Examination of Witnesses (Questions 420-439)
10 FEBRUARY 2005
MR DARRA
SINGH, MR
ZAFAR KHAN,
CHIEF SUPERINTENDENT
IVOR TWYDELL,
DR NAZIA
KHANUM AND
MR TAHIR
KHAN
Q420 Mrs Dean: Have you
used any of the powers under the counter-terrorism legislation?
Chief Superintendent Twydell:
Yes, powers have been used principally in terms of stop-checks
in and around Luton airport where we actually use Section 44 of
the Terrorism Act 2000 for stop-checks in and around there as
part of the security measures for the protection of the airport.
Within Bedfordshire I believe it is only in Luton that powers
have actually been used. There have been a number of warrants
executed: twelve in the last two years and five arrests that have
been made, again all within Luton. They have all been in connection
with operations involving the anti-terrorist branch of the Metropolitan
Police.
Q421 Mrs Dean: Could you
say what measures have been taken to engage with the ethnic minority
communities?
Chief Superintendent Twydell:
It has been at a number of levels. We have community police officers
who are in place in different areas of the town so there is a
day to day contact with them. We also have a community liaison
officer whose job on a daily basis is to speak with leaders from
the community and leaders from the youth community within the
town to build up every week a very thorough community impact assessment
of what is the state of feeling around the town about issues within
the town as well as the feeling about issues which are outside
of our control in other parts of the UK or outside of the UK.
That forms a very comprehensive document which we use in my command
team every week to decide on what action we need to take in order
to reassure particular areas of the community in terms of our
police operations and how we can provide visible support. That
is done on a weekly basis. We have a youth officer who engages
specifically with young people's groups and community groups within
the town to do a similarity role. On a formal quarterly basis
I have a meeting with community leaders throughout the town where
we discuss issues around cohesion and community tensions, but
at the same time there are more informal meetings on a fairly
frequent basis in and around that. I think the key to it is that
people within the various communities across the towns need to
feel they have ready, easy access to me and to the specialist
officers who investigate a crime and are responsible for community
relationships. In every operational order we clearly assess the
impact of any operation that we are going to carry out on the
community in terms of whether they are going to be of detrimental
impact to community relations by the action of carrying it out
and how can we then minimise the risks to that in a way that we
actually carry out that operation.
Q422 Mrs Dean: What proportion
of police officers in Luton are from minority communities?
Chief Superintendent Twydell:
It is about 6%.
Q423 Mrs Dean: Do you
have an aim as to what you should be looking at?
Chief Superintendent Twydell:
Yes, the target the Bedfordshire Police has is 7% and I think
we are probably third or fourth within the UK in terms of the
proportion of police officers and police staff from minority ethnic
communities. Bedfordshire Police as a whole has a great pro-active
stance towards trying to recruit from minority ethnic communities
and has a number of recruiting officers in place specifically
for that purpose.
Q424 Mrs Dean: Do those
police officers who are from minority communities fairly represent
the different minority communities or do you have more from one
community than another?
Chief Superintendent Twydell:
The proportion of minority ethnic communities from the African-Caribbean
community in the town is about 6% to 7%. Our minority ethnic police
officers are in the main African-Caribbean with a small number
from Asian backgrounds. What we aspire to do is to actually increase
that significantly and way beyond the 7%. Of course the proportion
of officers from the ethnic communities in Luton compared to the
rest of Bedfordshire is significantly greater. At the moment we
do not reflect that within my division of the Bedfordshire Police.
Q425 Chairman: Can you
throw some light on something which has perplexed the Committee
in other sessions? Dr Khanum, you say in your evidence that there
has been a steep rise in young Asian men stopped and searched
by the police and we have heard that from national organisations.
We then look at the statistics and the police tell us that there
was a steep rise, indeed it trebled between 2001 and 2003, but
it was from two to eight. There appears to be a very strongly
held perception locally and nationally in the Muslim community
that there has been a big increase and young men are being stopped
all the time, but when you look at the police figures we get that
clearly is not true. Can anybody shed any light on what is going
on here?
Dr Khanum: If you look at the
written submission which I sent I spoke about this steep rise
in stopping and searching Asian young people, particularly from
the Muslim communities, you will see that I did not mention Luton
there because I do not have the figures. Many people do not know
about the Luton situation, but where nationally there is a steep
rise mainly in London, Birmingham, Manchester and big cities,
obviously these are highlighted in the media as well as various
Muslim umbrella organisations in the country like the MCB (the
Muslim Council of Britain). We know that there is a steep rise
and that makes an impact on our perception and if you talk to
quite a lot of people in Luton who do not know the facts and figures
their perception is that stopping and searching must have increased
in Luton as well because if the national picture is like that
then it would be like that in Luton as well. Many of these are
not reported by the media or anything like that. Racial harassment,
harassment to Muslim communities and so on and so forth are not
necessarily always reported by people who are at the receiving
end of the harassment. They may not report this because they may
not feel that having reported those things there will be an outcome
which they would like to see.
Q426 Chairman: I do not
want to put words into your mouth, but to some extent so far as
Luton is concerned it may be one of these issues of perception:
because everybody believe this is happening everywhere people
think it is happening in their community even though it has not
happened to them or necessarily anybody they know.
Dr Khanum: Absolutely, but I would
like to say something about the police. Luton policing is very
different from policing in metropolitan areas and other places.
I worked in Tower Hamlets as well; for many years I worked in
Ealing Borough Council, in Tower Hamlets Borough Council in GLC
and I had the opportunity to see the community's relationship
with police in Tower Hamlets in particular and also in Ealing.
In Luton they definitely command a lot of trust from the communities
which they did not enjoy in Tower Hamlets in my time, for example.
Although Luton police have a lot to achieve in terms of real diversity
from the police force because they do not really represent particularly
the Muslim community which is the largest in Luton in terms of
minority ethnic communities so they will have to do that. Pakistani
and Bangladeshi people have to be there and people who feel that
they can communicate with communities. The other thing is that
women from these communities feel very oppressed by whatever happens
nationally or internationally in the Muslim community because
many of them when they go alone to shopping centres for example
or the GPs surgeries they feel fearful that they might be attacked
and comments would be made to them because some of them personally
experienced these in shopping centres in particular. I think that
the police should have women from the Asian communities on their
workforce to gain that sort of confidence. It may not improve
the incident level but confidence level will go up.
Q427 Mrs Curtis-Thomas:
Just as a matter of interest, the statistics for stop and searches
for Bedfordshire Police are available publicly and I hope you
will be reassured to know that the figures for stopping and searching
white people grew six fold over the same period of time. You made
a very interesting observation about racial harassment and I wonder
if you would like to say anything more about that. You have said
that the level of racial harassment was significant and yet not
recorded.
Dr Khanum: Not reported; if it
is reported it will be recorded obviously, but if it is not reported
and the people feel that having reported something they may not
see the result they would like to see basically, that is the people
who are harassing should be arrested or something because evidence,
witnesses and all sorts of things will come their way and it will
be very difficult for them to find those things and many people
do not report racial harassment in Luton or elsewhere. That is
quite true.
Mr Singh: I think Dr Khanum is
absolutely right. There has always been an issue about how do
we best, as a group of organisations, encourage those individuals
who are suffering or have suffered racial harassment to report
that incident. In Luton we believe that one of the reasons why
the number of reported incidents of racial harassment has gone
up, as the Chief Superintendent mentioned a little bit earlier,
is that we have been publicising a multi-agency approach. I can
never remember what the initials are; it is Luton Multi-Agency
Racist Agency Group, LMARA. There has been a lot of publicity
for example on the sides of buses there are adverts; it has been
tried in other authority areas as well. Whilst I would not claim
that we capture every incident I would say that we have significantly
increased the level of reporting. The second really important
point is that once an incident is reported we need to work further
to develop confidence in the community that actually something
will be done. Back in 2001-02 our statistics show that only 92.9%
of reported racist incidents were followed through, investigated
and some action taken. In 2003-04 we have driven that up to 97.9%.
We need to go further but that is an important area I think for
statutory agencies, ourselves and the police and we now enable,
since 2001-02, local people to report racist incidents to leisure
centres, libraries, lots of council buildings as well as actually
reporting them to the police. It is not perfect yet but we are
trying to work together to improve the level of reporting.
Q428 Mrs Curtis-Thomas:
Can I first of all say that I thought the report Sticking Together
was excellent. I enjoyed reading your report, Dr Khanum; I thought
it was very incisive and made me understand quite a lot of things
about Luton. This is an excellent report; I have seen many excellent
reports reside in a drawer. They are written for the benefit of
the people that have engaged in the activity but they do not produce
useful purpose. Of the good sentiment expressed here and the recommendations
that this report contains, how many have actually been delivered?
There was not sort of plan on the back for me to see; the recommendations
were not numbered and I could not see any plan of activity which
actually delivered against some of these excellent recommendations.
Mr Singh: As you will know from
the background to that report, the Sticking Together report
was as a result of a scrutiny panel which did excellent scrutiny
work led by councillors of all political parties in Luton. It
was commenced just after the publication of the Lord Ousley report
on Bradford in 2001 before 9/11 but was actually very timely given
the impact of international events. In terms of the actions I
would say it was a very courageous thing for the councillors to
do, to open up and say "We want a public debate about what
it means to live in Luton, what do people of different ages and
different ethnic backgrounds, different genders, think about issues?"
A lot of ideas came up as a result of all the consultation so
this scrutiny panel actually identified a list of the top ten
recommendations. One of the big recommendations is actually about
an inequalities agency. We do not have an inequality agency in
Luton and there was a recommendation that we should investigate
the feasibility of the need of an inequalities agency in Luton
and how we would fund it. We have actually worked with the Commission
for Racial Equality and we are about to complete the first stage
of the feasibility study working with our local strategic partnership
and with community voluntary organisations. I think Dr Khanum
is in fact involved. So that is one recommendation we have moved
forward. Other recommendations which are moving forward are around
communications. We worked to beef up the council's approach to
communications; we created a new unit, not just as a result of
this report but because our approach is fragmented. We have become
more pro-active I think and more assertive with the local media.
We have moved our civic newspaper Luton Line to a monthly
publication; we carry positive stories from across the communities.
Q429 Mrs Curtis-Thomas:
When I read your report and looked at some of the areas of your
consideration, despite advice received from Dr Khanum you omitted
health as a consideration. You refer to the publications that
are now being produced as a result of the Sticking Together
report, how many of these publications are joint publications
with other agencies which demonstrate a sort of working together?
How many come out with joint publications with the police or joint
publications with health and other agencies who are responsible
for addressing some of the serious discrepancies that exist within
Luton between the white population and the non-white population.
Mr Singh: I cannot list them all
but I will give you just a couple of examples, if I may. We work
very closely as a council with health and with the police as well
as a range of other agencies. In Luton Line we have regular
features about our achievements including achievements in terms
of the work of the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership which
the Superintendent chairs and I am the Vice-Chair. We include
issues around health and health inequalities—you are quite
right to pick those up—between different communities and
people in different parts of the town. We work very closely with
the primary care trust, developed the health improvement plan
and we bring all this together in the local strategic partnership
which is called the Luton Forum. We published our first community
strategy in May-June 2002; we are actually refreshing that. There
are six themes to add to our community strategy, one of those
is health and social care, so bringing together key people in
the health sector with voluntary and community sector and with
the local government and local council to look at health and social
care issues. For example, we have a zero delayed discharge from
hospital and that affects a number of people from different communities.
We have an excellent service that people of the ground are delivering
around falls; older people from different ethnic backgrounds in
their own homes who may fall and we actually respond to those
issues jointly. So there is a range of communications. We have
a community safety strategy which every area publishes every three
years; we are working very closely with the police to publish
a new one in April.
Q430 Mrs Curtis-Thomas:
Clearly there is a lot of good practice in Luton. Have you looked
at other models of good practice in the UK? If so, who is there
with you in terms of good practice? Given that you are developing
an expertise in the area, what are you doing to ensure that communities
in the north and other parts of the country with a diverse population
are benefiting from your very important experience?
Mr Singh: The work that we have
done to date has involved myself and others learning from other
areas. I was fortunate to be asked to be a member of the council
review team so I benefited from learning and visiting some northern
towns and cities and also some in the midlands and in the south,
so learning from Southall and Ealing, learning from Leicester,
also learning from Bradford, Oldham and Burnley and bringing those
messages back. The scrutiny review itself also involved councillors
looking at the situation in Bradford, picking up the analysis
that was in Lord Ousley's report and actually learning from that
as well. In terms of sharing what we do, we do that through networks,
whether that is the Local Government Association or networks that
councillors are involved in. We are also open to approaches. We
do not have a formal network where we go out at this stage. We
have only had one conference on community cohesion where we actually
asked Ted Cantle to come to lead that. We invited people from
other authorities at the launch of the Sticking Together
report. We are open and receptive both ways. One of the thing
we particular want to do is to learn from places like Leicester
particularly and their work with the local media. You may well
have heard about the report in the Leicester Mercury which
is exemplar in terms of promoting community cohesion and good,
positive community relations in the printed word. We have also
fed into the LGA guidance. You may be aware that some years ago
the LGA issued some guidance with the Home Office, the CRE and
ODPM and we actually made an input into that as well.
Q431 Mrs Curtis-Thomas:
What role does central government play in all of this? What can
we do to help you further?
Mr Singh: A critical role given
the relationship of the central local partnership between local
government and central government, what more can central government
do? I think in terms of messages that are put out by MPs, by ministers,
by departments, those are obviously critical; messages which actually
value diversity and celebrate what we have—ie a patchwork
of different communities—and how we can better work together.
Those are critical.
Q432 Chairman: Are government
messages consistent and always right? Or does government sometimes
get the messages wrong?
Mr Singh: I think you have asked
me that question some time ago; you probably do not remember.
I think my answer is that it is a mixed bag actually. Government,
as you know better than I do, is complex; it is not always possible
in large, complex organisations such as government to keep up
to speed with what some other part of government is doing so departments'
policies and initiatives might knock into each other inadvertently.
There is, I think, some room for improvement; sometimes messages
are not consistent. As to the leadership and promotion issues,
I think the work recently through the Community Cohesion Unit
in the Home Office and spreading that across government departments
and, I suppose, committee cohesion proofing initiatives is an
important one and needs to be continued. The review of regeneration
initiatives trying to streamline those initiatives and trying
to take out some of the rules that are too prescriptive in my
view and spotlight resources directly into neighbourhoods without
allowing local influence are important things for government to
do.
Dr Khanum: I would like to say
something on this because it is very important what local authority
and national government do to enhance community relations and
community cohesion. If you look at community cohesion as an expression
it is almost a kind of code for deprivation—socio-economic
deprivation—because you do not talk about community cohesion
in rural areas where quite a lot of white people live. As soon
as quite a lot of black and minority ethnic people live in a disadvantaged
geographical area people talk about community cohesion. I think
socio-economic deprivation and community cohesion go together
in people's minds. Local authority and central government can
tackle the specific socio-economic disadvantages which have been
identified through research studies and all that and if those
are not tackled then I cannot believe that the alienation of the
young people in particular which has happened to a large extent
in the Muslim community and other communities will help community
cohesion in the future because potentially it is a very dangerous
situation. These are the young people in various minority ethnic
communities who will be wage earners; some of them are looking
for jobs and not getting satisfactory jobs because there is a
lot of prejudice against them as well among employers. All of
these things can be looked at and investment should be made within
these voluntary sectors quite a lot to do capacity building and
confidence building so that they feel loyal and integral to mainstream
society rather than being on the margins of society. That investment
is essential. I think joint work between local authorities and
central government would be a good thing.
Q433 Mrs Curtis-Thomas:
Mr Tahir Khan, do you have money for your Youth League? Where
does it come from?
Mr Tahir Khan: Just like any voluntary
organisation we are starved of funding. Probably about 95% of
our funding comes from different charities and national sort of
funding streams that are available.
Q434 Mrs Curtis-Thomas:
Would you like to get your hands on some central government money?
Mr Tahir Khan: We have attempted
to apply for some of the recent initiative that came about. I
have forgotten the name of it but it was from the Home Office.
We have not been successful and it is because of the strict requirements
of that funding stream in terms of one of the criteria is more
about SLA between the local authority and the voluntary sector.
That SLA has to be on a new service delivery agreement which is
very difficult to get together in a short space of time that very
much demanded by the funding stream deadlines there. We have been
successful in the past working with the local college of further
education in terms of accessing some of the ICT funding that was
coming from the DfES possibly which is where that funding stream
came from and we have been successful in terms of working together
with our local college in accessing that funding. With that funding
we have been able to build up a resource within our centre and
the facilities within our centre which provide training not just
for Bangladeshis, it is called the Centre for Youth and Community
Development to encourage more community cohesion, more diversity
and encourage the communities from different racial backgrounds
to take part in the activities. It is based in one of the most
deprived parts of Luton which some of you may have heard of, it
is made up of Biscot and Dallow electoral ward. As a result of
our policy and strategy we have been successful in engaging people
from the different ethnic communities and not just the Bangladeshi
communities. At the moment our ICT and ESOL training courses are
accessed by east European new migrant community in Luton.
Chief Superintendent Twydell:
We have talked a little bit about health inequalities; I think
there is an issue about crime inequalities as well in a town like
Luton in that Luton sits within the top quartile of the Crime
and Disorder Reduction Partner areas—it is number 55—but
it is not within the top 40 which therefore qualifies for some
additional funding and it is not a priority area. The Criminal
Justice Agency as well as the other partners in the CDRP do not
receive any additional funding but would support that in the way
that those other top 40 areas do. For example, Crown Prosecution
Service, courts, police have difficulties in trying to manage
the volume of crime related work that we are actually dealing
with going through the Criminal Justice System. There is an issue
around targets and the targets set in process under PSA 1 for
the target of 15% crime reduction between 2005-08 where we feel
there has been a very prescriptive approach taken by the government
offices where Luton is told that it is in the top quartile therefore
we need to achieve a 21% reduction in crime but with no significant
increase in resources to enable us to do so. I think we feel at
the moment that we are being prescribed a target which we are
not entirely confident as a partnership that we will have the
resources to deliver on over the next three years. I think there
is a role there for government in the way that those targets are
negotiated with local areas.
Q435 Mr Clappison: Could
I ask Dr Khanum, who has just made some very interesting comments
about social deprivation in Luton—as indeed you did in the
memorandum which you submitted to the Committee where you specifically
mentioned the two wards that I think Mr Khan has just mentioned
Biscot and Dallow where there is a particular concentration of
deprivation and unemployment amongst minority ethnic community
members in those wards—and in your evidence a moment ago
you drew a link between that level of unemployment and the feelings
particularly of young people and their hopes for the future. Do
you think enough progress has been made on this front and what
more can be done?
Dr Khanum: Progress is being made
all the time; I would not say we are standing still in Luton at
the moment. However, I think specific targeted and co-ordinated
activities to make a difference to these people is needed and
it is needed from schools, from colleges, from institutions, from
workplace learning and by employers and by local authority public
health and primary care trusts and all sorts of other services.
Although we have this local strategic partnership which is bringing
people together for the first time as it were they are looking
at various pots of money together, I still do not feel that to
be absolutely confidently working in a co-ordinated fashion has
started yet. We have a long way to go to feel confident about
each other and trustful about each other on the local strategic
partnerships. When they do it then they can target the specific
disadvantage of particularly young people who are growing up so
that their education is first class, it is not really prejudiced
education or under achievement is not rampant among them, it is
tackled properly, and employment skills and employability among
them is much higher than before. When all of these things have
been targeted I believe that the other things will also disappear.
For example, poor health and longevity, if you look at even the
longevity of some communities it is lower than other people and
you can immediately link it with economic deprivation. It is as
clear as that. Unfortunately again amongst the Muslim community
that sort of deprivation is concentrated in Luton. I think that
plenty of work can be done. I have seen families where among five
children four of them are chronically suffering from all sorts
of illness which they should not be as a result of poor housing.
That affects their education, their life chances and as future
earning members of the town they already have barriers in front
of them and they are not responsible for that. People who are
responsible—the statutory bodies and the voluntary sector
and private sector—should come together and do more than
they are doing and central government has a role to play. On health
we calculated that Luton has serious health inequalities between
communities and just over £10 million can target the inequalities.
There are a huge number of perinatal deaths amongst the Muslim
community in particular because they are the most socio-economically
deprived. To tackle all these things like diabetes, like chronic
heart disease and so on and so forth, £10 million can immediately
target these sorts of things and make the community up a bit.
It is small change for central government but it will go a long
way to immediately tackle the specific disadvantages and I do
not see that happening. That is why I think a bit more is necessary.
Q436 Mr Clappison: Could
I pass on to a slightly different subject which was touched on
earlier by Mr Zafar Khan. When you were being asked about the
impact of 9/11 you mentioned work which faith groups have done
together to try to build confidence in the community and ease
any possible tensions. Can I ask you about the inter-faith dialogue
which takes place in Luton, and particularly how confident you
are that it reaches below the level of community leaders?
Mr Zafar Khan: I think I am fairly
confident because I consider myself below the level of community
leaders. I think messages do get across and there are a number
of things that we do together on a regular basis, for example
we have a standing joke: we make a spectacle of ourselves every
year round about the end of September-early October and we call
it a Faith Pilgrimage and every year we start off from one place
of worship and visit a number of places of worship. For example,
we start off in the central mosque and we visit the various churches
(we used to visit synagogues but unfortunately there is no longer
a synagogue because the Jewish community has really dwindled;
although we have representation from the Jewish community on the
Luton Council of Faiths, they meet in private homes now) and we
end up in the gurdwara. The other activities would include evenings
and special programmes. I suppose we could do a lot more, but
coming back to your question, we are only funded to the tune of
5%, no 50, point 5 and the faith worker is really a part time
faith worker. At the moment he is the only one who is static,
others are voluntary people and are happy to be voluntary. I suppose
that is one area where we could improve and make the faith worker
a full-time worker. When we were setting this up way back in the
late 1990s the danger there was that we did not want to be anybody's
poodle, if you like; we want to be an independent organisation
and our idea is that independent organisations getting into partnerships
whether it is with local authority, whether it is with other statutory
agencies, when they are equals in partnership they are not beholden
to anyone. When we were making initial inroads enlisting support
of the local authority in this area, this was quite clearly what
I put to the then leader of the council who was very helpful and
very insightful about the efficacy and importance of this area
of work, and we were saying, "Look, even if you fund us to
a tune of 100% of the salary of the faith worker, nothing else,
we will still act independently. We would not want to be stifled."
Coming back to your question, I think a lot needs to be done but
we are doing as much I think as is possible for all of us and
people are giving their facilities, churches, mosques.
Q437 Mr Clappison: More
people can go into different people's places of worship.
Mr Zafar Khan: Yes, of course
and it helps enormously.
Q438 Mr Clappison: You
have mentioned that there are within the minority ethnic communities
in Luton differences in faith and also in background, are you
aware of any tensions between different groups within the minority
ethnic community?
Mr Zafar Khan: There are always
undercurrents, yes. The Superintendent mentioned a newspaper report
and there was another newspaper report which purported to say
something about the Sikh community and came from some anonymous
Muslim group. That caused a furore. In fact, we took the bull
by the horns and I called a press conference and I called it right
in the Sikh gurdwara. The first press conference failed because
there were some hotheads but we stood our ground and we had a
second press conference there. We had a number of meetings in
the gurdwara and said, "Right, this is our community; we
live here and we are going to live here for many, many, many generations
and we have to come to terms with solving our problems".
We had successive meetings in the gurdwara and finally, fortunately,
we resolved the issue and we also ensured that in future if such
events occurred we, as a collective, are able to confront it.
I think there are always tensions but these are tensions between
people who understand that we may have different ideas but we
have an ultimate objective which is similar. We set out various
dialogue groups within the overall ambit of the Luton Council
of Faiths, a dialogue between the Christians and Muslims and Sikhs
and so on. Everybody is represented on the Faith Council.
Q439 Mr Clappison: There
is also the question of extremism which can be a problem in any
community. Is that something you are aware of as well?
Mr Zafar Khan: I think colleagues
here have touched on the media interest, recent events, the summer
of discontent and the consequences, and how we were able to actually
ensure that nothing similar happened in Luton although similar
issues, problems and debates were very much current in Luton.
Extremism by nature is around very few individuals or groups who
are very loud mouthed, and there are people out there, particularly
in the media, who want to exploit that or maybe in the political
arena who want to exploit that like the BNP who have done it in
Burnley and in other places and fortunately thus far in Luton
we have not been inflicted with their venomous approach to destabilising
the social fabric of our society. On the whole, as a community,
I think we are robust enough both in terms of the statutory sector
as well as the community informal sector, and we are working together
to ensure that we are capable of combating any eventuality but
of course this is not a rosy picture that I am painting, I am
saying that there are real problems but we have to work together.
Coming back to local and central government relationships, I think
central government has the power and the authority to do things
that the local government does not, but the local government in
this context has the experience—perhaps not as much as I
would personally want—the capacity and the willingness to
interface by nature in the definition of its existence with the
local communities and I think that is where a lot of good work
has to take place. Central government can actually play a role
in involving the local government and local communities to bring
that about. For me, change has to happen in local communities.
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