevor Latham and he was very much part of the community and people tended to go to him for advice and for support in any kind of community project. Since he was in situ at the time, he was the person who led the campaign for a school. They then took this further to both the archdiocese and diocese and at the time Derek Worlock was the Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool and David Sheppard was the Anglican Bishop. They were very good friends and had worked together on many ecumenical projects on Merseyside. I think they saw this as an opportunity to do something which would be fundamental and quite different. They were the driving force in this plus the two clergy who worked together. That is what gave it its drive and its thrust.

Q516 Mr Cummings: Was there any great friction in the area covered by this school?

Mr Maguire: Friction from and between whom?

Q517 Mr Cummings: Between the two denominations.

Mr Maguire: Prior to the school opening?

Q518 Mr Cummings: Yes.

Mr Maguire: I do not think there was particularly. The estate where the school is situated is an interesting one. It is probably the biggest private housing estate in Western Europe. People just seemed to be living almost without a community base or a focal point.

Q519 Mr Cummings: Do you know of any communities within Liverpool where there is friction?

Mr Maguire: There is less today than there was many years ago, but certainly Liverpool was not without its differences of opinion between the two churches, that is for sure.

Q520 Mr Cummings: Do you believe that your model could be applied more widely? Can you envisage a religious school involving Christians and Muslims? You mentioned that you do involve your pupils in visits to mosques and temples.

Mr Maguire: Anything is possible, but you would need to have an absolute desire for that to take place. You would also need to have total commitment from the people who were leading those organisations.

Q521 Mr Cummings: Have you tested the water at all?

Mr Maguire: No, we have not, except that parents whose children attend our school have a great desire for a secondary school for my children to transfer to, because they are so pleased with the way things move there.

Q522 Mr Cummings: Have you received any approaches from the Muslim community or the Indian community to involve themselves in the school?

Mr Maguire: No. There is not a strong Muslim element in the surrounding area. We have just two children from a Muslim background in the school at the moment.

Q523 Mr Sanders: You say that the school is made up of 50 per cent Church of England and 50 per cent Roman Catholic intake. To what extent does that mix reflect the religious preferences of the population in the area where the school is based?

Mr Maguire: The only evidence I would have is on the number of applications we have seen at the school and there is generally a higher level of Catholic applicants than Church of England ones. That may indicate to some degree the denominational allegiance of people in the community. I have no evidence of information other than that.

Q524 Mr Sanders: You have no idea about non Catholic or non Church of England.

Mr Maguire: I would suspect that in the community about one third of people have no particular denominational background, although I have to say that more people do seem to be seeking baptism now that the school is on the estate and requires children from a church background to attend.

Q525 Mr Sanders: How much of that do you think is the school and how much of that do you think is religious conviction?

Mr Maguire: Thank you for that question. I shall take that back with me and give it to the parents at school. One might say that the school has had a kind of evangelical effect in the area because of the admission policy which requires you to be baptised either Church of England or Roman Catholic. If we can take cynicism out of it for a moment, what I would say is that if people are of a mind to have their children baptised in order to gain a place at the school, it seems to me that once they have established the children in the school, they do become committed to the spirit of the school and to our ethos and in many cases are very supportive of the church which they then attend.

Q526 Mr Sanders: I do not doubt that at all, but what about the parents who are not successful in getting their children into the school. Are they then still assiduous church attenders?

Mr Maguire: Probably not, but, strange to say, some of them do, a small percentage. I know this because later on, when places have become available in the school these people have been successful in their application. The answer would be: probably not.

Q527 Mr Sanders: If you are over-subscribed, how do you select?

Mr Maguire: When we are over-subscribed, we take on a degree of faithfulness or support of their churches which would include commitment to the churches in how they work, or whether they have played some kind of a role, or to do with church attendance and so forth.

Q528 Mr Sanders: How does that work for somebody who perhaps has to work on a Sunday?

Mr Maguire: It is very difficult for them; very difficult. However, they are entitled to put in an application with an accompanying letter and ask for a special discretionary clause to be applied and so on. The governors view every application very, very carefully and spend a remarkable length of time on them. It is the most difficult aspect of the school, along with the transfer to secondary school. They are the two main issues that the school has problems with. There is no issue with the joint denomination of the children at all, although I did anticipate that being a problem. It has absolutely not been an issue at all, it has been wonderful. Having enough places for children and then finding good quality and appropriate schools for them to transfer to is the real difficulty that we have.

Q529 Chairman: The Cantle review did suggest that if you were going to have faith schools, then perhaps 25 per cent should be able to come from people of a different faith. Would it not be logical in your case to have 25 per cent of your school population coming from people on the estate who have no faith?

Mr Maguire: I think you ought to ask that question of the people who have Church of England and Roman Catholic faith when they are unable to take up a place in the school themselves. There was not going to be a school at all until the two churches formed a working party to establish one. It is difficult for people who have supported their churches and continue to do so, then to be told that their children are unable to attend. It would certainly be possible to maintain the two denominations in a school such as mine and then also engage another quarter or third of children who were of other faiths who wished to attend a church school.

Q530 Chairman: You talked about two children in the school coming from a Muslim background. Were they able to get in because you had space?

Mr Maguire: Yes, that happened simply because there were spaces in two particular year groups.

Q531 Chairman: Do you not see the church having a wider role in encouraging harmony within communities?

Mr Maguire: I do, but I cannot rewrite the situation in my own school. It would be something for people to think about if they were to begin a new project, or even a secondary school project; it would be something very worthwhile then.

Q532 Chairman: A lot of your parents will actually have raised money over the years, particularly the Roman Catholic ones, to extend Catholic education across a great deal of the diocese. Do you think that they ought to be a little more tolerant and feel that some of those places in some of those schools in Oldham and some of the other communities ought to be more widely available for non-Catholic children?

Mr Maguire: Raising funds to develop Catholic schools for Catholic children should not be regarded as intolerant, if that is what you are saying.

Q533 Chairman: What I am suggesting is that if children are brought up in schools which are parallel but separate, they would have less understanding of each other, would they not?

Mr Maguire: Yes, they would.

Q534 Chairman: Therefore there are advantages to encouraging them to be in the same schools.

Mr Maguire: Right.

Q535 Chairman: So would it no then be reasonable for some of those Catholic schools across the North of England to make available some of their places to non-Catholic children?

Mr Maguire: And would you have an answer for the children who were Catholic who wished to seek a place in that school?

Q536 Chairman: Would it not be a question of nearness to the school?

Mr Maguire: Not necessarily. Admission policies often do use proximity to the school as a criterion. That question is not so much the exclusion of other groups, but the inclusion of additional groups to a school. I personally would see it as an excellent idea, but I do not feel that you will create harmony be preventing Catholic children taking up places in Catholic schools.

Q537 Chairman: What you are really saying is that if a school is short of pupils, then it is happy to take anybody in, but if it is over-subscribed, then it is reasonable for it to stick to pupils from the faith which supported the school.

Mr Maguire: Yes, but I would also say that it is also reasonable, when thinking about the forming of a new school, to take into account all the things you have raised today.

Q538 Mr Cummings: By establishing a church school involving two denominations, how have you avoided creating barriers with other cultural groups? Do barriers exist?

Mr Maguire: That is the point I was going to make. I do not see any barriers. You do not avoid creating them, you just do not create them. They do not exist.

Q539 Mr Cummings: Has the local authority or the local education authority helped you to prepare policies and strategies to deal with the issue of improving social cohesion?

Mr Maguire: Yes, I think so. Liverpool are quite proactive in all of that area and are very, very supportive in equal opportunities and race equality, advisory support and policy writing as well.

Q540 Mr Sanders: Has your school developed a response to those policies?

Mr Maguire: Yes, the school has. We adopted those policies as a governing body.

Q541 Chris Mole: On occasions you will get difficulties between various groups of pupils within different religious or ethnic backgrounds. What policies and strategies does the school have to deal with potential flare-ups or disruptive disagreements?

Mr Maguire: Schools such as mine do not have flare-ups and problems relating to ethnic, or social or cultural backgrounds, they just have flare-ups relating to football, or who is doing this and who is doing that, or you have red hair or you are overweight, normal situations which happen in primary schools. In the make-up of the school where I am head teacher, there are no flare-ups relating to social, cultural or whatever backgrounds.

Q542 Chairman: Do football flare-ups not relate to the traditions of Catholic and Protestant teams?

Mr Maguire: My school is situated in Liverpool and not Glasgow, so we do not really have that, although there was a tradition some years ago between the two teams.

Q543 Chairman: You have been describing to us the way in which the school manages to cope with children from the two Christian faiths. What do you do about trying to make sure that your children have an understanding of some of the youngsters from other parts of Liverpool who comes from different religious traditions?

Mr Maguire: As I was saying earlier, part of our RE syllabus and part of our personal and social health education is to engage with other faith communities. People will come in to talk to the children about Islam or Judaism and we visit mosques, we visit synagogues and so on. That is the strategy which we employ.

Q544 Chairman: In some places they have been twinning schools to try to make that work more effectively. Do you see any scope for twinning schools so that you have pupils going from one school to another school to do a joint activity?

Mr Maguire: I have not heard of this. It sounds very interesting.

Q545 Chairman: The difficulty is that if some adult comes in and talks to youngsters, they tend to remember the strange and the weird rather than understanding the common ground that youngsters have.

Mr Maguire: You are quite right actually, but I certainly hope they do not think the adults are strange and weird. I think they find them extremely enjoyable and interesting. To suggest visiting other schools is an excellent idea.

Q546 Chairman: Do you think race relations in Liverpool are improving?

Mr Maguire: The answer to that is that I do not know. I would hope so, but until we can have people growing together from an early age and mixing together as friends rather than as people from different race backgrounds and allow that to move through to an adult age, I do not think we will have great improvement. We must start at a very early age with children whose friendship dominates the relationship rather than ethnic background.

Q547 Chairman: You describe the fairly large housing estate which you serve. Is there any discrimination within that estate for people moving into it?

Mr Maguire: I do not see any.

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

Memoranda submitted by Peacemaker and Tolerance in Diversity

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Mr Raja Miah, Senior Officer, Peacemaker and Mr David Holloway OBE, Non-Executive Director, Tolerance in Diversity, examined.

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, 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, 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, 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 this school which is Asian to this 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 it, but I am certain it would work. It is just a matter of maintaining that 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, 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 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 for 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 down into 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 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 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. It is not mainstream in Tower Hamlets, where you would think it would be. We do not get funding from the Connexions organisation, 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.

Q560 Mr Clelland: Rather than you having a bigger budget to deal with these problems it ought to be the mainstream organisations.

Mr Holloway: In the round it should be mainstream organisations and then it really happens.

Mr Miah: You could give me millions of pounds and I would still be here in ten years' time. I would still be doing what I am doing in ten years' time if the mainstream organisations do not pick it up.

Q561 Mr Clelland: Both of your organisations go into schools and you are making a positive contribution there towards social cohesion, but does this work become part of the schools' agenda, or should it and could it become part of the schools' agenda?

Mr Miah: The schools we go into do not have the skills to make it part of the main agenda. In all honesty, that is why we are allowed to go into those schools.

Q562 Chairman: What skills do they not have?

Mr Miah: It is a combination of the skills of understanding the complexities the town faces and also the confidence to talk about these issues. These issues have been suppressed in our town for many years. Even beginning to discuss some of these issues is opening up a can of worms and some schools shy away from it. It is far safer for an external agency to come in and do some of that work.

Mr Holloway: There are not that many resources around, there are not that many people with the right tools to be able to do it and to engage young people actively in a way which is fun and which is relatively light and which is safe and which moves them on. If I just think of Tower Hamlets, because that is where we do most of our work, there is only one school there which has consistently brought us in over a long period and that is one of the better. The head there has been knighted, etcetera, so it shows. It is the only one of the schools which has actually managed to retain a decent mix. Most of the schools in Tower Hamlets seem to go from one colour to a different colour over a very short period of time, but it is not taken on. Some people in some schools where it has been taken on, when they have an issue they take it on for maybe a couple of years or just over the year when they feel they have an issue and a problem in the school. We go in, do something, then they forget about it. They think it is great and it all goes away until a few years later when the next problem comes up. We all suffer from this.

Q563 Chairman: So it is troubleshooting rather than changing the culture.

Mr Holloway: Yes and you really cannot troubleshoot. You can do some very good short-term work but it is not sustainable. You need to go in there, it needs to be regular and it needs to work. You have the citizenship curriculum and it needs to be a specific part of that. Every school needs to do it and it needs to be part of the Ofsted agenda to see that it happens. It needs to happen after school money in, etcetera.

Q564 Mr Sanders: How can that be done where there are faith-based schools or where there is any form of selective education? Is that not then a further complication?

Mr Miah: In my opinion the most successful secondary school in Oldham is the Catholic secondary school, which is very much based within an ethnic minority community and its catchment is in that community.

Q565 Mr Sanders: It is not exclusively Catholic.

Mr Miah: No. In my opinion, that would be the most cohesive of our secondary schools.

Q566 Chairman: You have been fairly critical of schools. Is that because the teachers lack the training and the skills to do a better job?

Mr Holloway: I am not really critical of schools at all. They have a massive job to do. I am in and out of schools and working on the 14 to 19 agenda on the DfES pathfinder at the moment. I just find every time I go and ask a teacher to do something that I feel I am overloading them. They need the space to be able to do it, they need help to be able to do it. I rarely criticise. I might criticise some of the faith schools and some schools, but usually it is about fear. The teachers, the head teacher, whoever, are afraid of doing that. The board of governors is perhaps afraid of doing that. They are not trying to do that. They want to see a change. Where you have faith schools, where government money is going in, with it should go an expectation that they are working towards social cohesion. Social cohesion and social justice are in the statutes and we should be working towards that. If they are not, that money should be withdrawn. I have known Islamic schools, various schools and if they are open, they are open and they are working to solve the problem; some are seen to be working against it.

Q567 Mr Betts: Coming back to the Cantle report and the Youth Service, he drew attention to a lot of problems in the Youth Service, the cuts in funding over the years, the parlous state of it really. What are your concerns about the Youth Service, youth facilities or lack of them? What do you think needs to be done?

Mr Miah: In my opinion, as soon as cuts are announced in local authorities the Youth Service is the first to have its budget slashed. There is an issue there of prioritising the Youth Service and prioritising the funding of the Youth Service. Then there is the same issue as in everything else of the way the service is delivered. Youth Services are naturally community based, community resourced services and what we tend to have is Youth Services working on projects delivered to exclusive mono-ethnic community groups.

Mr Holloway: Within the training of youth workers there is a big issue. They are trained around equal opportunities but not trained to do active work with young people. The Youth Service lacks motivation in a lot of places. It has worked better outside London than I see it working in London. It does not have a strategic view and I do not see it working strategically and I see it failing all over the place, to be quite honest. It usually depends on an individual youth worker, their understanding, their responses and their energy and their ability to involve and engage the young people. I do not see that. In the organisation we run, young people control the budget. Although I am the Treasurer, I have the control, if they decide to blow the budget in the next meeting, I am not going to stop them, because that is giving them real empowerment. We have been operating for quite a while with very large budgets, with young people deciding how they spend that. They listen to me if I say this is how they should or should not and Youth Services should be doing the same. The Youth Services' budgets are not very big and they should be real. They are always talking about empowerment but I see very, very little of it and that might help.

Q568 Mr Cummings: How do you measure value for money?

Mr Holloway: The same way as you measure it in anything else. You look at the impact of the work, you evaluate the work through the workers who are doing it and you evaluate it by asking the question of the young people to whom you are delivering the work. You go back over a period of time and you look to see whether any of that has settled and whether the impact has lasted and if not you ask why not and you go back to the drawing board.

Q569 Mr Cummings: Are you receiving value for money in your work?

Mr Holloway: Yes, I think we are.

Q570 Mr Cummings: How do you measure it?

Mr Holloway: We do not have money to measure the impact. We do not have the money to do the analysis we should like to do. I should like to bring external people in to do that. Where we go out and do the work, we have young people joining our organisation, getting trained to do work with other young people. The cost of a workshop is about £150 for a single workshop which maybe last one hour and a half. If we wanted to do a large project with a lot of people it costs about £10,000. That would perhaps be a year long project, including some residential work. If you look at the costs of Connexions, we are very good value for money. If you look at the costs of the Youth Service, we are reasonable value for money.

Q571 Mr Betts: Can I just look at some points you both made? First of all, you both said yes, you need more money in the Youth Service, because it is the first one to be cut because it is not on a statutory basis. Then you are saying that in any case it does not have a strategic vision. Perhaps you could just say how you think that might be created and whose responsibility that is. You are also saying that the service tends to operate in mono-cultural types of activities. How can you then change that approach? Surely if you try to be artificial and impose things, that is not going to work. There are two questions: one about the strategy and one about the details of how we might get more projects up and running which cut across the cultures.

Mr Miah: Both of your questions are really entwined into one. Yes, we work with young people, yes, we can create artificial environments where that interaction takes place. Yes, we can work with every young person in the town and if needs be they can have a positive experience from the Youth Service. If that Youth Service operates in isolation without some movement on the way our children go to schools, the way in which our communities live separately, then nothing comes of it.

Mr Holloway: Strategically it is quite difficult. Youth Services are managed in different ways. Some of them are managed through a committee; some of them are just line managed as part of the education authority or perhaps another service. It is about the analysis; it is setting proper agendas and not empty ones. I find a lot of the Youth Service agendas' aims and objectives are fairly pat, rather than looking clearly and having an analysis of what the situation is in the local communities, in the area for which they have a responsibility. If I were doing work there, I would go in as a consultant and I would want to go in and spend a long time doing participant observation and then come out and say what the issues are and try different methods to overcome them. I do not see that is often the case. The Youth Service and Connexions to a certain extent are very embroiled in how many people and it is looking at people who are out of education, out of employment, which is definitely a good target to look at, but it is not bringing in some of those other targets, not bringing in social cohesion as a target and looking at the quality of work there and the impact long term. I do not see that many people able to do it. There is not that much expertise out there. I do not know what you find. It is expertise, resources, materials and finance which are missing.

Q572 Mr Betts: Should elements of youth provision be put on a statutory basis?

Mr Holloway: I would say ideally, yes. It should be driven by statute and it should be driven by education as well. It depends on their agenda and their strategy and their training and the professionalism of what they are doing.

Mr Miah: A clear link in the role of the Youth Services is about bringing the citizenship curriculum to life. Children are taught citizenship in the schools and the Youth Service should bring that to life.

Q573 Chairman: Would it make any difference making it statutory unless they had a significant amount of extra money?

Mr Miah: Yes, because it would be valued in the way that everything else which is statutory is valued.

Q574 Chairman: You think it is the lack of value which other people in local authorities give to the Youth Service which is the biggest problem, rather than the fact that most local authorities spend very little on it anyway.

Mr Miah: Yes, a combination of both.

Mr Holloway: Yes, that explains a lot of it. It is easily cut, not being statutory, and it is in the front line of where you cut. Maybe not at this very moment, but certainly in the past, in my experience of youth work over about 15 years, where do they cut? My expertise in fund raising and things like that accounts for the cutting and being able to provide money from other areas to provide a service, hence being able to get something up and running like Tolerance in Diversity.

Q575 Chairman: Cynically though, my feeling is that there is hardly any money left in the Youth Service to cut, is there?

Mr Holloway: They have increased it by a marginal amount in the last year. But I do not see much of it.

Q576 Chairman: An awful lot of local authorities are trying to move the Youth Service out of fixed buildings to having youth workers almost on the street. In Tameside they have a system where they have these movable pods and when they get a situation where youngsters are causing a bit of friction in a neighbourhood, they move in and make a provision for those youngsters for a short time. That seems to work quite well, because it is flexible and it moves around. Do you think youth workers really manage to get to communities where there is friction or once they are not based on a building do they tend not to be able to get to groups and certainly to ethnically mixed groups?

Mr Miah: I always found the pod debate rather interesting and I have worked in places where we took resources into a community where there were issues and young people were being disruptive and we provided a service for maybe two months or three months and then we moved the pod out and on and left nothing behind. The debate around the pods is very much around the reason we have them, which is because we do not have enough funding to service that community properly in the first place. The solutions we are offering are very, very much short term. We go in with the pod, we go in with a detached team of youth workers, we do a piece of work over two or three months and we move out of that community.

Q577 Chairman: So you think the key thing is to go in, but to have the resources to stay.

Mr Miah: Yes, to go in and stay.

Q578 Chris Mole: Would you be worried that if you put Youth Services on a statutory basis you would lose the flexibility you need to work with different communities in different localities?

Mr Miah: No. What you would find, if you put Youth Services on a statutory basis, would be that you develop expertise and you develop a range of ways of working with young people from different communities and you would find that works far more.

Q579 Chris Mole: I am a little worried that the next question applies a little of a stereotype, or it could be seen as that and it is certainly not intended to. How significantly does drug dealing contribute to the overall problem of poor social cohesion amongst young people?

Mr Miah: Not to be cynical, many of the young people I work with do not care whom they buy their drugs off as long as they have the drugs.

Mr Holloway: I do not think it is an issue. It is an issue for social cohesion in so far as you have drugs and if you have a lot of drugs happening in a community, it unknits communities because it sets people against each other. There is a lot of money floating around, a lot of violence floating around, that sort of thing, but it is not a racial thing whatsoever. It cuts across every class group, every race group.

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, 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 the Youth Service.

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 I have with Tolerance in Diversity is fantastic and they wished they could get to the stage of 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. 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 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 that, that needs to be delivered inside the local authority so that they can see what is happening in that 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.

Memoranda submitted by Groundwork Northern Ireland

and Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Ms Mary McKee, Chief Executive, Groundwork Northern Ireland, Mr Seamus McAleavey, Chief Executive and Ms Frances McCandless, Director of Policy, Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action, examined.

Q586 Chairman: May I welcome you to the third session in our inquiry this afternoon and ask you to identify yourselves for the record, please?

Mr McAleavey: I am Seamus McAleavey, the Chief Executive of the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action.

Ms McCandless: I am Frances McCandless. I am the Director of Policy at the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action.

Ms McKee: I am Mary McKee, Director of Groundwork Northern Ireland.

Chairman: We always let witnesses make a statement if they want to at the beginning, or are you happy to go straight to questions? Straight to questions.

Q587 Mr Cummings: Do you believe that there is a connection between the Northern Ireland sectarianism issue and the more recent racial incidents in the Province? Are there any direct parallels with the race problems experienced in some English cities?

Ms McCandless: I think there are very, very close connections and in fact evidence is coming to light in recent days that paramilitaries are themselves involved in orchestrating some of the recent attacks. We have developed a culture where we have institutionalised separation and intolerance and it does not really matter thereafter what it is your are intolerant of: it could be race, it could be gender, it could be religion. In this case it is race.

Q588 Mr Cummings: Could it just be sheer thuggery and exploitation?

Ms McCandless: It is possible, but there is a very complex web of relationships developing. It is about power and control in neighbourhoods and communities. In one instance it is actually about an ongoing court case and the manipulation of witnesses. It is a very complex situation at its most detailed level. At its most fundamental level it is about a society which has allowed those intolerances to become acceptable.

Q589 Mr Cummings: We have all recognised for many, many years the differences between Protestants and Catholics but this seems now to be spilling out to the wider ethnic communities. How do you account for this?

Ms McKee: How you account for it perversely is that it is the beginning of the normalisation of the society, the beginning of the fact that people are realising it is not just two tribes. We have had 30 years of living in what some policy makers call benign apartheid, where policy makers and people on the ground allowed this institutional separation to happen. Now there is an element of the community which cannot tolerate difference in any manifestation. We need to join up the debate in terms of community cohesion, the social cohesion debate in England, Scotland and Wales, with the community relations debate in Northern Ireland. There is lots of good practice and we have so much to learn from you and we have so much to share with you. For me, it is not just about religion and race, it is about relations.

Mr McAleavey: With regard to race, the other thing to say is that up until very recent times Northern Ireland has been a very white place. Even though there is division between religious and ethnic groups in terms of Protestant and Catholic, that tends to describe the community backgrounds people come from rather than their religious persuasion. Northern Ireland, because of the troubles, was not a welcoming place for people from elsewhere. There are increasing numbers of people, Chinese, other Asian backgrounds, black communities coming into Northern Ireland, some of them to work in the Health Service. In the areas where they concentrate, which have tended to be in the inner city of Belfast quite close to the two main hospitals, they find themselves under attack from working class communities.

Q590 Mr Cummings: The current violence in Northern Ireland has lasted over 30 years. What are the lessons for the rest of the United Kingdom in seeking to ensure that those mistakes are not repeated in England?

Ms McCandless: The lessons are similar to the ones we just articulated a minute ago: do not institutionalise intolerance; do not spend to allow people to be separate; spend the state's budget in a way which encourages integration and sharing. We have separate schools. I was amazed, when the debate on faith schools was being held in the media, that there was never any reference to Northern Ireland. We have a system of faith schools which has failed entirely to promote any form of social cohesion. We have almost entirely separate housing. Our workplaces have become increasingly segregated, so it is almost impossible to meet in neutral venues and to live any kind of lives which are integrated in any way. I suppose we have made this structural.

Mr McAleavey: Where large parts of the community become alienated from the state and alienated from authority, there is a serious problem. When we look at the Cantle report and we look at some of the things which have happened in the North of England we see parallels in that alienation. Then you do get a breakdown, you do get what happened in the Catholic working class community in Northern Ireland, which was that self-help groups started to develop to deal with the issues they felt the state was not dealing with for them. We found that there was a greater number of community organisations in Catholic areas, there was more community development and things like that as they became alienated from the state's provision.

Ms McKee: One of the key issues, which is a cliché in Northern Ireland, is: do not invest in the politics of the last atrocity. There is nothing like a good riot to focus the mind and in Northern Ireland it has been synonymous with rewarding bad behaviour. The debate needs to be on the table, but let us not get initiative fatigue.

Q591 Mr Cummings: Do you have any views of any actions which could perhaps have been taken in the early stages of the conflict, which could have prevented the culture of intolerance and distrust from becoming so deeply ingrained in society?

Ms McCandless: We invested very little in finding out what works in terms of sharing, in terms of shared communities, in terms of shared education, shared workplaces. We invested a great deal in trying to mop up the damage as each atrocity happened and therefore we come to a situation where we have enormous quantities of research on why certain areas are separate and how those communities feel and the lack of trust they feel for each other. There is very, very little understanding of what has worked and why it has worked, the areas which have not separated, the areas which have not reverted to violence, why that has been the case. We do not understand that yet.

Q592 Mr Clelland: Despite all the work you and others are doing divisions are still intractable, are they not? How much impact can the voluntary sector have on these problems?

Mr McAleavey: There has been significant impact in that one of the things we have done over the last 30 years has been to provide a shared neutral space. We are not neutral in that our sector has lots to say on political, social and economic issues and how they affect communities in Northern Ireland. We have tried to maintain a space which is open to people from a Nationalist or a Unionist background. One of the things which has happened is that people did share ideas. In the early 1990s our organisation supported work called community development in Protestant areas where some of the Protestant working class areas in Belfast began to look at how they were behind the equivalent Catholic working class areas. Quite a lot of information and experience was shared. Some of the people who involved themselves in that actually then involved themselves in what became the Loyalist ceasefires. I think some development took place there and people could see that there was reasonable commonality and they tried to draw on that experience. Quite a lot of sharing goes on now, even though we still have this political division between whether people are pro union with Great Britain or pro a United Ireland. There is still quite a lot of sharing and some of the worst aspects of the troubles have been moderated. That is not to say there have not been some really bad cases, like Holy Cross, which have taken place since the ceasefires, since the peace process has been developed and they have been incredibly damaging. It does mean that people in those communities do become reinforced in their separate lives, do live separate lives in terms of not knowing each other particularly well at the individual level, yet some of the community leaders are swapping ideas and exchanging things all of the time.

Ms McCandless: There have also been some very, very practical interventions in the voluntary integrated school movement, which came out of the voluntary sector. Those parents mortgaged their houses to set up schools where kids could be integrated together and eventually the state took on the funding of those; integrated play groups for pre-school children and some very practical examples where change has been effected.

Ms McKee: My experience is that you do not wait until those things happen, organisations like ours have to be actively or proactively involved in creating some of the debate. I found the discussion about the faith communities, indeed the Youth Service, to be so interesting because it is one which has been raging on with us for so long. For me the debate is not about the Youth Service, but the provision of youth services. It is best done, believe me, in a community situation. In Northern Ireland we have the largest amount of money invested in the statutory youth services in the world; phenomenally expensive. There has been a lot of research about how that has worked and inevitably if you create big institutions the debate is around salaries, pensions. The debate is about needing more resources rather than concentrating on the ground and working with real young people.

Q593 Mr Clelland: Do you think the public sector in general and local authorities in particular rely too heavily on voluntary organisations?

Ms McKee: I have to say I wish they would rely on us more - and I would say that. I wish they would rely on us more, in a mature and grown-up way. We are quite happy in the voluntary sector to have service level agreements, to be contracted in to deliver services. In terms of our role, our role is not mainstream or delivering mainstream services. Our role is about R&D; our role is about taking something and trying it differently, joining up the Youth Service with mental health, with the environment, with racism, sectarianism, and creating something and studying it from the beginning. There is an opportunity, certainly through the Cantle report as well, to begin to try things out in a different way.

Ms McCandless: The state and local government have relied on us heavily to do the difficult and the unpleasant things in areas where services broke down or where communities broke down and certainly the market was not going to go there. It has often been the voluntary and community sectors which have had to step in.

Mr McAleavey: I am not in the least an expert in the Youth Service provision but one of the things I hear from local communities is that it is fairly detached from young people in those most difficult areas of Northern Ireland in Belfast. They would say that there is a greater need for a flexible and very quick response. For instance, a lot of the difficulties arise in the interface areas of North Belfast around July, summertime, for a number of reasons: it is the marching season, in terms of Orange parades, but also the kids are off school. In North Belfast, where our offices are based, local community workers coined the phrase "recreational rioting". The kids take part in riots because they are the most exciting thing around for them to do. You have to displace that, as some of the community workers have said, with high octane activities for kids to be involved in, if you want to divert their attention.

Q594 Chris Mole: A rather unfortunate metaphor to use.

Mr McAleavey: Well chosen in this case. What happens is that nine-year-olds start the riot at the traffic lights in North Queen Street, that quickly becomes sixteen-year-olds, becomes adults, quickly moves from stones to bottles to petrol bombs and sometimes blast bombs and on the odd occasion small arms fire is exchanged. What they are saying is that you want to take the heat out of that situation, you have to start sorting it out at the very lowest levels of those kids. In our submission, we have talked about how community workers have operated a mobile phone scheme, where they do communicate with each other to try to take away all the rumour which goes around about who is attacking who, which sets fire to a lot of these things.

Q595 Mr Clelland: What do you need to make your work more effective?

Ms McCandless: We need funding, we need all kinds of things. Northern Ireland needs political consensus or we are always going to be mopping up the damage. We live in a framework, as everyone else does, of the state being where everyone focuses their energy when it comes to voting, when it comes to thinking about their long-term future. What we do on the ground is often despite what is happening at that level, so it is incredibly difficult. What we need most of all is a consensus into which our politicians can buy and in which they can show leadership and we can get on with doing what it is we need to do, which is repairing the damage, otherwise we are just a sticking plaster every time.

Ms McKee: I would agree. Our sector has some of the frustrations. When I mentioned R&D, the downside of that is that we front-load the risk, we front-load the personal safety risk, we front-load the reputational risk when things go wrong, very often we front-load the financial risk. What we need in Northern Ireland, certainly for our work, is more leadership and more leadership in the absence of politicians, more leadership perhaps from civil servants to do things differently, perhaps to look at partnership in a very, very different way, not just commission us to do things, but be a partner and think them through. Does this actually work? If it does not work and there are lessons which need to be learned, then we must not be left carrying the can. We are not going to have the Audit Commission chasing us because we did not spend two pence or £10.

Mr McAleavey: One of the key things which is probably needed, regardless of the political situation, is more integration in terms of how government approaches these things. We point out that quite a lot of the responses do not sit well within a particular department's budget or an agency or wherever. The most difficult thing of all is to get a corporate response from government and we need to find better ways. People keep talking about joined-up government, but we need to find better ways of approaching some of these problems which engage people in partnership rather than keep talking about partnership, but cracking it is a different thing.

Q596 Mr Betts: Is one of the problems of the strength of many community organisations that so many of them are rooted in one particular community or another? We talked before about the good exchange of ideas between community leaders, but probably not much happening between ordinary members of the community being very much involved in the organisations which help and benefit their community.

Mr McAleavey: Northern Ireland is a divided society. Your colleague John Reid, when he became Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, said that people quite often wanted to tell him the full history of the last 800 years as to how we arrived in the spot we are now in. One thing is for sure, sectarianism has been a big thing for 400 years in Northern Ireland and it blows hot and cold at times. People separate out at different times. Particularly in 1968 and 1969 there was the biggest movement of people which had taken place in that small part of the world for hundreds of years and people have divided out. There are areas which are predominantly Catholic and predominantly Protestant and it is easy to grow up in those areas and not really know the other side; certainly if you are below 40. What happens is that community organisations will come forward and they will be almost exclusively one side or the other, simply by the area that they are in. We have talked recently about single identity groups and that is particularly common in Protestant working class areas where they feel they have to have a single identity group to develop their culture and feel that they can then communicate with the other side. One of our fears is that that does not happen there. One of the points we picked up from the Cantle report was that greater need, in terms of programming, to see we do not build these little islands all of the time, but that there is much more sharing out and beyond, otherwise we will have communities which simply compete with each other. However, it is very difficult, because people live where they live.

Ms McCandless: There are issues of personal safety in this. It is not just about choice or culture. If we use the language of social capital, Northern Ireland probably has a great deal of bonding capital which looks inwards and builds quite strong and outwardly cohesive -looking communities - sometimes those are held together more by force or threat than by choice - but not very much of the bridging capital which would allow or encourage those communities to reach outside themselves to other communities or to decision makers or to arms of the state. It depends how organisations are funded and how they are incentivised as to what becomes possible or not possible for them.

Ms McKee: That is where my organisation would come in, in terms of one of our value bases, community cohesion and community relations. So any project - and we have 104 of them at the moment - we would create would automatically have an inbuilt incentive to come together. That is not to say we want you to come together to discuss community cohesion, because you would get a stampede. It is to sit round a table to discuss child care, play, environment and generally relationships are built up. It does happen and it does take some time, but it should not take for ever. You cannot keep investing in people being separate. You have to incentivise them. If it continues to be separate, then you stop it and you try it somewhere else and you build good case studies which actually work.

Q597 Mr Betts: A lot of these organisations will have to get public funding. Do you think there should be a requirement, when public funding is handed over, that the groups being funded invite citizens across communities, or at least that there is an incentive to work with a similar group in another community? How careful do you have to be that you do not drive the organisation away from the public funding to look for other sources and then you are back to the churches, or religious groups or elsewhere and to say if that is a condition they will not accept it and they want to remain inside their own community and they actually pull away altogether?

Mr McAleavey: That is right. It is a really, really difficult task to do this. If it were easy to square, people would have done it. The other thing that happens, if there is a cross-community requirement, is that people are very good at getting around that by making an arrangement with another community, saying we all love each other and we will sort the funding out and you will get yours and we will get ours. People are very good at thwarting those sorts of arrangements. We do have to invest in terms of local communities, but we also then have to build up their own confidence quickly so that they realise they need to dialogue with others, they need to be involved with people outside their own immediate area.

Q598 Chairman: If they fiddle the system to get cross-community cohesion, to get the money, is that not at least a start?

Mr McAleavey: You can become very cynical. We are not involved in funding, but I saw an application once which said "We are a cross-community group of Catholics, Protestants and legless paraplegics". They thought they would hit everything which sounds good. People can get round the system. Questions would be asked. We have had a community relations council, or a forerunner of that, in Northern Ireland for donkeys' years as well. How has it not solved the problem?

Ms McKee: It is not just about money. It is also about putting projects together to improve the local area and sometimes when there is a very weak infrastructure and sometimes the infrastructure is not as kosher as you would want, then it is about organisations handling the money until there is the infrastructure within that organisation. In Northern Ireland, in fairness, we are awash with money: European, American, every element of money. It is not about money. It is how money is invested and how it is spent.

Ms McCandless: We also have to be careful about the superficiality of what we spend, of what we would call crude contact work. It is not enough to fulfil the terms of your funding obligation that you meet a few Catholics once on a Friday afternoon and call that cross-community work. We have had years of an industry of taking kids away together on holiday to America. They come back and they beat the living daylights out of each other again the next summer as they did the summer before they ever went away. It is much, much longer term work than that. When Holy Cross was going on, there was an integrated school in North Belfast and some of those children have been integrated since primary level right up through to secondary school level and they were out rioting on different sides. If it is easy to slip back into that after years and years of an education which is focused on asking you to examine what the differences and the issues are and how you can live together peacefully, then if that is not quite enough, if you need all of the structures around that, parents and society, then a funding requirement which says you must sit down with the other side for ten minutes once a week is just not going to cut it. That kind of superficiality is meaningless.

Q599 Mr Betts: How do you measure the impact of you bringing communities together?

Ms McKee: That is something I am asked to do every day by funders. They ask how I can know it is value for money and how I can know it works. There are two very basic replies. We know it works if we are working in four communities, six communities across Belfast. After a certain amount of time sectarian murals, hate graffiti, will disappear off walls. Red, white and blue, green white and gold kerbstones will disappear. Flags will be put up, but they will come down. There are very quantifiable ways in which you can measure. Qualitatively? You take attitude surveys. This is measuring the effectiveness of your work, especially when you use the environment and regeneration. It is not rocket science. The challenge is sustaining that.

Q600 Mr Clelland: What about the mix at work? How many Catholics to Protestants, in percentage terms, work in your organisations? Do you know?

Ms McKee: We are 50/50.

Ms McCandless: Half and half. We do know, because we have to monitor that very closely. It is a legal requirement.

Q601 Mr Clelland: You are half and half.

Ms McKee: More or less.

Q602 Chris Mole: NICVA touched on the question of growing racism earlier on. Could you expand on why you think this is becoming such a problem in Northern Ireland? You referred in your submission to it being twice as significant as sectarian prejudice and you also mentioned a 400 per cent increase in recorded racist attacks. Is any of that to do with better recording?

Ms McCandless: Yes; absolutely and some of it is to do with the police recording things in a certain way and people being more open to reporting things to the police, to do with the ceasefires and different kinds of incidents happening or not happening in areas. Interestingly the number of racist attacks shot up after the ceasefires were announced. That was partly because the media had less to talk about in terms of bombs going off, so suddenly the focus was switched onto drugs and onto the racist attacks at that time. The statistic about racist attitudes being twice as prevalent as sectarian attitudes, was from survey information and when people were asked which they detested more, Chinese people or Catholics, that was the way in which those preferences manifested themselves.

Q603 Chris Mole: What was the answer?

Ms McCandless: Chinese people.

Q604 Chris Mole: How does it really relate to the sectarian divide? Some of us are aware of the links between Combat 18 and the Red Hand Defenders and all that sort of thing.

Mr McAleavey: Combat 18 has certainly appeared in South Belfast where most of the recent racist attacks have taken place. There has been evidence that either supporters or people who may be connected to Combat 18 have been influencing some of the Loyalist organisations, much to the embarrassment of some of the political organisations associated with the Loyalist groups.

Ms McCandless: If I may give you an anecdote, the two sides in one area of North Belfast like to capitalise on other divisions in the world and the Republican side will often fly Palestinian flags, so the Loyalist side automatically put up the Israeli flag as a retaliatory gesture. Then some of them came down again, because there was so much anti-Semitic feeling within the Loyalist community that they were not going to fly the flags, but then it was more important to antagonise their neighbours, so the flags went up again.

Ms McKee: The UDA commander in North Belfast was Egyptian. Figure that out.

Mr McAleavey: In terms of the racist attacks, our recent press release condemning those was quite strong. The point we were making was that Northern Ireland often gets itself a reputation for being a very welcoming, friendly place for outsiders. We were saying that is not the case. We are and can be as racist as anybody else. There was less of an opportunity in the past and that is increasing. We are just showing the same sort of traits as happened in parts of England and other places.

Ms McCandless: That is right. It is something to do with normalisation. We have been very busy with sectarianism and now we are getting a chance to be a bit more racist.

Q605 Chris Mole: Do you think it is possible to tackle the religious, the political and the racist problems together by tackling the root causes of intolerance or do you need bespoke solutions?

Ms McCandless: We think they are the same root causes.

Ms McKee: Absolutely.

Q606 Chris Mole: They are fundamentally the same issue.

Ms McCandless: It is about values. This is about coherence of values and human relationships and they all come down to the same thing.

Ms McKee: Absolutely.

Mr McAleavey: Racism and sectarianism are two sides of the same coin.

Q607 Chris Mole: Could you project that conclusion? Is that a solution which is not just appropriate for Northern Ireland, but for the whole of Great Britain?

Ms McCandless: Yes.

Ms McKee: Absolutely.

Q608 Mr Sanders: To what extent is deprivation a factor in all of these problems?

Mr McAleavey: Deprivation is certainly always a factor because the extremes of sectarianism are most noticeable in the poorest working class areas. That is where interface riots will take place and that is where people historically will have been shot and killed because of sectarianism. The sectarianism manifests itself in well-to-do middle class areas as well. It will be reinforced by people in those areas who will talk about not being able to trust certain groups of people, whether it is Catholics or whatever it happens to be. That will keep fuelling the situation. Certainly in terms of deprivation, it is classic stuff "They're going to take our jobs" even if they are not doing those jobs and things like that. If you are poor, I think you are canon fodder for both sectarianism and racism.

Ms McCandless: These relationships are complex. There is no evidence which links poverty and lack of cohesion in the way we could point quite simply to cause and effect. We have no doubt anecdotally that deprivation exacerbates the situation, but it would be unfair to those working class communities which are hugely deprived and which have remained peaceful and remained integrated to say poverty is the cause, because they have worked very hard to make sure poverty was not the cause of any kind of trouble in their area. It is much more that one feeds and fuels the other.

Ms McKee: It is a very interesting conundrum. I work in a number of communities which are some of the most cohesive I have ever worked in and that is about keeping people out, so there is this tremendous community spirit. Frances is right, it is complex. The manifestation of sectarianism is the Rost [?],which is like gladiatorial pits where it is played out: the flags, the signs of sectarianism. However, it translates into middle class areas as well, through the golf club, through the faith communities, through churches. People are still wedded to exclusivity and keeping people out.

Ms McCandless: Which is why I think we would argue that this is definitely a lesson which could be considered in the rest of the UK. Do not just fire-fight in the areas where the manifestations are greatest, in our case the interfaces between Catholic and Protestant, do not just put the money into resources and shine the light where the trouble breaks out and where the fighting is, because that is just a symptom, it is just the nasty eruption of a disease which is much, much more widely spread throughout society. If you allow people to opt out of that, because they can afford to live in a better area, then that is a whole other kind of lack of cohesion which you are going to have to deal with later on.

Q609 Chris Mole: Ms McKee, you use environmental concerns to engage people from different religious or political identities. I think you touch on child care as one other issue, but are there other issues you could tell the Committee about, where you might draw people together in a common cause?

Ms McKee: Yes, again very close to the conversation earlier about youth services and youth provision and work with young people. We would use the environment, but we would join up a number of key policy areas. We have a project in East Belfast on an interface which was perhaps two years ago when violence erupted after 20 years of relative calm. We had a project just about to go on the ground there, which was employing a Catholic youth worker and a Protestant youth worker. I may say that these people were qualified. Part of the challenge is to invest in people in the local area who can become qualified but also are known as key stakeholders. It would have been disastrous for us to bring somebody in from the outside who maybe had different values to that community. So the Catholic and Protestant workers began to work and it was not a big youth project, it was pulling kids off an interface, off riots every night for four months. This was a soulless task, I have to say. Eventually things settled down. We began to join up the whole idea of young people and sectarianism and racism. In Groundwork we have linked our work with young people to Bradford and Burnley and some of the debate with other young people in those areas, also looking at the mental health implications and the health implications of sectarianism and racism and we used the environment, though we are not an environmental organisation, to get small wins and confidence builds, young people who were the first to take off the sectarian graffiti and paint over paramilitary murals which gave a huge confidence boost to an area, an area which has been beleaguered. Young people from either side would paint views of the opposite side of the street on peace lines, which again is a hugely significant message of hope, dictated by young people. The voluntary sector has been prolific in Northern Ireland over 30 years of growing civic engagement; civic leadership when there was none there and we were being administered. We were the people who had to link the debate and do the lobbying on a number of things, on unemployment, youth crime, anti-social behaviour orders. There is a plethora of examples of being proactive.

Q610 Chris Mole: I do not know how many of those examples you were giving me there were connected to the Greencare case study which you reported on. You talked there about the importance of the formation of partnerships being central to the project. To what extent were those partnerships across the cultural and religious divides? Were there any other benefits which came from that approach?

Ms McKee: Greencare is a model, it is actually going into its third phase and we are now working with another set of four communities. These four communities are in inner city Belfast: two Catholic, two Protestant, very evidently in areas which display their cultural identities in your face. We do not underestimate the challenge of creating that particular partnership. There is very little you can ask communities to do unless you are giving something. One of our successes with one of the communities in the Greencare project was an area called Tiger's Bay in North Belfast, which is probably one of the most volatile in Rost [?] and there was a politically offensive political mural which would be akin to hate crime. We asked the community, after working with them for two years, to locate a sports zone. We got the money, we did all the planning with the local community because it was their plan, their ownership. We got the money and UDA commanders came to us, to me, and said the mural could now come down. It is a very graphic example where we had a great success, a great partnership. If you manage it properly people will meet together round a table on very tangible issues. The issue is if you frontload and you ask them to talk about the difference. If you talk about areas which are common to them, the trust and relationship builds up in very small ways. I am delighted to say that Greencare won several awards for community engagement and consultation.

Q611 Chris Mole: Yet in that you talked about bringing together the Catholic and the Protestant communities. You did not mention any other ethnic groups which we were just talking about in the context of the growing racism problem in Northern Ireland.

Ms McKee: That is a very good point. It is a perfect example of where our awareness of the race issue is. We are still the two tribes. For us to bring in an ethnic minority to that, we would have to go out and actively find one, because they do not live in corrals, they live within communities as well. They are part of communities.

Q612 Chris Mole: Earlier on, Mr McAleavey talked about the importance of working with groups of young people and how that can be most productive. What techniques were used to facilitate interaction amongst young people during the Short Strand project?

Ms McKee: First of all, we had two very strong role models: one of the youth workers from the Short Strand, a Catholic part of East Belfast, is an ex Republican prisoner. That is a great role model, believe me. Young people will not engage in anti-social behaviour while in his care or in close proximity to him. The techniques are to find role models which young people can sign up to and which young people will believe and can trust. Then they will build up the relationship. One of the other very successful issues is that if you ask local people, including young people, to engage in a visioning exercise about their community, the worst thing you can do is bring out a plan with a sticky-backed plastic model on it. This is not Blue Peter. What people do is bring in architects who use 3D Studio Viz. These young people are adept at PlayStation, so why give them something which takes them back to play school. The first technique was to take them seriously and put very professional people alongside them who would listen to them; not dictate what they think they heard but listen to them. All of a sudden one of the key products of that interface in East Belfast is an area which was previously a riot zone and is now a community park for the Catholic side; we have not yet got to the panacea of both playing on that particular green, but two years ago the interface violence on that particular piece of ground was quite significant. This year it is almost down to five per cent policing. Financially there have been massive savings. We have not yet convinced the police they should give us the savings.

Q613 Mr Betts: We talked about the schools being separate and that is very well known, but apparently there are separate health facilities and bus stops even.

Ms McCandless: We do the whole range of separation.

Q614 Mr Betts: Do you think the public services have just bowed to the inevitable or have they actually acquiesced in a way, when they ought to have stood up and resisted?

Ms McCandless: Both. They have partly bowed to the inevitable because if they were delivering health services they took a decision that it was more important to get people to access the services than to try to teach them a lesson and force them to go somewhere they did not want to go and did not feel safe to go. It may be that there was a time when they could have taken a stand and said, "Sorry, this is where this facility is going to be and you have to make your way to it", but they made a decision to say no, we will put this here. In one instance in the Lower Shankhill, they had to build an extra door on to a health facility so that no-one had to walk past Johnnie Adair's house and I am not making this up. Even in the Lower Shankhill when the feud was going on, there was a demand for a separate swimming pool for one group of Protestants and another group of Protestants and kids had to be separated in school during those times and they had to use different entrances and exits to the school. That was intra-community rather than inter-community. The problem is that as time goes on, it is more and more difficult to make a stand and say "No, we're not going to do that any more". We traditionally do it. We traditionally spend in that way. Where do you start rolling back the tide? As the areas have become more and more segregated, it is increasingly dangerous to cross from here to here to get to the job or to cross from here to here to get to your job. Work with young kids on interfaces which asked them what their travel zones were revealed that someone who lived a couple of miles from the centre of Belfast had never been in the centre of Belfast because in order to get there, they had to travel through unsafe territory. The public services debate is incredibly difficult. Are you trying to deliver effective services at the point of need, or are you trying to deliver a cohesive society with good public services within it? Where do you draw the lines within that?

Q615 Mr Sanders: It sounds almost intractable. Just take the example of the public transport system. Can you expect bus drivers to risk their lives taking people in the wrong area?

Ms McCandless: That has been a hugely contentious issue and the unions have started to say "No, our staff won't do that. We won't allow that".

Mr McAleavey: Bus drivers have been attacked and their buses stoned as the bus goes to another area and passes through one of a different community. The issue about the bus stop is not that people want to stand at a different bus stop, but 200 yards down the road may be a very dangerous place to stand. If you want to go to the health centre and it is located 300 yards away but in a different piece of territory, you might well be told "Don't come here or we'll kill you. We'll be the biggest danger to your health". It is not the easiest thing in the world to change. When Mary talked about the Short Strand, during that conflict the local Catholic community were told not to go near the FE college and masked men turned up one day and put out whoever was in it. You cannot simply say that you will change everything and it will work out. People will not use the facilities if they are in fear of their lives. What did cause Belfast to happen is that the neutral venues of Belfast were in the city centre and they are the very expensive venues for people. We, NICVA, could not locate our new headquarters in the city centre, because it would have been far too expensive to build. So we picked a peace line; we are sitting on the peace line in North Belfast between Protestant Tiger's Bay and Catholic New Lodge Road. The other thing was that the ground was cheap. We can make our contribution to social cohesion by being there, because everybody comes into our building.

Q616 Mr Betts: Are there not more opportunities for public services to do exactly the same?

Mr McAleavey: Yes, there are things like that. We would say that it is about putting your money where your mouth is, so you do have to find places where there is not a chill factor to either side. Some of our organisations, some of our groups are a bit fearful; people who came from outside North Belfast were saying they did not like it up there, it was a patchwork quilt, too dangerous. Gradually they know that it is the same for everybody and people come in and out, politicians come in and out of either side as well and some of them might be fearful at times. If you pick your locations well and negotiate with the community, you can do these things. I am just saying it is not easy.

Chairman: On that note, may I thank you very much indeed for your evidence.

Memorandum submitted by Age Concern England

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Mr Chris Bain, National Development Manager and Ms Helena Herklots, Head of Policy, Age Concern England, examined.

Q617 Chairman: May I welcome you to the final session of the Committee this afternoon on social cohesion and ask you to identify yourselves for the record, please?

Ms Herklots: I am Helena Herklots, Head of Policy at Age Concern England.

Mr Bain: I am Chris Bain, National Development Manager at Age Concern England.

Chairman: We give people a chance to make a statement at the beginning, if they want or are you happy for us to go straight to questions? Straight to questions.

Q618 Chris Mole: Your paper set out the many barriers to older people playing their full part in creating cohesive communities. What single change would make a real difference in breaking down those barriers?

Mr Bain: I should think a much more localised approach, a community development based approach to working with communities and with older people, would actually enable those barriers to be more clearly identified. As for solutions to them: solutions have to be developed in consultation with people else they will not be sustainable solutions. Those can be developed on a very localised basis and then the learning from that can then be spread more widely through communities and across cities.

Q619 Chris Mole: Ted Cantle's report after the disturbances in Oldham, Bradford and Burnley does not really address the question of elderly people. Why is the role of older people in creating cohesive communities being overlooked?

Mr Bain: It is a difficult one to answer. It should really be the policy makers who answer. My view is that it has not been sufficiently high up the political agenda, because older people are not a corporate group who make their views known. They are a very disparate group, as any group in society is and they have not made use of their political power. They have the opportunity to do so now because they are not voting in the tribal ways that older people in previous generations used to vote. They are thinking independently and making pragmatic choices. With that, the political profile of people will rise and my experience is that as the political profile rises, so politicians take people more seriously.

Q620 Chris Mole: Do you think there is anything Age Concern can do to contribute to that?

Ms Herklots: Certainly in terms of highlighting the voting power of people over 50 we are doing a number of things. One is in terms of some of the local projects we have across the country, which seek to involve older people, but also try to help older people build their own confidence. Sometimes there has been an assumption that older people can just join in things and often that is not the case, either because of some very basic barriers like a lack of public transport or fear of crime. Older people may be frightened of going outside their homes and it may be that community events are happening in the evening and people find that a barrier; so projects which help older people to build their confidence. We run something called a Voice and Choice course, which is helping older people build the skills to get involved. The other area which is really important in terms of social cohesion is in generational projects. Here again we found quite a bit of success in bringing together younger and older people and breaking down some of the myths that they have about each other. Older people may typically be fearful of younger people; younger people may think of older people as "has-beens". Working with groups, doing joint activities, whether it is computer clubs or reminiscence projects or whatever, is a really helpful way of beginning to build that understanding, which is a very important first step to building that social cohesion.

Q621 Mr Clelland: Do you think local authorities do enough to promote social cohesion through projects involving older people?

Ms Herklots: The experience is very patchy. In some areas there certainly is a commitment and one of the programmes which has helped that to some degree is the Better Government for the People programme, which government has supported, which set up a number of pilot projects across the country, with the aim of consulting and involving older people in the development of services and in planning for ageing populations. It is patchy and part of the problem there is sometimes the funding regime. Quite often they may be funding for new and exciting projects but quite often local voluntary organisations then struggle to find continuation funding. Funders will typically like something which is new, but funding for sustained involvement of older people and projects can be difficult. We believe one of the things that local authorities could do, which would be very valuable not only to older people, but to local areas more generally, is to develop strategies for ageing populations which look across the age spectrum and really plan ahead for the way in which their local communities may change over the coming years.

Q622 Mr Clelland: Would you also look across gender balance and ethnic minorities? When we went to Oldham we visited some luncheon clubs which tended to be the women's luncheon club or the men's luncheon club or various ethnic minorities. How can we bring in a bit more cohesion in terms of older people's activities?

Mr Bain: We talked earlier on about capacity building for older people to enable them to participate and indeed for other excluded groups, using a primarily community development based approach. I would also argue for capacity building for service providers and for the older people and the other excluded groups to be part of that capacity building, to deliver the training and awareness raising. With that you then start not only to build links, but to build awareness on both sides, because there is an issue amongst older people and older groups about the fact that they do not really understand the very real issues local authorities are facing, in terms of service delivery. If you can get that better understanding on both sides, then you have a more sustainable solution coming out at the end of the process.

Q623 Mr Clelland: Do you think there is any mileage in local authorities providing incentives by making it a condition of funding that there is more cohesion, more of a mixture in ethnic groups and the way they work?

Ms Herklots: There is a number of things which local authorities can do, starting at the care level, the commissioning practices of local authorities actually expecting providers of care services to take account of cultural differences and to ensure that the funding is there to employ the right people to take full account of people's religious needs, cultural needs, for example. That is certainly helpful. In terms of their duty to promote the wellbeing of their local communities, some indicators there about the involvement of older people from different groups would be really helpful. There are not really any incentives in terms of the performance indicators which assist the engagement of older people, so we have a situation where a number of areas are doing it, but there is not really enough policy framework to support that, certainly not in terms of monitoring and indicators.

Q624 Mr Cummings: Can you tell the Committee how older people can contribute to community cohesion?

Ms Herklots: They are doing it already to some degree. Older people do an enormous amount already in terms of volunteering in a range of different ways, in terms of their role as grandparents and carers, in terms of the role of local voluntary groups. There is a number of barriers to that. Some of the projects we are involved with, involve older people teaching younger people. We have a kind of foster grandparent scheme where older people provide support to children perhaps from a deprived family who need that older mentor if you like. There is a number of individual projects across the country which are very successful. The challenge is beginning to try to mainstream that and move it from patches of good practice, much more into a more standard approach.

Mr Bain: It is also about having a change of mindset. We do tend to talk about a demographic time bomb. To me that is an entirely inappropriate way to look at an ageing population and the issues between ageing and older people need to be considered as separate issues; they are not the same. I have argued for some time that the growth in the number of older people is not a social services issue; even though it is an issue for social services, it is much wider than that. There are opportunities around the number of fit and active older people entering into our community which we need to take into account. There is a potential role in the future for older people as, for example, mediators between generations and groups, building on their experience and knowledge and commitment and capacity which they gain over a period of time. In order for that to happen, we need to make some sensible judgments about what older people need in order to fulfil that role and give them the appropriate support. They can become an enormous resource in beginning to sort out some of the tensions there are within communities and within society. We need to give them the opportunity to do that.

Q625 Mr Cummings: The Committee have been told about projects which bring young people together with older people so that they can learn about their lives and their experiences. How do you believe this project could be expanded?

Ms Herklots: The inter-generational projects are beginning to develop more now. There is actually an inter-generational network across the country and organisations such as Age Concern and the Beth Johnson Foundation are involved in that. We are doing our bit to try to develop good practice and to initiate projects across the country, but there are two issues really: one is sustainable funding. Quite often it is difficult to get funding for projects which are seen as not necessarily supporting those in greatest need. A lot of these projects are about helping older people before they need a lot of help, about helping older people contribute to their local communities and it is very difficult to get funding for those. That is one factor. The other factor is about help to spread good practice and ideas and the network is beginning to do that, but it has some way to go really. One of the important things we found from the inter-generational work is that it is not only good in terms of social cohesion, but it is also good in terms of the health of the older people involved. There is a real link there between people being involved and people feeling healthier and better. It has some very positive spin-offs in terms of people's own health and staying independent.

Q626 Mr Cummings: How do you believe projects could be developed which promote social cohesion, with white students learning from older people from black and mixed ethnic communities about their lives and cultures?

Mr Bain: I would see it as a two-way learning process, because it would be helpful for some of those elders to see what was happening to people.

Q627 Chairman: Are there any examples of where that is happening? There are obviously examples of where young people are working with older people in recording history and things like that, but are there examples of cross-ethnic groups?

Ms Herklots: We could certainly look to see whether we have some examples of those and send those on to the Committee.

Q628 Mr Betts: Local authorities and health trusts come in for some criticism that they do not always provide services which are appropriate for older people from black and ethnic minorities. Do you have particular concerns about that? Do you think changes ought to be made in the way those communities are approached?

Ms Herklots: It stems from a general concern really about health and social care services not assessing people as individuals all the time. That is particularly important when people have particular religious and cultural needs and requirements. There is more than an understanding now that things need to improve and one council, Kent County Council, has produced a very good guide on providing what is called culturally competent care, which sets out some standards really in approaches to make sure that older people, particularly if they are vulnerable and need personal care, get the right sort of support. There are problems. We are a long way from that being the case. We are a long way from it being the case for older people to get individualised support anyway, but certainly we are a long way generally from people getting that culturally appropriate care. One of the issues there is about commissioning. Local authorities have an opportunity, through their commissioning practices to require of providers that level of provision, that level of cultural sensitivity. It is certainly not there at the moment across the board, although there are some elements of good practice.

Q629 Mr Betts: Is there not a conflict here between the need to provide services which are appropriate for people in their particular community, whatever the particular requirements and needs they have, maybe due to religious approaches or whatever and social cohesion? Are you not almost saying that the service which is going to be delivered to people from different ethnic backgrounds and is going to be different and probably separate and people will simply not mix as a result?

Mr Bain: One of the key issues here is around discrimination and we have talked about race, faith and cultures being one of the determinants of appropriateness, but there are others. There is age, gender, level of disability and so forth and awareness of how those issues are perceived in some communities as key to getting an appropriate service. Many of the people who receive those services suffer multiple discrimination on a number of levels. They suffer a complex web of discrimination which perhaps the rest of the community does not. If that were not complex enough, it changes over time. The perception changes over time; the role of older people in particular communities changes over time; attitudes to age and gender and disability change over time. We need to be far more sophisticated and understanding, putting in place and reviewing improvement mechanisms for our public services, otherwise what we will have is a service which is universally applied, but is not individually tailored, which was one of the objectives of the public service reforms.

Q630 Mr Betts: Individually tailored services can mean services are separate for people from different backgrounds, that you will not have a community centre where people from the white community, extended community, black community all mix together because they will all want separate things. How do you go about that? Is there a tension between tailoring services to suit the needs of individuals and particular communities and trying to ensure there is a social cohesion, a bringing together of people in different communities?

Ms Herklots: The challenge is to try to do both. In a sense we are talking about specific services for specific groups as well as trying to mainstream these issues so that services generally are more acceptable to more groups. At the moment we are in a situation where people will just not come forward to services, they would not come to services unless they felt they were specific to their culture. Therefore we need to recognise and provide for that, but at the same time we try to build a more cohesive society and a more cohesive community and to have the mainstream service providers, which in some areas may well be Age Concern, doing all they can to try to ensure that their services are more open and people are more likely to approach them. At the moment, if we just say we want everyone to come together and that is the approach we are going to take, that will not work. We need to try to do both. We need to identify the needs of particular individuals and groups and try to respond to those, as well as work hard to try to make mainstream services more appropriate and more sensitive. It is about trying to recognise each individual need and that may be a need around race or culture, it may be a need around disability or mental health or whatever. It is a huge challenge, but it is not a question of trying to do either/or; we need to try to do both.

Q631 Mr Betts: May I ask about interpreting services and the importance you attach to them? Do you think they are generally of a standard which is appropriate? Sometimes you do hear stories of elderly people being dismissed as confused, when actually what they cannot do is understand what is being said to them.

Ms Herklots: We have quite a way to go before we have interpreting services which meet what people need. One of the issues we come across is older people going to their GP and needing an interpreter and perhaps having a younger person there doing the interpreting, who may not actually understand what the older person is trying to express or is going through in terms of the illness they are presenting. Sometimes also you find that interpreters may be members of the family and there may be an issue of confidentiality for the older person. They may not want to talk about their particular problem with the member of their family.

Q632 Chairman: Do you have any examples of good practice across the country?

Ms Herklots: Not off the top of my head, but we can certainly look to see whether we can find those.

Q633 Mr Sanders: How should the revised guidance on community cohesion, which is coming out of the Home Office later this year, address the needs of older people?

Ms Herklots: The single thing it could do which would be really helpful would be to include older people as both contributors to community cohesion and as people who can benefit from it. This is a point generally about policy in these areas. If older people are not specifically mentioned, the danger is that they will get left out and ignored; not necessarily deliberately, but simply because they have not been identified. We should like the community cohesion guidance to include some measures about consulting and involving other people at local level in a way which has not been there to date.

Mr Bain: There are also issues about how you measure effectiveness in terms of progress and there are several qualitative measures which you can use. I have heard somebody say that you measure the effectiveness of anti-discrimination legislation by the absence of discriminatory outcomes. To me that is an inadequate measure. What you need to do is talk to people about how they feel about the public services and the community in which they live and about the people with whom they engage and do surveys of that, because that is the most reliable measure of how effective social cohesion has been. Some excellent work has been done by the Audit Commission in terms of developing measures for social capital, which is helpful in this context. David Jones of the Audit Commission is doing some of that. It is also something about getting an intelligent accountability for our public services and making sure that the accountability we have is rooted in accessible and transparent information, above all that the accountability is rooted in the needs of the communities we serve and the aspirations they have, rather than is currently the situation, which is a mixture of centrally and locally derived targets.

Q634 Mr Sanders: Is not the problem, how you define what the older community is, because it is such a disparate group and while some of them depend upon public services, other older people will want nothing to do with public services? Do they have a legitimate right to a say in how you build a cohesive community, when maybe they have voted with their feet into a private road, behind a gate, with private security guards and want nothing to do with the rest of the community?

Mr Bain: It is an interesting one. One of the things I do in my spare time is chair a primary care trust and one of the things which was said to me was that people were disengaged and not at all politically aware or politically active or interested in what was happening. My reply to them was: if you believe that just try to close something.

Q635 Chairman: Do older people really exist?

Mr Bain: I think they do, because we are the older people; it is everybody in this room now or in the future.

Q636 Chairman: The reason I ask is that you said in the regeneration initiatives that older people are so often ignored. I have looked at quite a lot of regeneration projects and very often the people who have been most active in the community are over 60, but they certainly would not see themselves as older people. They might think about catering for older people, who might in fact be younger than they, but they would not see themselves as older people. Is it fair to say that regeneration projects fail to cater for the age group over 60?

Ms Herklots: The research we have commissioned over the last few years certainly suggests that. We have some research coming out shortly, which shows there has been some improvement over the last two or three years, particularly in projects which are inter-generational in focus or have a health dimension. From our experience, it is difficult to get older people's needs and contributions into regeneration programmes. People tend not to define themselves as older people. Older people are always five years older than one is at any point in one's life. The point about the population being incredibly diverse and increasingly so does make it clearly a challenge in terms of involvement, but no less an important thing to strive for.

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