|
UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 45-iii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE OFFICE OF THE DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: HOUSING, PLANNING, LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND THE REGIONS Wednesday 11 February 2004 MR TREVOR PHILLIPS, MR DHARMENDRA KANANI and MS SANDY PITCHER MR STEPHEN TWIGG MP and DR STEPHEN LADYMAN MP YVETTE COOPER MP and FIONA MACTAGGART MP Evidence heard in Public Questions 637 - 774 USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Committee on Wednesday 11 February 2004 Members present: Andrew Bennett, in the Chair Mr Clive Betts Mr John Cummings Chris Mole Mr Adrian Sanders ________________ Memorandum submitted by Commission for Racial Equality Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Trevor Phillips, Chairman, Mr Dharmendra Kanani, Director of Countries, Regions and Communities, Ms Sandy Pitcher, Head of Corporate and Parliamentary Affairs, Commission for Racial Equality, examined. Q637 Chairman: Is Mr Phillips not coming? Mr Kanani: He is. He has just been delayed somewhat, I am afraid to say. Q638 Chairman: I think we should make a start. Perhaps you would like to introduce yourself for the record. Mr Kanani: My name is Dharmendra Kanani. I am a director of Countries, Regions and Communities for the Commission for Racial Equality. Q639 Chairman: We normally give witnesses the chance to make an opening statement. Do you want to say anything? Mr Kanani: I know that our chair had prepared a statement. I would like to say that I welcome the opportunity to be here. The evidence that we have submitted obviously speaks for itself. One of the issues for us has been clearly the appropriateness of the policy aim that has been established following the disturbances in the north and how that has actually had an impact on the ground. Obviously the work of the Committee is going to add to understanding the practical impact and how we measure the impact of that particular policy aim. Q640 Chairman: I have to say that the Committee were somewhat shocked that Mr Phillips failed to get up to Oldham when we were originally taking evidence on this; for him to fail again does seem to me to be remarkable, given that I have been chairing this Committee on and off in one form or another for over eight years and I do not think we have had any other example of a witness who has failed twice to turn up. Perhaps you would draw that to his attention. Mr Kanani: By all means. I do apologise once again on his behalf. Q641 Mr Betts: The Government has now clarified what it means by social cohesion. What do you see as the CRE's role in delivering that? - If, indeed, you do see it as your role to deliver it. Mr Kanani: Absolutely. I think we have a very important role and I think we have a partnership role in assisting in the delivery of that particular policy objective. I do not see it as being our sole purpose but I do see us as a partner organisation with local Government with central government and others to enable the delivery of that. From our point of view it is also about ensuring that the centrality of the issues of racial equality is brought to the fore. One of the issues we have come to understand and experience, especially from our work on the ground through funding work throughout Britain, has been the sometimes confusion between the role of social cohesion and how racial equality actually fits within that overall framework. It has been a complicating process, which people have tended to make sense of as we move forward, but, from our point of view, we have a number of functions and a role to play, not least through our policy advocacy role through to the grant management and grant making role that we have through to assisting with government and other agencies in providing advice and guidance. Q642 Mr Betts: Do you see a potential conflict there between the equality role and the social cohesion role? In the past, it seemed almost as though in the equality mode, if I may put it that way, there was a celebration of diversity: we were living in a multicultural society and everyone had a right to be themselves, to celebrate their own culture. Then social cohesion comes along and says, "Well actually it is all very well being a multicultural society but we really have a series of different cultures which do not touch each other: people live in their own culture but never get out and have any contact with people from another culture who could be living in the same street." Is there a conflict there? Mr Kanani: No, I do not think there is a conflict. I think many have referred to the issues of incompatability between the issues of cohesion and equality. I think we need to understand very clearly that we cannot achieve social cohesion or cohesion of any sort unless we begin to tackle issues of both inequality and discrimination. I think that is where the rub is, if we begin to ignore that how communities begin to trust each other, live comfortably next to each other, is born out of their experiences of access to services and their ability to enjoy employment on a fair and equitable basis - and I think issues around perceptions come to the fore. So I do not think they are incompatible as issues. I think there is a job of work for us to do and for providers of public services in particular to ensure that that confusion does not actually occur, both in the minds of individuals receiving services or attempting to achieve employment but those who are actually providing those goods and facilities. I think we need to be very clear, so that there is not that confusion. Q643 Mr Betts: Why did you say in your submission to us that, "The CRE does not believe that the community cohesion agenda has assisted greatly in advancing towards a society where all inhabitants have a place where diversity is appreciated and welcomed and difference is respected"? You had just said there is not a problem, but in the submission you are saying that you thought it was not very helpful. Mr Kanani: We feel that the way in which the policy aim is being implemented and where it has been understood has created and caused that potential conflict. We feel that the way in which it is actually delivered and made sense of is what is important. That is where we drew attention in our submission to the fact that there are issues where the way in which the whole agenda has been unfolded and delivered has caused that kind of difficulty, not least on a local level in terms of how people have made sense of both the issues. Q644 Chairman: Good morning. Mr Phillips: Good morning. My apologies. I am afraid I am not having much luck with this Committee. Q645 Chairman: We have already commented on your inability to get to Oldham and now your inability to get here on time. Mr Phillips: Yes. Chairman: But we have started the session, so we will continue with questions. Q646 Mr Cummings: In your submission you say that one of the guiding principles is to promote good relations, but does the evidence of the 2001 disturbances not suggest that you have failed in this respect or at least not given this the necessary degree of priority? Mr Phillips: Forgive me, I am not sure where we have got to, but ----- Q647 Chairman: The second set of questions. If you could answer the question, we would be grateful. Mr Phillips: In direct response to your question, I think to reach that conclusion you would have to pre-suppose that the CRE - if by "you" you mean the Commission for Racial Equality - is in itself some way responsible for the fundamental causes of those disturbances and the fractures that led to them. I am sure other people have said to you - and I have read the evidence ------ Q648 Mr Cummings: I was not suggesting that you are the cause. Mr Phillips: When you say, "Does that not suggest that you have failed" it seems pretty direct. It was a fair question. If I may answer it. Q649 Mr Cummings: I would think it is more than a fair question but I am certainly not attacking any individual or any organisation. I am trying to ascertain your thinking behind where perhaps you may have failed. I am not suggesting you have. Mr Phillips: I am trying to answer your question. If your question is: Does that suggest that we, the CRE, have failed? And I think the answer is in what are the causes of this. We know that some of the causes are to do with economic deprivation. We know that some of the causes are to do with inequality. Some of that is to do with government action and some is to do with the position of the private sector, some of it is to do with the way that local government has worked. The question is: Could we in some way or another have influenced the behaviour of all of those actors in a way that changed what they did? I would say: A bit, but not a huge amount. Perhaps it would be simpler to say what we have done since. In the case of East Lancashire, Burnley particularly, we have now set up an REC where we did not have one before, to support the efforts of local councils and to encourage people, particularly those in the voluntary sector, who want to bring different communities together, to create greater contacts between communities. Elsewhere I myself have been to Bradford and Oldham, although I have not been to Burnley, to discuss with particularly local councils and the voluntary sector there how we might help and support them by making grants available, by encouraging new activities. I am sure Dharmendra has already spoken about our Safe Communities Initiative - and it is in our evidence - where we are trying to develop some new ways of approaching issues of conflict avoidance. Q650 Mr Cummings: For instance, with the benefit of hindsight, do you think it was wrong for organisations like your own to focus narrowly on the equalities agenda without trying to tackle some of the underlying causes of racism and discrimination, perhaps by promoting much wider cross-cultural understanding? Mr Phillips: If that were the case it would have been wrong, but it is not. My own first involvement with the Commission for Racial Equality, which reaches back now nearly 30 years, was the promotion of a painting competition for schoolchildren aimed at encouraging multiculturalism. Much of the CRE's promotional effort has been directed at persuading, if I may put it that way, the British public that racial and ethnic differences are not in themselves a reason for division. A great deal of what Race Equality Councils do locally is not to do with what you would describe as a narrow equality agenda but much more to do with reconciliation, a great deal to do with bringing different communities together. It is not always successful - this is hard and difficult work - but it would not be correct in any way, shape or form to suggest that the CRE or, indeed, Race Equality Councils, have focused on a narrow agenda. Q651 Mr Cummings: In your view, which national body now has responsibility for promoting and developing a national framework for good community relations? Is it the Community Cohesion Unit of the Home Office? Mr Phillips: Within government? Q652 Mr Cummings: Yes, which national body. Mr Phillips: As I think you will have seen from our evidence, we are a little bit sceptical about the way in which the entire concept of community cohesion has been approached. I am rather doubtful whether in practice it has content. I think the formal position is that this is the territory of the Home Office. I happen to believe that the new minister who is responsible for this has taken a pretty active and vigorous posture on it. I am not, however, persuaded that the machinery of government is clear about where the responsibility for driving such an agenda as it has is located. There is a Community Cohesion Unit within the Home Office but I would guess that the Home Office would tell you - and you would have to ask them really about this because we are not responsible for Home Office policy - that this is a cross-departmental responsibility, including ODPM, including DWP, for example. Q653 Chairman: Who are giving you the thumbs down and really saying that it is not working? Mr Phillips: It is not clear to me. Q654 Chris Mole: Do you say that because you think it should be the CRE? Mr Phillips: Could I make a more general comment? I dislike the term "community cohesion", frankly. I think it lacks clarity. I think we are beginning to talk more about the term "an integrated society" because in order to advance a solution - which is what I think community cohesion is supposed to be - we have first to understand what it is you are trying to remedy. My view is that we are trying to remedy some of the fractures in our society. Some of those are economically driven; some are driven by other kinds of difference and division independent of economics. Our particular interest is in the fractures that are driven by race, ethnicity, nationality, national origin and so on, so we have, we think, a big role to play in an integration strategy that will heal those fractures, but that would not be the only set of fractures that have to be healed. You could argue that perhaps the biggest factor here, if we are talking about economic fractures, is the Treasury. Q655 Mr Cummings: Would it be correct to assume that the proposed new single equality body does not meet with your favour? Mr Phillips: No, it would be incorrect to assume that. I am in favour of a single equality body if it adds value to the effort of the existing bodies. I think there are two great possible values of a single equality body. First of all, it would place equality in the centre of the public realm rather than at the margins, where it is to some extent, because there are limited binds to all of the existing commissions. Secondly, if constructed properly and given the right framework of law and the right resources, the single equality body would be a driver for equality right across government and right across society and it would embody advances towards equality. That is the good picture. The bad picture is that you create a vast bureaucracy with warring factions and diverse interests which cannot be resolved. I do not think we necessarily need to go down that road. That is part of the discussion that is being held at the moment, centring on DTI. Our view is that there is all to play for here. If we can get the right structure, we can get the right outcome. This could be an immensely powerful independent guarantor of equality in our society. That is what I think is worth working for. Q656 Chris Mole: On that last point, do you think that focusing on equalities within the single body will allow yourselves to concentrate on the integrated society agenda? Mr Phillips: Yes, I do not see why not. The proposal for the single equality body does not make any difference to the fundamental weapons, if I may put it that way, of the Commission for Racial Equality which is law. We work under the framework of two laws. I think it is quite important for people to remember that the Commission for Racial Equality is not an advocacy body. It is not a pressure group. It is a law enforcement agency. It is a regulator. If we operate within a different framework, the important thing about that framework is will it regulate, will it enforce the law as well - and I mean both equality law and, as it were, the integration aspects of the Race Relations Acts. My own view is that a bigger more substantial body could do it much better. I think there may be aspects of changes in the legislation to bring about the new body that could help us to do what we do more successfully and more effectively. Forgive me if I am not understanding your question, but if I understand the thrust of it - Would our issues, as it were, get lost in a bigger body? - frankly, I do not think that necessarily is the case. If we still have the basic law, we still have the resources and we do our job well, there is absolutely no reason why within this framework we should not do it better. Q657 Chris Mole: If I could move onto mainstreaming at a local level, the amendments to the Race Relations Act 2001 gave most public authorities some statutory duties around promoting race equality. Which single agency at a local level do you think now has overall responsibility for the integrated society agenda? Mr Phillips: You would have to say, without question, the most powerful body would be the local authorities because they hold some of the most significant levers. Speaking personally, I think the most important institutions, both because of what they do and also because of where they are, are schools. In many of the communities where there are parallel lives, the issues you are concerned about, the place where people meet could be in school or in college. When I went to Oldham, one of the interesting things that the young people in Oldham College said is that that is the only place where Asian and white young people meet, and on Fridays and Saturday nights and Sundays they do not see each other. I think that education under the local authority is an important lever. I think the planning regime is an extremely important lever which we have under-utilised. By that, I mean this: In trying to reach for an integrated society, developing it locally, you have two choices. You can say that we want to prevent all clusters of ethnicity and so on developing and we will use a planning regime to prevent any ward, for example, having more than a certain proportion of families of certain backgrounds; or you can say that we want to create bridges between different communities which naturally cluster together and we want to create, if necessary artificially, opportunities where people will be led to integrate. I favour the second. That means, for example, that if you are planning a new park or a new supermarket one of the factors you will take into account, alongside the issues of where land is available, cost and so forth, is its contribution to increasing the interaction between people of different backgrounds. In essence, if you put a new supermarket in in certain towns, you could put it in the middle of an Asian community or a white community, or you could put in on the border so that the shoppers meet in the queue as part of their natural daily business. If I were forced to make a choice, I would have to say local authorities are powerful actors here. Q658 Chris Mole: If you see local authorities as the ones having the most impact or perhaps the ones in the best position to give a lead, do you think they can really achieve a significant contribution by themselves or do they need to work in partnerships with other public agencies and would you think that the new local strategic partnerships were the right body to take on that sort of role? Mr Phillips: The answer to the first question is yes. The most important bodies with which they have to work are probably the public agencies, particularly the Regional Development Agencies, and, I would say, other public service agencies. I would say the National Health Service, generally speaking, is probably the most significant and biggest one - the impact of the work of PCTs and hospitals, I think, is very much underestimated. On the question of whether LSPs, as it were, are doing the job, in our view the jury is definitely out. I will tell you my own view, which is that I think the concentration in area-based initiatives does not look like a success in our terms. Q659 Chairman: Can you tell us of an example of a local strategic partnership that you think is doing well? Mr Kanani: No, we cannot actually. The evidence we have from our partners on the ground, especially those agencies that we fund, the "clarion call", is that whilst LSPs are a very good thing - and in terms of the intention behind them they are a very good idea - with all such good ideas the difficulty is about making them work. Consistently we find that LSPs are not foregrounding the issue of equality and race equality at the heart of their business. That seems to be a recurring theme. I think a lot more effort or leverage has to be placed on making them take that particular issue forward in a more meaningful way. Q660 Mr Cummings: How does the CRE balance its work as a national organisation with those initiatives in priority local areas such as Oldham, Birmingham and Bradford? Mr Phillips: For us it is not an issue of balance. If our principle business is - let me put it this way - managing the social consequences of migration - and a big element of that is encouraging the integration process - most of that is going to happen at a local level, so it is an integral part of our business and there is not really a question of either or. We fund local partners to a tune of £4.5 to £5 million a year. That is an integral part of our resource allocation. Q661 Mr Cummings: Having said that, would you accept that in some areas the Race Equality Councils have ignored their job in promoting good race relations until perhaps after the 2001 disturbances? Why do you believe some RECs have imploded and failed? Mr Phillips: There are three different questions in there. Do I accept that they have ignored the job? No. Would I say that they have not been successful in some areas? Yes. Have some imploded? Yes, but lots of voluntary organisations do. Let me say this: We are not going to be a bunch of people who will sit here and say Race Equality councils are perfect. That is why we this year have introduced a new funding regime which we think will do two things. First of all, it will focus the Race Equality Councils that we fund not on traditional and past activities but on outcomes that we have set down; one of which, as a top priority that we have set for our local partners, is a contribution to integration and community cohesion. Q662 Chairman: Cheer me up. Give me an example of two or three Race Equality Councils which you think have done really well. Mr Phillips: Peterborough. Dharmendra can talk more about Peterborough. Mr Kanani: Yes, we have seen that Peterborough has actually formed a partnership with both public agencies and community voluntary organisations to put the issue of making communities work in a safe way, in a trusting way, right at the heart of their activities. They have actually been a leading aspect agency in that respect. We have seen good work in Bristol. We have seen excellent work in, for example, Scotland, in Fife. We have seen some excellent work by the Oldham partnership also, to which we have given some resources, where they have been a kind of source and focus for partners to come round and focus on some of the key issues. Also they have been the source to a large extent to the voluntary sector, especially the ethnic minority sector, by actually bringing the range of partners round in a very neutral way, so they have created neutral spaces. Some of the best RECs have achieved that in a meaningful way by partnership work, being a voice and being able to articulate the various needs around a particular community. Q663 Chairman: The Oldham one had to be reformed, did it not? Mr Phillips: Yes. Let me be clear about this: Where we want better performance out of RECs, that is what we will do. The new funding regime that we have brought in this year is designed precisely to guarantee better performance. May I just make one other point. It would be worth perhaps having a look at some of the pilot authorities with which we have worked, Oldham being one, to influence the work of the local authority and to support initiatives like Oldham United which brought the private sector into the arena of local community integration. One other area that perhaps it might be worth saying a sentence about is the role of Greenwich CRE in helping to deal with the legacy of the Stephen Lawrence incident, which was very, very serious locally. It is not all a bad story: there are good stories here, but there is better that we can do. Q664 Mr Cummings: I think part of my question has been answered. It does appear now that you are seeking to support a wider group of organisations over and above the Race Equality Councils. Would that be correct, that you are embracing more organisations now rather than concentrating your funds on Racial Equality Councils? Mr Phillips: We are saying that Section 44 of the Race Relations Act, which allows us to make grants, does not say that we must only give money to Race Equality Councils, so, though we intend to continue to support and develop and modernise the Race Equality Council network, we want to use that money for a couple of other purposes. One of them is to support a range of, for example, legal organisations which will receive complaints on race discrimination. To raise their levels of expertise, we are supporting some training in the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureau to make sure that they are able to deal with the kinds of complaints that sometimes come forward. We also want - and I cannot say at this point exactly what we have in mind, if you will forgive me, because we have to talk to our partners about it - to make sure we are supporting some different kinds of voluntary sector organisations. But I would not want that to be read in any way as a decision by the CRE to downgrade or abandon the Race Equality Council network. We think that is absolutely essential and will remain essential even if there is a single equality body. Q665 Chairman: Do you have enough money? Mr Phillips: No. Q666 Chairman: How much are you spending on the Race Equality Councils? Mr Phillips: Last year we granted under Section 44 about £4.5 million .... £4.8 million. Q667 Chris Mole: Could I just ask if you have resolved the issue with the pension arrangements for CRE employees? Mr Phillips: We are working on it with our colleagues at the Home Office and the Treasury. We are pretty much there but anybody who has ever dealt with these things knows that "pretty much there" is not there. Q668 Chairman: The role of central government. Does the Government really take cohesion, integration (whatever you want to call it) seriously or is it an add-on when they remember to do something about it? Mr Phillips: I think there are different parts of government which have different views about this. I am happy to be able to say that our sponsoring department, or at least the Secretary of State, takes this extremely seriously. I am not entirely persuaded that every other part of government takes it quite as seriously. I think there is a tendency to think of community cohesion as politician-speak for "please let there not be any more riots". That is a perfectly laudable ambition but it is not a strategy. My real criticism is not about whether they take it seriously or not; my real criticism, to be honest, is that I do not think anybody really knows what it is for. There are some fundamental decisions, such as the one I referred to earlier on, about whether you take the view that the direction of policy should be to prevent clusters of certain communities developing, or whether the direction of policy should be to permit that but ensure that there are not trenches dug around these communities and that there are bridges in and out of them to other communities. Q669 Chairman: You have posed those two contrasting philosophies, if you like. Which one is running? Mr Phillips: The latter, without any question. You cannot conceive of a society in which the State says to, for example, Jews, "You must not live within walking distance of a synagogue" - which is why Stanmore or some parts of Golders Green. Secondly, there is a notion which has got about that these clusters are in themselves bad things. Nobody says that about Golders Green. Nobody says, by the way, when we talk about mono-ethnic communities, that Guilford is a bad place or that some areas of the North-East are bad places because they are mono-ethnic communities. The issue is mono-ethnic communities where there may be a fatal combination of .... Absence of diversity and poverty, we know, do present challenges. They are the breeding ground, they are the target for the Far Right at the moment, and we also know that communities where they may be diverse but there is little interaction between the different groups within that community are also toxic. We need to focus our attention on that rather than worrying about ethnic communities where groups of people drawn together for perfectly good reasons are in themselves bad. The issue is: Can we make communities permeable? Can we build bridges between communities? Can we make sure that the object of policy is to increase the interaction between different kinds of British people? Q670 Chairman: The Government published Creating Sustainable Communities: Making it happen: The Northern Way this week. It did not have a word in about social cohesion and yet within the area covered by the Northern Way we have Oldham, Burnley and Bradford at least. Do you not find that amazing? Mr Phillips: You will have to forgive me, it has not been drawn to my attention. I have been out of the country until 48 hours ago. If what you say is true - and it must be because you are telling me, you have obviously read it - I would be astonished. Q671 Chairman: Thank you very much. Mr Phillips: And I would be deeply disappointed. Deeply disappointed. Q672 Mr Sanders: The Government wants to tackle the concentrations of poverty and deprivation in local areas. How can this be achieved without undermining cohesion? Mr Phillips: I would also put it the other way: Why should it undermine cohesion? All of the evidence suggests that communities where there are jobs, communities where there is security, communities where people feel they have an investment are communities in which there is cohesion, where there is integration, where people do feel a sense of belonging. I would pose it entirely the other way round: The more investment in successful communities governments make, the greater the likelihood of those communities being successfully integrated. Q673 Mr Sanders: The Cantle Report identified the competition between different ethnic communities as being divisive and your own memorandum states: "The regeneration scheme is a good example of a government initiative that lacks a strategic approach to regeneration funding. In this regards, the CRE has continued to express concerns about the way in which regeneration schemes have been funded," so there is clearly some division within the aim. Mr Phillips: Forgive me if it was not clear. We think there are two kinds of problems that arise in the way that regeneration money is distributed, both of which are to do with inequality and perceptions of inequality. First of all, it is not clear that in the redistribution of regeneration money, particularly by redevelopment agencies, there is a race equality and integration filter applied; that is to say, they think very seriously, as it were, in handing out the money: What impact will it have socially? Part of the guidance, I think, that emanated from ODPM, at least until a year ago, was that the regional development agencies should consider themselves principally as economic bodies and not to worry too much about social targets. This is a mistake. It is a mistake because one of the things that then happens is communities, particularly communities where there is a concentration of ethnic minorities, feel a sense of grievance. They feel that they are missing out on the investment that is taking place elsewhere and that in itself is a cause for division. Inequality is always the enemy of integration. The reason that this becomes an issue is the way it is presented - and here I think there is a practical point that the development agencies have to think about. Notwithstanding what I have just said, quite often when they put money into an area where they think there is a concentration of ethnic minorities, they will trumpet it as a contribution to the advancement of ethnic minorities. I would prefer it if they said it is a contribution to building the community as a whole and the integration of the community as a whole, because the effect of saying that it is a contribution to the improvement of life for ethnic minorities is to make everybody else feel - incorrectly always but nonetheless to make everyone else feel - that, bluntly put, "the blacks have something we haven't". The example I can give you is that one of the wards in central Bradford - and the same is true of Peterborough, I think - which is heavily Asian was, I believe, the seventh to receive regeneration money. The first six passed without any anxiety, any public interest particularly at all. When that particular ward got some money, it suddenly became an issue of local controversy: "The Asians are getting all the money." Actually, they were seventh in the queue. Q674 Chairman: I am going to have to cut you off at that point, because if we are going to get the rest of our questions in we do need short questions and short answers. Mr Phillips: Sure. Q675 Chris Mole: Mr Phillips, I think you were a local politician yourself before you took this job. It is seen that local political leaders have an important role in promoting cohesion. Are they effective? If not, what more is needed to enhance their skills in this area? Mr Phillips: I do not think you can generalise about this. To be perfectly honest, the position in which I was, was extremely unusual - well, unique actually: devolved administration. I would say two things about local politicians. One is that they are much put upon, and I think as a general point their contribution is underestimated. As a class of people I think they could do with a great deal more support individually, that we should do more to attract a wider range of people. That means - and this is a wider point - actual support for them. I think many local councils would benefit from, for example, being in a situation where a nurse could give up some of her shifts in order to be a local councillor. I think they would benefit hugely. At the moment that is impossible because of the level of commitment and the poor reward. More broadly, I think both local councils and the political parties which influence their composition could pay a great deal more attention to making sure there is genuine diversity on their councils, that they have a wider range of people from different backgrounds. I think they should avoid encouraging what the Americans call "ward healer politics"; that is to say, essentially picking out ethnic minority leaders and treating them as representatives of that community and nothing else. I think they need to have a smarter and more - I keep using this word - "integrated" approach to local politics. Q676 Chris Mole: On another aspect of local politics: Do you think enough is being done to tackle the rise of the Far Right in local government? If not, what more is needed? Mr Phillips: The answer to that is no. There are two major contributions that local politics makes to the rise of the Far Right. First of all, the failure of councils. On my fourth day in this job, I went to Yorkshire to talk to people who basically had voted BNP - I asked specifically to talk to a white audience - and everywhere I go I tend to try to meet young people who either have or are likely to. The overwhelming message is not: "We hate people from ethnic minorities." It is, "We think we have been ignored by the local council, they are useless, they do not do anything for us. We never see the councillor from year one to year four." So, first of all, there is the failure of local councils, and, secondly, the apathy of some political parties in some areas. It is incredible and unacceptable that some political parties decide, however difficult it is, that they will not contest wards, and thereby allow racist parties pretty much a free walk-in to some of them. There is a separate but connected issue, which is the behaviour of the local press which often inflates stories. Q677 Chairman: We are coming on to that. Could I ask you briefly: Do you think it is possible to create a common set of values that cuts across all ethnic groups within this country? Mr Phillips: Yes, there must be. And there always has been. We have a thousand years of it. Q678 Chairman: Do you think speaking English is part of that common culture? Mr Phillips: Yes. Q679 Chris Mole: Could I just ask: What do you think of the European secularist model that is being debated in France at the moment? Would that help here? Mr Phillips: I think it is a disgrace. Q680 Mr Cummings: Do you believe anything can be done to promote a more mature, positive approach to race relations in the local media? If so, what? Mr Phillips: Yes. I think there are two things. I think it would help, first of all, if local journalists actually met people from some of the communities on which they report. I am a journalist myself and I think that often people write stories on the phone: they write what they have been told. They do not visit the tower block in which there are supposed to be hordes of asylum seekers; if they did, they would note that probably there are no asylum seekers, or, if there are, there might be one or two families. By the way, in one of the cases I went to a place and nobody could tell me who the asylum seekers actually were. So, although there were these terrifying monsters, nobody could actually identify them. Q681 Chairman: It is a plea for journalists to do their job better. Do we need more regulation of what goes into local papers? Mr Phillips: Unless they do better, we will. Chairman: On that note could I thank you very much indeed for your evidence. Thank you. Witnesses: Mr Stephen Twigg, a Member of the House, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools, and Dr Stephen Ladyman, a Member of the House, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State (Community), examined. Q682 Chairman: Could I welcome you both to the Committee, to the second session this morning, and ask you to identify yourselves for the record. Mr Twigg: Stephen Twigg, Parliamentary Under-Secretary in the Department for Education and Skills. Dr Ladyman: Stephen Ladyman, Parliamentary Under-Secretary in the Department of Health, Minister for Community. Q683 Chairman: We offer people the opportunity to say something by way of introduction. Do you want to do that or are you happy for us to go straight to questions? Dr Ladyman: I am quite happy to go straight to questions, but if you miss anything which I think is important perhaps you will give me a minute at the end to put it in. Chairman: Right. Q684 Mr Cummings: It is no more than two years since the disturbances in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford and there have been several reports which have proposed new ways of providing services. Can you specify to the Committee one change in the way your department has delivered services which reflects the conclusion of these reports? Mr Twigg: We have sought to learn lessons from the reports. We have established in the Department a practitioners group involving a range of different stakeholders and individuals. I think it is hard to single out one particular initiative, but I would emphasise that in terms of education policy generally we are placing a far greater emphasis on collaboration between schools and between different educational institutions to try to get away from the competitive era in terms of education policy. I think that brings a number of general benefits, but in terms of community cohesion it brings important benefits in breaking down some of the barriers between schools and the barriers between communities that were highlighted in the Cantle Report and, indeed, some of the other reports to which you referred.. Q685 Mr Cummings: From the Department of Health's point of view ...? Dr Ladyman: I suppose the key thing is one of the central planks of government policy, in fact. It was set out in Shifting the Balance of Power, where we have created the primary care trusts as the chief commissioners of health services and the chief planners of health services in their local communities. We have given 80 per cent of all the National Health Service money to the primary care trusts and it is now for the primary care trusts to make decisions about how they buy services and how they set up health services in their area to reflect local problems and local issues and local health needs. Essentially we have devised a method that we believe will deliver health services in a way which is absolutely reflective of local communities. Q686 Mr Cummings: Who will monitor the primary care trusts in respect of your department? Who will monitor the local education authorities in respect of your department as to whether they are moving towards any degree of change arising out of the reports to which I have just referred? Dr Ladyman: In terms of the primary care trusts we have a range of mechanisms. We have just passed the National Health Service and Social Care Act which sets out the mechanisms for the independent bodies that will inspect the health service and the delivery of health services, so we have the Commission for Social Care Inspection and we have the Commission for Health Auditing Inspection that will both come into effect from April. Their job is to audit the delivery of services. Another thing we are expecting the primary care trusts to do from this year's planning round, and which will be of direct relevance to this, is that we are asking them to introduce health equity audits. This is a process which is beginning for the first time this year. We are expecting them to look at the health needs of different parts of their local communities and come up with a health inequalities plan. In an area like Oldham, for example, the local PCT will be expected to look at the different communities within their area, work out what their health needs are and make sure they are commissioning services according to that health equalities audit. Of course, since it is an audit, it will be an ongoing process to see whether they are actually delivering to the needs of those local communities. Q687 Mr Sanders: How does that work in an area with next-to-no minority ethnic groups? Dr Ladyman: That is what the audit will identify, that they have no minorities. That is why we have devolved this to local PCTs. If we tried to come up with a magic formula from Whitehall, we obviously could not reflect the differences in local areas. We would have to come up with some sort of averaging for the distribution of health services. That is exactly why we have done this, why we have devolved the decision-making to PCTs, and why we expect them to do a local health inequalities audit. Q688 Mr Sanders: Other funding comes with the criteria that recognises such groups and in a sense rewards those areas with such groups, whereas areas without such groups are often ineligible or do not receive that weighting because it is not there. Dr Ladyman: We do obviously have some national initiatives in place. Maybe at some point during this Committee we may talk about translation services, so we have a national translation service, for example, that can supplement efforts that are going on locally and the money that we send to the PCTs of course is based upon a formula which we believe reflects broadly the local needs of each different PCT, so, not only does it take into account the number of people in each PCT area, but it looks at levels of deprivation and health need and rurality. Therefore, it distributes money across the country on what we believe is a fair basis for them to address these local issues. Q689 Mr Cummings: Is that one of the reasons why Easington is 20 per cent below target! Dr Ladyman: Easington has some specific problems which ---- Q690 Mr Cummings: Oh, yes! Dr Ladyman: -- are outside the scope of this Committee, I am delighted to say. Q691 Chairman: Unfortunately, this Committee looked at coalfields as one of its inquiries, and we were disappointed when one of your colleagues came that they were not able to explain to us the problems of Easington. But I think we need to concentrate on social cohesion. Mr Twigg: Would it be possible for me to answer the question? It is only right that I also answer it because I think it is critically important. I do think education has a central role to play if we are really going to promote community cohesion. We have a number of levers for doing that. First and foremost, we, as a department, have a direct responsibility. We have our own field force that is out there, working with schools in key areas like literacy and numeracy; we have OFSTED who have certain responsibilities in this regard; we have the Commission for Racial Equality - your previous witnesses - who have very important responsibilities in terms of the duty on schools and local education authorities to promote race equality. Then at the local level there are some very key organisations and agencies. One example, the early years' and childcare partnerships, are critical in one issue that I know you have considered as part of this Inquiry, which is about the standards of English of children with English as an additional language as they enter primary schools, and looking now at the further development of early years' services, children centres, all of those things. One of our priorities in taking forward work around community cohesion is to ensure the best availability of teaching of English for children who have English as an additional language, especially in our most deprived communities. Q692 Mr Betts: We had evidence from the Northern-Irish organisations and they said to us that there are two of everything: there are two schools, two community centres, two health centres - two of everything. What procedures are there in your departments to ensure there is a promotion of social cohesion and there is not a duplication of facilities? Maybe there are not two health centres, but very often you find there are two community centres or that other provisions are duplicated. Could you tell us how you approach that? Mr Twigg: Certainly. Our commitment is absolutely to education playing its role in promoting community cohesion and promoting a genuine diversity that both breaks down barriers between communities but also increases understanding between them. I know that as a committee you have taken evidence from people involved in education in Oldham and there is the issue about segregation, the issue of mono-cultural schools, which as a department we do take very seriously indeed. Q693 Chairman: You are taking it very seriously; what are you doing about it? Mr Twigg: We are seeking to break down some of those barriers in a way that is realistic bearing in mind patterns of (a) where people live and (b) patterns of parental preference. That is partly why in my first answer, Chairman, I deliberately emphasised collaboration, partnership across schools, because, I think, whilst we would want to promote mixed schools, that is not always going to be a realistic outcome and therefore we also need to promote links between schools to break down some of those barriers. Dr Ladyman: The most normal accusation that is made against us in health is that we do not provide enough money for one of everything, never mind two of everything, so it simply would not happen that we were duplicating services at primary care level on the basis of people's ethnic background. We certainly would expect the PCTs, however, to look at the health needs of particular communities and make sure that health facilities are built in the areas where they can maximise accessibility and do most to drive down health inequalities. They may well, for example, decide to build a clinic in a particular area of town because that is where a particular community is living and it has a particularly poor levels of outcome in that area. Q694 Mr Betts: Have you, therefore, ever had a bid for a facility and then turned it down because it does not support social cohesion, and told the organisation that put the bid in to go away and rethink what they are doing? Mr Twigg: I have not had that, but probably because those sorts of decisions do not come to me. What I am happy to do is to take that away, ask colleagues and write to the Committee with the outcome of that. Probably the sorts of programmes where that would be relevant, for example the extended schools programme, go to another minister for decision, and I would like to find out what the position is and write to the Committee. Dr Ladyman: I cannot give specific examples of that but I can give a sort of general example where we would do that: when we are considering Section 64 money, which is money which is bid for by voluntary groups to build up particular services, we expect voluntary groups to be delivering services that are applicable either to the national picture or widespread across communities. That does not mean to say that, for example, a minority ethnic community cannot put in a bid for a particular service through Section 64 to deliver services to that community, but if we thought that any of those Section 64 bids were not taking into account the needs for social cohesion then we would certainly turn them down on that basis. Q695 Mr Betts: What about local health services? Different communities have different approaches to how they think those services ought to be provided. Is that a particular issue for you? Dr Ladyman: It is, and I have to say we are doing some research on things like the way the Mental Health Act works. We have noticed, for example, that a far higher proportion of people from ethnic minorities are detained under the Mental Health Act than are represented in the community. That is something that concerns us, so immediately we see that we start to try and ask ourselves the question as to why that is happening; is it something wrong with the Act or is it something wrong with the implementation of the Act? I think in the health service we are alive to where the data is indicating things might be going wrong and then we take active steps to try and investigate further and do something about it. Q696 Chairman: You did talk a minute or two ago about the interpreting services. I think they are more relevant to health than to education. What is the principle that underlies interpreting services in the health service? Dr Ladyman: We obviously want to drive up the accessibility of health services. It is something that greatly concerns us. An example I have used frequently is that if we look at, for example, infant mortality rates amongst Bangladeshi communities, they can in some cases be nine times higher than in white communities. One of the reasons for that is that many people from different backgrounds find accessing the health service is difficult, it is culturally difficult for them or there are issues about translation and about making their views known. Sometimes services are not being delivered in a culturally sensitive way. We are trying to address that and we see making translation services available in a flexible way and in a high quality as one of the ways we can do that. So as well as local initiatives that might be taking place, we would expect primary care trusts to be commissioning an appropriate level of translation services in their local area. We would also expect them to be following best practice to try and introduce translation services. We also have the national service, which is run through NHS Direct, which provides a telephone translation service. A new contract is going to be issued shortly on that and that new contract will be going out from April. In addition, services can be commissioned through a number of organisations that provide face-to-face translation services. There are web-based translation services, and software-based translation services that are all available, but the key national tool is NHS Direct and the translation services provided through that. Q697 Chairman: You would not expect trusts to be dependent on family members translating for people? Dr Ladyman: No, absolutely not. Of course that is bound to happen from time to time because in any huge organisation the delivery of services is never as perfect as we want it to be, but no, we would not expect that to be built into systems; we would expect people to be trying to minimise that type of activity. We would expect primary care trusts and acute trusts to be commissioning services in order to make sure that that is not necessary. Frankly, it is not necessary because we do have both national and local services available. Q698 Chairman: When the Committee was up in Oldham in September we were impressed with some of the things we were told about the translation services that were available at the acute hospital, but it is quite expensive even though they may be pretty cost-effective in their own terms. What happens in terms of a trust like that getting extra resources to take into account that more translation work has to be done in an area like Oldham than in some others? Dr Ladyman: There is no additional money from the centre. Obviously the centre pays for NHS Direct, so we pay for the national services. So far as primary care trusts are concerned, the indices of their local need are used in order to judge how much money the PCT gets in total. Of course, one of the things on which they would be expected to use the additional money they get to reflect their local extra need would be to provide, out of that, translation services. So there is not a pot, I am afraid, that somewhere like Oldham can ring up and say "Send us some more money because we have a greater need for translation services", but they would be expected to engage with their local PCT to explain the need for those services and for the PCT to provide that money. Q699 Chairman: In somewhere like Oldham they obviously have quite a lot of people who have been in the town a long time who need translation services but they have also been receiving a fair number of asylum seekers, and that means that the range of languages goes up. Does any money come to help with the translation for asylum seekers? Dr Ladyman: No additional money. We recognise the range of languages through the NHS Direct service, so we would hope that NHS Direct could provide language translation services for just about any language. Translation services for the four Asian languages are the ones which are most often requested. Q700 Chairman: In Oldham, and I think in Bradford, there were a substantial number of doctors who came to this country more or less at the time all the groups moved in. A lot of those doctors are now in their late-50s or early-60s and reaching retirement age. Quite a few of them were able to translate for their patients or, at least, talk to their patients in their mother tongue. Do you see this as a problem in the health service? Dr Ladyman: It is certainly an issue. We are not expecting mass retirements in the next year or two, and in fact we have just introduced a scheme to encourage them to say on for a few years. I am delighted to say there are significant numbers of young Asians going through medical training at the moment and qualifying as doctors. That is the good news. The bad news is that the Asian doctors that are going through training at the moment have the same prejudices about going into general practice in poor areas as white doctors. So they are tending to look for practices that are in more affluent areas, or not going into general practice. So we certainly have the same problem attracting Asian doctors to go into those areas as we do with attracting white doctors to go into it. That is an issue we are aware of, and we are thinking about what we can do to hep in that. Q701 Mr Sanders: You briefly talked about faith-based schools. What are you actually doing to try to avoid or at least limit that sort of segregation within the education system? Mr Twigg: I think the first thing I would say is that I think the faith schools are only part of the picture. I think in some of the discussion on this an undue emphasis is placed on the impact of faith schools when, actually, other factors - for example, geographical segregation and housing policy - are far more significant. What we would say as a department is that faith schools can be part of the solution. One of the things that I am very keen to do is to promote more inter-faith dialogue and involve faith schools in that process of inter-faith dialogue. What we have said to local admissions forums, which bring together all the key players in a locality, is that they should be looking very carefully at local practices in terms of promoting diversity and challenging any forms of discrimination that may exist at the local level. I am very impressed with the sort of schemes you have looked at as a Committee in Oldham where they have twinning between different primary schools to try to promote greater understanding where they have got mono-cultural, or almost mono-cultural, schools. Q702 Chairman: It may be impressive but they are short of money, are they not, to fund it? Mr Twigg: That is a factor. Schools' funding has obviously been a big issue for us over this last year. One of the programmes we have put quite a lot of money into is the extended schools programme, which is starting out in some of our most deprived communities but which we want to be a nationwide programme. I think that gives a great opportunity for breaking down some of those barriers. Q703 Chairman: How? Mr Twigg: There are a number of ways. One of the issues is around family learning. One of the questions that was addressed when the Oldham group came in to see you was around levels of educational qualification and English of some of the parents of some minority ethnic communities. One of the things we say with extended schools is that (a) they must have a strong commitment to community cohesion and (b) they need to provide facilities for family learning, including for the teaching of English. Q704 Chairman: Adrian's questions started on the question of mono-cultural communities and you have not addressed that. It may be very nice that within the mono-cultural community you are actually starting the Early Years programme which is helping, but how are you addressing this cultural divide? Mr Twigg: I sought to answer it in an honest way, which is that I do not think these things are going to be imposed by me or from the centre, because I do not think that will work. I think we have learnt some lessons about that in education policy in recent years, which is why in my answer I emphasised the role at the local level. In fact, reading the evidence from the Oldham people who came to see you they actually talked about what they were doing at the local level to break down some of those barriers. What I do not think you can do is go for a policy where you forcibly mix schools when those schools are genuinely reflecting the nature of the neighbourhood. Tower Hamlets, here in London, is an area that I know better than Oldham and they have the same issue about mono-cultural schools; part of it, yes, is to do with faith education but most of it actually is to do with housing policy over the years and, therefore, where people are living in the local community in Tower Hamlets. Therefore I think the solutions are likely to be about how you can bring about exchange - twinning, linking or however you want to put it - but also how you prepare primary age children for secondary education. It was very interesting looking, again, at that evidence from Oldham that the secondary and the post-16 institutions were far more mixed than primary schools, which is not that surprising considering the scale of the institutions that we are talking about. Getting those secondaries into the primaries, I think, is one way in which we can encourage some of those barriers to be broken down. One model that we are developing, as well as the extended schools that I referred to, is federations of schools; trying to get different schools in a neighbourhood to work much more closely together. There are all sorts of benefits to do with the curriculum as to why we are doing that, it is not just bout community cohesion, but I think it could bring certain benefits with regard to community cohesion as well. Q705 Mr Sanders: Do you agree with Camden Council's view on the Education White Paper where it said "promotion of increased cultural segregation in education would appear to be deeply undermining to the cohesion agenda and this apparent inconsistency belies the Government's clear commitment to cross-sector working on cohesion issues"? Mr Twigg: I think I would have to look at the context of what Camden was saying, but if what they were referring to was policy on faith schools I would disagree with them. I will give an example of some of the work I have been involved with in London where we have a number of independent schools - as indeed there are in other parts of the country - drawn from some of our minority ethnic communities, notably in the Muslim community. A number of those schools are now coming to us and saying that they are interested in joining the family of schools and becoming voluntary-aided schools. I would say, in terms of community cohesion, those schools being part of the local family of schools is actually better for community cohesion than remaining independent schools - which in reality is the choice. Q706 Mr Betts: When we had evidence from people from Northern Ireland they almost expressed incredulity that we have got an example on our doorstep of a community divided by faith and schools divided by faith, which many of us think has led to many of the divisions and continued problems in that part of the United Kingdom, and yet we are now carrying on in this country allowing more faith schools to be created. Have we not learnt any lessons? Mr Twigg: The parallel with Northern Ireland is one that I have heard before, and I can understand the power of the argument. I do think the situation in Northern Ireland is not the same as the situation in England. What we have said is not that we want to encourage lots more faith schools but that if people come forward with a proposal for a new faith school we want to consider that. We have also said that we want to encourage faith schools to look at whether they can attract pupils from other faiths into the school, and some, particularly Anglican schools, already have a long-standing practice of doing that. Q707 Chairman: That is usually because they are short of pupils, to be blunt. Mr Twigg: Sometimes, and sometimes it is perhaps more in rural areas where they are the only school and, therefore, it is inevitably the case that that will be how they operate. I talk to people involved with education in the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church and some of the other faiths and very often there is a very strong commitment to promoting understanding between schools. I do not think it is reasonable to place such a great onus on the faith schools in this debate. Frankly, I think that lets the rest of us and other schools off the hook. Q708 Mr Betts: Let us move on to the issue which you mentioned before, where you said that social cohesion - yes, you were trying to do it but you still had the policy of parental preference. That is really the way round, is it not: parental choice first and then you will do what you can about social cohesion? Mr Twigg: I think most schools have as their over-subscription criteria brothers and sisters and distance from the school. I know there are debates to be had about the first of those criteria, but I think if we want to have a system of state education where you have successful neighbourhood primary and neighbourhood comprehensive schools I do not think there is a better alternative to that. A consequence of that will, in some communities, be mono-cultural schools. I read the evidence from Oldham and noticed that the primary head-teacher who gave evidence also talked about the attitudes of some of the local white parents and the whole issue of "white flight", so I accept it is not simply about housing policies in the local area. What I do not think you can do is to construct a system whereby you have quotas or certain numbers of pupils from different backgrounds or faiths going to schools ---- Q709 Mr Betts: So we are not going to boss people around. In my own constituency we have a mixed area of white families and Asian families from Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds. There are two primary schools serving the community, one at either edge of it; one is predominantly Asian and one is predominantly white, and you see the Asian parents and kids walking across to one school and the white parents and kids walking to the other school. That is parental preference; there are two community schools and the community is dividing itself, according to government policy. Is that acceptable? Mr Twigg: You say "according to government policy" because it is a consequence ---- Q710 Mr Betts: If they actually went to the school nearest their home you would have two mixed schools. Mr Twigg: I do not think we can go back to the days of the state telling parents where they are going to send their kids. I just do not think that is viable. I think it is much better to say "Yes, there is an issue ..." Do not get me wrong, I am not saying that what you have just described is something I am happy or comfortable with - it is not something I am happy or comfortable with - but I think we need to look at ways in which we can break down some of those barriers that exist between communities rather than, effectively, dragooning people into schools that they do not want to go to, particularly in a situation like the one you have described where the parental preferences are different between the two communities. If you described a situation where everybody wanted to go to one of the schools but only the white parents were getting in (or, indeed, the other way round) I think we would need to address that. However, if there is that actual preference in both those communities we have got to face up to that and look at ways, through citizenship, education, federations and all the other things I have briefly referred to, in which we can promote greater understanding between those communities, and then perhaps also look at some of the other areas of policy that you will be pursuing with ministers. Q711 Mr Betts: It might well be that if we had never had the parental preference policy in the first place we would not be in this position at all. Mr Twigg: I do not know. It is hard to speculate. We have had that policy now for such a long time I think that it is hard to judge whether that would have been the case or not. Q712 Chris Mole: What about when schools are reorganised? Is there any opportunity to create a better mix by choosing the location of a new school and perhaps closing two mono-cultural schools and putting one somewhere where it can span communities? Mr Twigg: Yes, I think there is potential for that. Again, I was struck in the evidence that I read about Oldham that with respect to the sixth form provision there (I think I am quoting this rightly) the principal there placed great emphasis on the location and how that was successful in drawing people in from different communities within the city. Q713 Chris Mole: I think you are shying away from the notion of quotas. What other incentives might there be to increase the ethnic mix? Mr Twigg: I think these things have to be at the local level. I think there has to be a decision at the local level, including among the schools, that they want to go down this road. Q714 Chris Mole: Is that not passing the buck? Mr Twigg: I do not think it is. Clive has described a particular situation; there will be other situations where the mono-cultural character of a school is mostly a consequence of simply where people live, and actually people are going to the local school, they are not exercising any kind of preference. Q715 Chris Mole: They are losing out by being in a mono-cultural school, are they not? Mr Twigg: Do I think the kids are losing out by being in mono-cultural schools? I think it is good for kids to have opportunities to meet other kids from other backgrounds, yes, but I think we then have to test any alternative policy to the one we have got against a number of different criteria, and I am not convinced there is an alternative, such as going back to pre-parental preference, that would be better than what we have got at the moment. Q716 Chris Mole: Okay, so if it is better for kids to have that experience of ethnic mix, what is OFSTED doing to look at that with schools and give weight to it as an issue when they are looking at the extent to which a school is socially cohesive and contributing to the wider community? Mr Twigg: One of the big changes we have seen with regard to OFSTED in recent years is a much greater emphasis on schools' own evaluation, and what we are saying to OFSTED, to local education authorities and schools is that they need to be considering issues around (a) community cohesion and (b) race equality as part of their own evaluation within their school. So OFSTED absolutely has a duty to consider this as one part of the inspections that they are undertaking - you are absolutely right. We are still relatively new. For example, the race equality requirements are still relatively recent and I am sure the people from the CRE earlier would have said this. We are working very closely, as I am sure Trevor Phillips would have said, with them to ensure that those requirements are absolutely consistently carried out in all communities, but I think with a particular emphasis on some of the communities where issues have arisen that quite properly you as a Committee have been focusing on during this inquiry. Q717 Chris Mole: Turning then to the DfES School Admission Code of Practice which was published last February, why does that not refer to community cohesion? Mr Twigg: I believe it does. I will stand corrected if I am wrong, but I believe it does. I cannot quote chapter and verse ---- Q718 Chairman: We would be very pleased to see the paragraph that deals with that. Mr Twigg: I will check into that, Chairman, and write to the Committee on that point, but I believe it does. Q719 Mr Cummings: From the evidence received by the Committee it appears that public agencies are relying more heavily upon cash-strapped voluntary and community groups in order to break down community barriers. Why are schools and health services not playing a greater role in their own right? Mr Twigg: I think schools do need to play a greater role in their own right, and I think it would be wrong if we found ourselves relying on community-based groups. In this area, clearly, there is a lot of expertise in the community and voluntary sector. For example, I am involved with our work around ethnic minority achievement and a lot of the evidence I see suggests that some of the Saturday schools - the supplementary schools - that are run in many of our minority ethnic communities play a significant role in educating young people from those communities, and have often not received any kind of financial support from the state or public sector at all. Q720 Mr Cummings: The question, Minister (and I know that time is getting short) is what do you intend to do about it from your department? Mr Twigg: What we intend to do about is to put, as we are doing, more than £300 million over the next three years. Q721 Mr Cummings: In both schools and the health service. Mr Twigg: What we are doing over the next three years is to promote extended schools where facilities, indeed including health services, are provided alongside education on school sites. We are starting with our most deprived communities, with the most deprived neighbourhoods, in doing that and we will be spending over £300 million over the next three years on this very important project. We will engage the voluntary sector but we will also be working with the health service, social services and other agencies. Dr Ladyman: Can I answer from the point of view of health? First of all, challenge the notion that was implicit in your question that we are not doing anything for social cohesion. Over 1 million people work in the health service and 1.4 million people, on top of that, work in social care. They are the two biggest multi-racial workforces in the entire country. One million people make contact with the National Health Service every 36 hours; it is the biggest multi-racial experience that we have in this country. So the notion that somehow we are not doing our bit for social cohesion is nonsense. Do I think the voluntary sector has an important and growing role? Absolutely I do, because their job, in many respects, is to tell us where we are failing to meet the needs of local communities and to help us meet the needs of those local communities. We are putting significant amounts of money through Section 64 grants precisely into voluntary organisations to support them in supporting us. So the voluntary sector plays an important role and it will grow, but do not minimise the role that we are already playing in health and social care. Q722 Mr Cummings: I certainly do not do that, but you also recognise that many local authority youth services are very poorly funded. Youth workers are not trained to promote social cohesion. Are you considering how this can be tackled? Ted Cantle, in his report, suggests that part of the youth provision should be made statutory. Do you believe that is a good idea? Mr Twigg: What we have sought to do is to ensure that there is a proper basis for the youth service in every area. What is clear from the evidence is that the quality and availability of youth services varies enormously from one part of the country to another. We have put in place, as you know, the Connexions service that is now completely nationwide, the purpose of which is to break down some of the traditional barriers between careers advice, youth service support and all the rest of it. We have also sought to recognise that there are certain key times of the years - for example the summer - by putting a significant amount of money from different government departments into summer activities, focused initially in some of the most deprived neighbourhoods but ultimately extending out into other neighbourhoods as well. Do I think that is enough? No, it is not enough and we need to do more, but I think there is a recognition that the youth service has been undervalued for a very long time, and we are starting, through Connexions, through transforming youth work and through the summer activities to at least address some of those issues. Q723 Mr Cummings: Will you be moving towards placing youth services on a statutory basis? Mr Twigg: We are not talking about placing it on a statutory basis; what we are talking about is ensuring that there is a definition of what should be provided in every community via the local education authority working together with the Connexions service. Q724 Mr Cummings: Experience shows that when the squeeze comes, as inevitably it will, then it is the youth and social sector which is really hammered. Mr Twigg: I do understand that, and that is why, through the project I have described - the transforming youth work project - we are seeking to learn from that to give some sort of protection to youth services in the future. Q725 Chairman: How much extra money is there going into it? Mr Twigg: I do not know, off the top of my head. It is not directly my area within the department. Dr Ladyman: I can certainly tell you, in terms of social services, that the social service budget has been increased by 25 per cent more than inflation since 1997, and it is not ring-fenced so local councils have the discretion to decide how to best use it on their communities. If they want to squeeze some of the children and young people's social services they can do it; if they want to squeeze the adult social services they can do it, but it is their decision based on local need. They have certainly got more money than they ever dreamt possible to actually do this. Q726 Chairman: It sounds as though you are opening up the whole question of buck-passing. Dr Ladyman: It is called devolution, I am afraid. Q727 Chairman: Can I ask, on a more cheerful note, could you give us two examples each of really good practice where, in the areas of health and education, schools or the health service are doing well to promote social cohesion? Dr Ladyman: I will certainly give you one straight away because I am just about to go and make a speech to launch a report that has been looking at people with learning disabilities in black and minority ethnic communities and their access to services. That is a report which has identified an area where we do not think people from black and minority ethnic communities are getting the right level of services. Q728 Chairman: Wait a minute, you are telling us about a problem. Dr Ladyman: We have engaged those communities in helping us to design the solutions that work on the way forward. So the best practice that I would identify there is that we involve the people themselves who have identified a problem in helping us work out what the solution is. Mr Twigg: Let me give you two examples. Nationally, the Citizenship Curriculum, which is now 18 months in, as a core part of the secondary school curriculum. There are lots of lessons to learn about perfecting it but I think, in principle, it has got enormous potential for assisting in terms of social cohesion. A school example is Glades More (?) Comprehensive School in South Tottenham, in the London Borough of Haringey, which opens up on Saturdays, with three different Saturday schools, one of which has literacy programmes for local primary age children from all ethnic backgrounds, and another is a Turkish and Kurdish school with a particular focus on the needs to learn English amongst the parents. The most frequent attendees are some of the mums from the Turkish and Kurdish communities. I would like to extend that practice to other parts of the country. Dr Ladyman: I would like to add the joint one between us, the Sure Start programme, and the work that we are doing to integrate health services for children through the Sure Start programme and what that does for social cohesion. Chairman: On that note, can I thank you both very much. Thank you.
Memorandum submitted by Home Office Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Yvette Cooper, a Member of the House, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, and Mr John Bright, Head of Implementation in the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister; Fiona Mactaggart, a Member of the House, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Race Equality, Community Policy and Civil Renewal, and Mr Atul Patel, Deputy Head, Community Cohesion Unit, the Home Office, examined. Q729 Chairman: We welcome you to the Committee this morning for the third session of our inquiry into social cohesion, and ask you to identify yourselves for the record, please. Fiona Mactaggart: I am Fiona Mactaggart and I am Parliamentary Under Secretary in the Home Office, with responsibility for Community Policy, Race Equality and Civil Engagement. Yvette Cooper: Yvette Cooper, Parliamentary Under Secretary in the ODPM. Mr Bright: John Bright, Head of Implementation in the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit in the ODPM. Mr Patel: Atul Patel, I am Deputy Head of the Community Cohesion Unit in the Home Office. Q730 Chairman: Do either of you want to make statements at the beginning, or are you happy for us to go straight to questions? Yvette Cooper: Chair, could I just say a couple of words? Q731 Chairman: By all means, yes. Yvette Cooper: Firstly, it is a pleasure to be here in front of the Committee again, for the second time this week. I just briefly want to apologise for the fact that we were not able to give evidence in Oldham and to apologise for any inconvenience or irritation that may have caused. Q732 Chairman: I think it disappointed people in Oldham who would have liked to have seen you, particularly at that point. Yvette Cooper: I do apologise for that, and I hope we can cover the main issues today. Q733 Mr Betts: Are we closer to achieving more cohesive communities than we were two years ago? If so, in what way? Fiona Mactaggart: I think that the answer to that is probably yes. It is always difficult to say certainly yes because if you say "more cohesive communities" the situation, we all know, is not the same in every part of the country, nor is it going to be. I think that the way includes the fact that where there are signs of division and dis-cohesion there is better intelligence about that and there is more awareness about appropriate strategies. If you think about what was happening in Oldham before the disturbances, there were a number of signs that were there that people were aware of which they did not really have very powerful strategies to confront at that point. It seems to me that that problem would not occur now because there is actually much more clarity about confronting division, about being open, about communicating the message, about connecting between services and so on, and not reinforcing problems - which I think happened by accident, to some extent, in the past. Yvette Cooper: I think we have certainly learnt a lot from what happened, and have I think done a lot more to emphasise issues around community cohesion in a whole load of other things that are happening, whether it be through Local Strategic Partnerships' work or local government work or issues across the board. I think we have done more to bring issues around community cohesion into the mainstream services and mainstream debate. So to that extent I think we have made a lot of progress. Q734 Mr Betts: In terms of the policies you have on cohesion, do you think they are responding adequately to the different types of problems that are thrown up in different places? For example, the challenges in somewhere like Oldham or Bradford are probably very different, and the circumstances are different, to those in a London borough. Would you like to say something about that? Fiona Mactaggart: That is one of the reasons why instead of having a kind of national, one-size-fits-all "This is the answer to community cohesion" strategy, we have used the concept of pathfinders to try to develop appropriate strategies in appropriate places. We have got 14 pathfinders and 14 shadow-pathfinders and they cover a very substantial variety of kinds of places - not just north and south but also rural and urban - in order to try to model appropriate ways of building cohesion and to make sure that they learn from each other and from change. I think it is really important to embed the learning which comes out of the pathfinders and to put learning at the heart of it, and to make sure that we make the connections. One of the striking things is that in these very different 14 pathfinders and 14 shadow pathfinders (some, like West London, are collections of local authorities, some are single local authorities) there are some very similar messages coming out of that. For example, things like connection with the voluntary and community sector; for example, things like communicating, being open about policies, and so on, and making sure that those messages are widespread even if differently applied in different circumstances. It is quite striking to me that in these very different circumstances quite similar strategies, adapted to the real local situation, seem to be appropriate. Q735 Mr Sanders: The Community Cohesion Unit is supposed to have a central role in co-ordinating the work of the different departments. How does it do that? Fiona Mactaggart: The main way that it does that is by informing policy in other departments. One of the things that we know has happened in the past is that well-meaning policies (and Area Based Initiatives are a classic example) have inadvertently contributed to a sense of division within communities. So that by targeting resources at a particular neighbourhood, perhaps, people just outside the neighbourhood have felt excluded, and that created a sense of division in the community. When I went to visit Oldham it was one of the issues that was raised with me by residents and businesses there. So our strategy is to try and make sure that policies do not inadvertently contribute to division by, for example, collaborating with ODPM on the ABI guidance that we issued last autumn and, secondly, to try to make sure that government departments embed a mainstream strategy to deal with community cohesion. One example might be the Department for Education's contribution to the pathfinder areas that I was just speaking about. They have put a contribution into each pathfinder and also into each of the shadow pathfinders to develop extended schools programmes. Those programmes help schools to have more community outreach, to have more connection and to get more connection between schools. Their model, a programme which actually needs to be mainstream but working with the pathfinder programme through the DfES, gives them the kind of learning that I was talking about, at the heart of pathfinders, to introduce into their general education programme. Q736 Mr Sanders: It is very bogged down, though, is it not? The actual desire and demand for these programmes is coming from a local area often and is actually dependent upon a decision at the centre for it to happen. There is also a great plethora of government units across both departments involved in promoting social cohesion. How is their work being co-ordinated? Yvette Cooper: I think it is true that there are a lot of different parts of the government involved in promoting social cohesion, but I think that is probably a good thing because what that demonstrates is that we are picking up the issues around social cohesion and community cohesion in a lot of different places because it is relevant to a lot of different things. From my perspective, which is outside the Home Office where the Community Cohesion Unit is, I am struck by the fact that I think this is one of the areas - certainly from the ODPM's point of view - where we have one of the better examples across government of cross-government working. It is always easy to identify bits of the government that, for all of the best intentions, do not work as well together as they ought to. I have been struck by the fact that the relationship, particularly between the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit and the Community Cohesion Unit, seems to be a very close working relationship and quite an effective one. The Neighbourhood Renewal Unit, which does the support for a lot of those local programmes and a lot of those local things that you are talking about - local regeneration programmes all across the country - and the support that it gives, whether it is providing people with local expertise, providing people with guidance or performance-managing different local programmes, actually includes a lot of work around community cohesion, most of which has been developed in partnership with the Community Cohesion Unit. So whilst I think it is always a legitimate question to ask, "Are we working effectively across departments?" and so on, I think this is one of the better examples. Q737 Mr Sanders: But does the buck stop with anybody? Fiona Mactaggart: In terms of the overall policy, I think the buck stops with the Home Office. We are the department with the responsibility for community well being, community safety and so on, and that means that we have responsibility for the issue of cohesion. However, it is important that we work in this way across both departments because, for example, the constituents of Easington might think "Community cohesion is not to do with us, it is to do with Slough or Bradford or places which are more multi-racial", for example. Unless we get policies which make sense in every area then actually we risk making mistakes about it. I do not think it is centrally dictated, although I think there is a central core, a necessary central core, which makes sense. However, the reason for doing this via a pathfinder programme rather than via "You have got to do this" and plonk down on the heads of your citizens the solution is actually because we need to grow, adapt and make intelligent the solution in the neighbourhoods that are most affected. Q738 Chairman: We have got the Community Cohesion Unit, we have got the Active Communities Unit, the Civic Renewal Unit, the Race Equality Unit, the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit and the Social Exclusion Unit. That is a recipe for some civil servants to spend all week in meetings, is it not? Fiona Mactaggart: No, no. The fact that we call many of the groups who work within the Home Office units does not mean that they are somehow kind of isolated islands here and there. All those groups of people are within overall teams; many of the ones you have read out, for example, which are based in the Home Office, are within the Active Communities Directorate, and I do not think the fact that there are units which are focused on different things means that their work is not connected to each other. When, for example, as at least three, I think, of the units that you read out are within a division, they are merely units which have a particular expertise and which have clustered together within an overall division. I do not think the fact that we have clustered our staff within units to develop expertise should mean that there is confusion, because these units - certainly the ones in the Home Office - work closely together. As Yvette has just described, they work very closely across departments in a way that is surprisingly difficult in Whitehall and that we are managing to crack quite well, I think. Q739 Chairman: You have put great emphasis on the pathfinders, and I think we have had some good evidence about pathfinders. But shadow pathfinders? They are the booby prize, are they not? Fiona Mactaggart: They do not have a lot of money associated with them, that is quite true, but I do not think they are a booby prize. My own constituency is a shadow pathfinder (it had got that status before I got this role) and I think it is interesting to be able not just to have the pathfinders - for which there are only 14 places - developing these things. In shadow pathfinders they have some resources, for example, the DfES money I was referring to earlier goes into the shadow pathfinders. One of the things that is happening in the pathfinders is communications training. One of the things we have learnt is that it is really important in tackling these issues to have good leadership and good communication of strategies, so we have developed a communications' training package which is going to the pathfinders. All the shadow pathfinders will have that, too, and they are involved in all the learning out of it. Frankly, I think that one of the things we need to recognise, if we are trying to mainstream this programme, which we are, is that we need to practise doing some of the habits that we are developing without special grants. In a way the shadow pathfinders are a way of doing exactly that. Q740 Chris Mole: Yvette, just now Fiona mentioned the concerns that have been expressed about Area Based Initiatives creating some divisions where some people feel they are getting something and others do not. To what extent have regeneration initiatives from Government moved towards a more strategic approach, perhaps using thematic initiatives? Yvette Cooper: I think there has been quite a shift towards, I suppose, a more flexible and thematic approach. The introduction of the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, which is actually probably the biggest regeneration programme that we do, concentrates the funding on the local strategic partnership and gives them quite a lot of flexibility. We need them to try and meet the floor targets but the floor targets are all about narrowing the gap between the most deprived area and the average and to try to get rid of those inequalities that can cause tensions between different areas. So I think that has actually been the biggest focus. Local Strategic Partnerships have all sorts of flexibility to pick up particular themes right across a district, concentrate on particular areas if a particular problem is focused in those areas, but to respond very much to those local concerns. We have also, I think, done quite a bit to streamline some of the Area Based Initiatives to merge some of them together and so on. I think, though, it is worth saying that I do not think we should dismiss Area Based Initiatives altogether, however, because they can also be very effective, and done in the right way they can also be extremely effective at promoting community cohesion - if they are sensitive about the geographical boundaries and about the way in which the initiative works. One of the reports, possibly the Oldham report, identified Sure Start as being a very positive programme in supporting and developing community cohesion. Interestingly, I think it is a benefit to the Sure Start programme that it is an Area Based Initiative because it is not saying "We are stigmatising poor children by only including poor children"; we are including all the children in this particular area as part of the Sure Start programme. So that has been a benefit to it. Equally, however, it is important that Area Based Initiatives are very sensitive to those sorts of issues. We have issued two sets of guidance, one to local areas and local communities when designing their own programmes and another to government departments when they are drawing up Area Based Initiatives, which actually includes some quite strong tests on community cohesion and making sure that we actually use these to support and promote community cohesion rather than making the problem worse. Q741 Chris Mole: Can you say something about how government departments are implementing that advice? I think you have touched on things like flexibility around scheme boundaries and better involvement of adjoining communities in twinning areas, and the like. How are you actually doing that through government departments? Yvette Cooper: I think a lot of the departments are now looking at how they can better link the work that they do in areas which have got the greatest difficulties with the work being done by the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund and by the Local Strategic Partnership. So actually linking programmes with the Local Strategic Partnership rather than giving them very narrow remits, and also linking them with existing programmes in the area as well. For example, I know that some areas have been looking at trying to take a Sure Start approach right across a whole district. So they may have one or two Sure Starts in a particular district but are now looking at trying to spread the Sure Start approach to the entire district, even if they have got money coming in for particular areas, to broaden it and take the same approach across areas. The Sure Start Unit has been supporting that and supporting that as an approach. I hoped you would have been sent copies of the guidance we do now send out to departments on community cohesion and Area Based Initiatives, which sets out the principles that they need to follow. There are various tests; we have what we call a "gatekeeper" function which is performed by the Regional Co-ordination Unit which has looked at, I think, some of the Creative Partnerships work, the Safer Communities' Initiative, and so on, and also the Neighbourhood and Street Crime Wardens' work as well, where their kind of process of checking on the Area Based Initiatives and ensuring that they do consider community cohesion issues has actually improved them. On the Neighbourhood and Street Crime Wardens, for example, we have actually merged three different schemes that were in operation and linked them far more closely with the Local Strategic Partnerships and with the Neighbourhood Renewal priorities, rather than having them as separate, almost detached programmes. Q742 Chris Mole: I had spotted the RCU as missing from Andrew's list of units just now. Can I go on and ask you how you are monitoring the implementation at local government level? You talked about what LSPs are doing, but how are you keeping a check on the effectiveness of what they are doing? Yvette Cooper: Local Strategic Partnerships have, as part of their accreditation process and their performance management process the obligation to consider the impact of their work on community cohesion and, also, to monitor the inclusiveness of their strategies and to ensure that they are taking an inclusive approach. So it is actually part of the mainstream approach to monitoring the Local Strategic Partnerships, identifying problems, working with Local Strategic Partnerships that are struggling and, also, giving more scope for flexibility to those that are being successful. It is a very central part of it. Q743 Chris Mole: The CRE have just told us they do not think LSPs are putting it at the centre of their strategies. Yvette Cooper: The interesting thing is that with Local Strategic Partnerships, in order to support local flexibility you also get quite a lot of local variations. I think there is a wide variation in the level of performance of Local Strategic Partnerships on a whole range of different dimensions, and this undoubtedly would be one of them. There will be some Local Strategic Partnerships, like Bradford, for example, which have done an awful lot of work on community cohesion and have been very effective around community cohesion, and there will be others where no, they have not taken it as seriously as they need to. The LGA works with both of our departments on, and has produced guidance on, addressing community cohesion. One of the things we are working on with them at the moment is to update that and to ensure that we are picking up best practice, but it is undoubtedly right to say there is a wide variation across the country. There are some fantastic examples of things that are being done but there are other areas where it probably is not being picked up as much as it could be. Fiona Mactaggart: I think the other check is through the changes to the CPA, so actually measuring how local authorities are dealing with community cohesion, leadership and issues which are at the heart of this is now much more easy within the CPA process. I think in the long term that will deliver better accountability and we are only just sort of getting that through the system in all levels of authority. Q744 Mr Cummings: Would you tell the Committee to what extent is promoting cohesion rather than tackling racial incidents an explicit task for the police? Fiona Mactaggart: It is an explicit task for the police. If you look at the National Policing Plan ---- Q745 Mr Cummings: We know it is an explicit task, but to what extent? What emphasis is placed upon it? Fiona Mactaggart: I think it is important. If you look at the National Policing Plan in 2002, community cohesion was absolutely at the heart of the first-ever National Policing Plan. If you then go on to consider the kinds of reforms to policing that we are presenting, developing and discussing with the Police Service, this is about developing much more citizen-focused policing. To succeed in citizen-focused policing and better citizen participation in policing you have actually got to engage with communities intelligently and sensitively - not kind of police "at" them but police "with" them - and respond to them. That requires a much more powerful skill-set from the police in terms of community cohesion and community relations. In my judgement it is already, on paper, at the heart of the National Policing Plan. As the reforms are developing we are developing a demand for a kind of policing which actually requires this to be even more in practice "on the pavement", more central. Q746 Mr Cummings: So you are proactive and you are pre-emptive? Fiona Mactaggart: I hope so. Q747 Mr Cummings: Following the Cantle report, what steps have you taken to promote local patch responsibilities for police officers? Fiona Mactaggart: As you know, the operational deployment of police officers is a matter for the Police Service and is not directed by the Home Office. What the Home Office does is deal with the kind of strategic policing, but we have included within the pathfinders programme a policing strand. As I have already emphasised to other Members of the Committee, developing work through local pathfinders is part of the way in which we are testing, within communities, how to do this. As part of the Pathfinders Programme, a budget of £100,000 has been set aside to provide training support to the police forces in the pathfinder and shadow areas. The funding will be available to spend in the period of April 2003 to the end of March 2004. Q748 Mr Cummings: Are you dependent upon the Chief Constable deciding where to spend that money? Fiona Mactaggart: No. That is why I am saying £100,000 within a Pathfinder. A pathfinder area could be one local authority or a small group of local authorities, for example the West London Pathfinder which you have interviewed is only a very small part of the Met, it is actually quite a big part of the Met but of the Met as a whole it is quite a small part. Other pathfinders are much smaller than the police services within which they are situated. We are directing that money within that pathfinder area, it is in order to ensure that policing in those areas is contributing to the community cohesion agenda. There is a mechanism to make sure that the learning which comes out of that is generalised. I think that we will be able to show via the pathfinders that we have examples of good practice. The sort of things that used to happen, when we are talking about community policing in areas where there are very diverse ethnic communities, used to be that the senior police officer would talk to the people who he called community leaders and very often those people were not the people who were most likely to be out on the street, who were potentially at risk of being involved in the kind of disturbances that triggered the events that preceded this investigation. I think one of the things that we are able to develop through the pathfinder process is much more intelligent connections between police officers within crime and disorder reduction partnerships and the communities, it is not just talking to the so-called community leader. Q749 Chairman: We had the Chief Constable from Leicestershire in front of us and he told us all the things you are telling us now, he convinced us that in Leicestershire it was actually happening, and our enquiries suggest that it is happening in Leicestershire. His good practice does not seem to be getting spread to a lot of other police forces. Fiona Mactaggart: There is an issue about spreading it, that is one of the reasons why we try to imbed it in the pathfinder process because we have spreading mechanisms for pathfinders. In addition we are reforming policing nationally via the national policing plan, via getting more citizen-focused policing, we have gone through a White Paper and these issues are at the heart of this. Q750 Chairman: Why is it not happening on the streets in some parts of the North of England? Fiona Mactaggart: I think it is beginning to happen. If you look at Oldham, for example, the National Reassurance Policing Programme which is targeting the issue of single crime being a precursor to wider crime and to fear of crime and to disturbances, and so on, is actually being delivered. It is all very well to say, why is best practice not happening everywhere? We know that that is the big challenge of every public service, it is a particular challenge of every public service, it is a particular challenge in policing partly because the kind of issues which confront police officers in different communities every day are always urgent and are always slightly different from each other. What we are trying to do through this programme is to imbed in the National Policing Statutory best practice to test out how you can get cleverer policing which meets this set of needs in particular areas and then to generalise it. The programme of the National Reassurance Policing Programme is going to be rolled out after it has been tested. Where it is being tested it is proving to work well and it will be at the heart of the police reform programme that we are planning to legislate on next year. Q751 Mr Cummings: Could you tell the Committee what steps you have taken to promote retention and career progression within community policing, especially in the inner city areas? Fiona Mactaggart: The reason I am hesitating is because we get here to the point of division between the operational responsibilities of chief constables and the fundamental responsibility of the Home Office, nevertheless --- Q752 Chairman: If you are a good community patch officer you do not get promotion and an awful lot of police officers like to get promotion, do they not? Fiona Mactaggart: Of course they do. One of the things we are trying to do is by making community policing citizen-focused policing at the heart of our police reform programme it means it is the exciting end of policing if it is at the heart of your reform programme. One of the things about the police service is that the exciting end of policing has traditionally been kind of the Sweeney, or whatever, and one of the things we need to do is to say that the exciting end of policing is also the policing that the average citizen wants and actually it is where change is, it is where new investment are, it is where opportunities to lead more strategic teams are, the new crime family that we are dealing with is. While we delegate to the police themselves their manpower, their deployment quite rightly we have a commitment to increase the number of police on the streets, to increase community policing, to make citizen-focused policing at the heart of our police reform. As we deliver that I think there is no doubt that the exciting end of policing will be where investment is, where change is, where reform is because, as you point out, police are ambitious. I think that will mean that the old vision of the community police officer as the kind of the guy who is slowly moving towards retirement, who cannot move about as fast as when he was in his ambitious phase of his career is an issue of the past. The issue of the future is the most excellent police officer is the police officer who has a relationship with the community so that communities themselves are beginning to take responsibility for policing. That is the most difficult trick. We are beginning to crack it and as we crack it that will be where the ambitious police officers will want to be. Q753 Mr Sanders: That is very encouraging. I think that is a 30 year turnaround in how we have looked at these things. Do you agree that tackling racism and racist attitudes is a necessary precondition for developing cohesive communities? You can answer yes or no. Fiona Mactaggart: Yes. Q754 Mr Sanders: Some groups of individuals are concerned that statements by ministers on asylum have actually added to this anxiety and negative view about people of different ethnic origins, how would you respond to that? Fiona Mactaggart: I think they are wrong. I do not think that ministers' statements which say that the citizens of Britain have a right to have an asylum system which is not prey to exploitation by those who have no fundamental fear of persecution and that we have well managed borders, I do not think that feeds racism. I think there is sometimes a problem with how the issue is reported. I am concerned about the way in which some tabloid papers use the label "asylum seeker", sometimes not accurately, to demonise a class of people in a way that is dis-cohesive and dangerous. An asylum seeker is somebody who is applying for refugee status in the United Kingdom, they have not had their decision made yet. In order to qualify under the 1952 Convention you need to demonstrate that you have a well-founded fear of persecution on one of five grounds. If you do demonstrate through a very rigorous and robust system you have you are then a refugee not an asylum seeker. Sometimes this label is used in a way which I think is dis-cohesive. I do not think that ministers have done that. Q755 Chris Mole: There are some concerns about the work that NASS has done in terms of dispersal, ending up with asylum seekers disproportionately placed into disadvantaged communities, have you looked at this and considered putting any restraint on it? Fiona Mactaggart: It might be worth just reminding ourselves why the dispersal programme was introduced. It is important to remember that it needed to be introduced because communities in the South East of England - Dover is the most publicly well known - were subjected to a very substantial number of asylum seekers to a point that it was causing real problems within those communities to manage it, therefore a national dispersal programme had to be introduced, it was introduced relatively fast and it was a national programme. One of the consequences of that was that relatively long-term housing contracts were entered into so there has been some difficulty in changing some aspects of that. What we are doing right now is improving the regional focus of NASS so instead of it just being a national programme which is driven from the centre, which feels to a local community as though it is, we are actually developing a much more sensitive regional strategy with people within the region. At the moment together with Blackburn and with Darwen we are piloting a local scheme of how we might develop the NASS resident system in order to avoid some of the problems it might have had in the past. That pilot will inform the new contracts which will happen after 2005 because we will have more effective management of the application of asylum, the number of asylum seekers are reducing, the number of applications have gone down by half and so the programme will not need to be as big in future as it has been in the past. It does need to be sensitive to local demands and right now we are working on ways of making it much more sensitive. Q756 Chris Mole: Can you tell us something about what account NASS takes of the level of support services in an area before they make decisions? Perhaps what has happened in the past you might suggest to us was not quite as sensitive as it might be and perhaps you are going to suggest that it has got better. Fiona Mactaggart: The original way it sought to do that was by having cluster areas, so it sought to cluster people together with similar kinds of language and other needs in order not to provide very diverse burdens suddenly in an area. It is true that the initial programme, because it needed to be introduced relatively fast, because it was driven centrally, was not as sensitive as we would have liked and we are putting in place more sensitivity so that this development will inform it quite substantially. That will be working side by side with a new national programme of induction centres. We already have two, we are developing more, where asylum seekers when they first arrive are informed about life in the United Kingdom, about what is going to happen in their programme, about how to behave, behaviour expectations, these are new programme that did not exist and which will also help to tackle some of the issues you have identified. Q757 Chairman: Why should local authorities not have a veto and say that it is not possible to accommodate any more asylum seekers in this neighbourhood? Fiona Mactaggart: A local authority does not have a veto on anybody coming to their neighbourhood. They cannot say it is not going to have any more people like Fiona Mactaggart or Andrew Bennett, equally I do not think it should be able to say it cannot have any more people of this whole class. However, what is sensible if you have a national programme is to work with local authorities to try to ensure that the way that it is introduced is done intelligently with the local area, and that is what we are doing. Q758 Chairman: In fact the City of Manchester really co-operated with the Government directly very effectively, did it not, and then suddenly NASS comes along and creates chaos in the whole system. That is totally unfair on local people, is it not? Fiona Mactaggart: I do not know as well as you do the details of what happened in Manchester and I would not want to comment on it. I do not think that there is a common experience of complete contradiction, I do not think that it is possible, we do not have it in any other area, to say that a whole class of people cannot come somewhere, it is quite reasonable to say --- Q759 Chairman: If people wanted to move there freely I cannot see any problem with it but if NASS is saying we are going to let a block contract which is basically done on price, you look for an area of low housing demand and that is where the block contract goes. Asylum seekers or the refugees, whoever are in the property, are being exploited because they are getting very poor quality housing, landlords are ripping them off and local authorities have to pick up all of the problems. Fiona Mactaggart: From 2005, which is when the present contract ends, we will be --- Q760 Chairman: That is 18 months away. Fiona Mactaggart: I understand that. We have long-term contracts and we did that in order to get value for money for the taxpayer. We will be in a position to develop much more sensitive letting. I do not accept that we have completely overrun local desires. That is one of the reasons why we are regionalising the NASS service in order to ensure that we can get effective co-operation with local authorities, and so on. I do think that it is not sensible to say that a class of people should not be able to live in a place. I actually think that we might reasonably say that their landlords and some of the ways they manage them are people who we might want to control some of the activities of but I do not think you can say that a whole class of people should not be able to live in a place because frankly that is what feeds racial discrimination. Q761 Chairman: While we are on people coming to this country, there are a significant number of imams who get into this country with work permits, could it not be a reasonable condition of those work permits that they had a command of English so that when they come to serve their communities they can serve them both in religious terms and in contributions to the community? Fiona Mactaggart: Yes it would and we will be introducing that. Q762 Mr Cummings: This is to the ODPM, the ODPM has defined a sustainable community as one in which there is a diverse, vibrant and creative local culture. Can you tell the Committee what practical steps you are taking to ensure that the new housing developments in London and the South East will promote both diverse and cohesive communities? Yvette Cooper: I think the housing and the wider community issue is particularly important, it is something that we are very conscious of in the work both round the growth areas, the Thames Gateway areas, and so on, but also in the housing market renewal pathfinders as well. What we need to do is recognise many of the mistakes that were made in the past in terms of responses to local communities. Previously we saw things very much as just about bricks and mortar for housing, do we have enough houses, enough blocks, enough units in the right place to get everyone into and the approach was very much about dormitories and things like that. The work being developed round the Thames Gateway and the other growth areas is very much about the need to sustain proper communities and that has all sorts of different dimensions, it means looking at public services, employment, transport and all of those sort of things. It also means looking at issues round community facilities, ensuring that you have ways for people to gather, to meet, to really live as a local community rather than simply being people living in a dormitory that then travel somewhere else and never see each other. Community cohesion is very much a part of that whole approach and part of the development of those communities. I think that also applies in housing market renewal pathfinders, there you probably have even more difficult questions to address because in housing market renewal pathfinders you are dealing with communities which are already in place and sometimes where there are already tensions in place and actually using the housing market renewal pathfinders is an opportunity to address those as well. Q763 Mr Cummings: Who is going to monitor this? Who is going to monitor proposals put forward by housing market renewal pathfinders to ensure that you are promoting community cohesion? Yvette Cooper: The Government Office is looking immediately at the housing market renewal pathfinders. We look at these very carefully when each housing market renewal pathfinder bid comes in. Already, interestingly, the Oldham and Rochdale Pathfinder and also the East Lancashire Pathfinder have very much identified community cohesion as one of the key issues for those pathfinders which they need to address. Many of their suggestions in terms of the short-term ideas they have, the quick wins are focused round community cohesion. As they draw up their longer-term plans it will be one of the factors that will be taken into account by both the Government Office and by the ODPM in terms of approving the Pathfinders and giving them the go ahead and giving them the money to get on with it. Q764 Chairman: The Northern Way came out with fanfare this week, how does that deal with social cohesion? Yvette Cooper: A lot of it was about economic growth along the M62 northern corridor and a lot of other issues there. One of the things I think was critical both to that and to the original sustainable communities plan was the idea that the community is about people, it is not simply about bricks and mortar. One of the main things which was announced as part of that was the liveability fund and the support for different areas. Q765 Chairman: Would it not have been useful to have headlined one of the paragraphs "social cohesion". Yvette Cooper: We could have done. You can always find particular re-drafting changes that could have been made, and so on. There is a strong focus on cohesion, on building strong communities throughout the document, it is very much the same approach. Q766 Chairman: You have to read between the lines. Yvette Cooper: It has to be everywhere in it. It has to be everywhere, when you are talking about how you develop parks and green spaces in a local community, how you deal with your housing market renewal pathfinders and housing issues and tensions there, how you deal with all sorts of things. I think it is a sort of implicit part of all of it, really. Q767 Mr Betts: What particular help are you giving to places like Oldham and Burnley where there is quite a substantial, in Burnley's case anyway, over-supply of houses but at the same time there can be shortages of a specific type of property, particularly large properties which cater for extended families and therefore you can find some communities end up in very poor accommodation because there are not the right houses for them. Yvette Cooper: The whole approach of the housing market renewal pathfinder is to look at housing as a market rather than simply look at it as a sort of provision, are there enough units, you should look at it as a market, where it is that people want to live, what kinds of housing they want. A lot of the areas that are picked up as part of pathfinders are areas where often demand for housing seems to have collapsed in the particular area. Often the houses may be very good quality houses, there may be some very nice houses in some of those areas but they are the wrong kinds of houses, they are not the kind of houses that people want, sometimes the area has become stigmatised or caught up in a whole spiral of different problems. It is about recognising what kind of housing it is that people want, maybe there is more need for smaller houses for single people to live in, maybe it is a need for more family houses with gardens in a particular area, where you often get streets of houses where none of the houses have any gardens, they only have tiny yards and families do not want to live in them any more, recognising the sort of changes and the sort of things that the market want. One of the things that is an issue in terms of community cohesion is actually starting to address as part of that the fact that you get these huge barriers between different communities, in particular areas you one have community and you can have strong segregation that can lead to all sorts of tensions and recognising that as part of the work on the pathfinders too. One of the things which I think is important in terms of addressing some of those sort of tensions is some of the work that some of the areas which are pathfinders have been looking at, Rochdale is a good example, round the sort of choice-based lettings, you give people more choice about where they want to live, the different things that are coming up, and so on, and you do it with the right kind of support. If it is an area where there is nobody from that particular minority ethnic group living at the moment actually arrange support, somebody goes with them to visit the property, somebody arranges introductions with the neighbours, talks to the neighbours and tries to address some of the kinds of prejudices that can prevent people living in different areas and can lead to some of the hostility. Q768 Mr Betts: I have a scheme in my constituency, we see it operating more openly, people understand it better, it enables people to have a choice in the sort of house they want, just as somebody who is buying a house would have a choice about where they wanted to go. On the other hand is there not a danger it might lead to community fragmentation and people start to choose to move into a white area or an Asian area according to their own particular ethnic background. Yvette Cooper: I think that is why you cannot see it as a sort of stark choice-based lettings without actually consciously addressing some of the cohesion issues with it. Some of the choice-based letting programmes have been very good at doing the kind of thing I talked about, encouraging people to visit a house in an area they might not have otherwise thought about because they thought, "our people do not live in a place like that, there is going to be too much hostility, we are going to have too much of a hard time" and working with the tenants and residents association, maybe with the local neighbours to support the choice-based lettings, and some of the evidence so far suggests that it is quite an effective way of addressing some of those tensions between areas and some of the ghettoisation that people can fear. Q769 Chris Mole: The Home Office did a number of PIs for community cohesion, can you tell me why you think public opinion surveys are a good tool for measuring the success of community cohesion? Fiona Mactaggart: The reason we produced that guidance about measuring community cohesion in that form was firstly because we wanted to give people measures which were not new measures, which were easy to operate. There was very strong feedback saying, we cannot have another complete set of figures to count. We had to try and find things which were relatively easy to count. It is certain that it is not enough to reduce inequalities in order to build cohesive communities, you have deal with people's relationships with each other and their shared vision. If you do not deal with that you do not deliver cohesive communities just by dealing with inequality. Q770 Chris Mole: Surveys are the only way you can get a handle on it. Fiona Mactaggart: We were told by those in local authorities that they wanted not to have new complicated measures. We looked at a way of building in to present measures finding out that answer. Q771 Chris Mole: We have also heard the difference between pathfinders, shadow pathfinders and local government renewal support beacons round this agenda, can you say something about how you think best practice is disseminated from pathfinders and beacons? Fiona Mactaggart: One of the things we had was a national conference in November this year where we looked at some of the lessons that had happened so far and shared them. On the website are a series of case studies and examples of things that the pathfinders and beacons have delivered, we imbed them into documents that we publish. There are a series of ways that we get it out there. Q772 Chris Mole: If you have got a council that is struggling to promote cohesion that is not a shadow pathfinder what does help does the Government give it? Fiona Mactaggart: The website has a lot of examples. We have a series of publications and guidance which come out of this. The publication that was produced at the first conference of the pathfinder has quite practical guidance, we have a video --- Q773 Chris Mole: By making information available. Yvette Cooper: Making information available, that includes workshops on the beacon councils and the progress they have made, they have been pretty well attended and also just imbedding the whole idea of community cohesion in the performance management framework. You have a mechanism to follow it up, if you have an area that is really doing badly you make a mechanism for working through the government office to address it and to give them additional support. Q774 Chairman: Do you think real progress has been made since the riots? Fiona Mactaggart: Significant progress has been made, a lot done, a lot to do. Chairman: On that note thank you very much indeed. |