Examination of Witnesses (Questions 500-519)
1 MARCH 2005
MS HAZEL
BLEARS MP, MR
BOB WHALLEY,
MR TONY
LORD AND
MS JUDITH
LEMPRIERE
Q500 Mr Clappison: Has
guidance been given to the police about this?
Ms Blears: I am not aware of any
specific guidance, but that is not to say there is not any. I
am not aware of any specific guidance. Clearly they have the law,
they interpret the law as they do in a range of other criminal
offences, and the police and the Crown Prosecution Service are
experts on this, that is part of their job, so I am not aware
of any specific guidance on that.
Q501 David Winnick: Minister,
I understand that it is intended that preachers, imams, should
be able to know English, pass an English language test. Have we
made progress on that?
Ms Blears: Yes, it is a two-stage
process. In August last year, we actually changed some of the
immigration rules that now mean people who want to come here as
ministers of religion are required to demonstrate they are competent
in the use of spoken English.
Q502 David Winnick: That
is the situation now, is it?
Ms Blears: Yes, that is the situation
now. There are two stages. We have brought in the first stage
and now they have to show they can use spoken English to Level
4 in the International English Language Testing system, which
is described as a limited user. Over the next two years that will
be raised to Level 6, so people will have to be more proficient
in English when they first come in. We are just about to launch
a second stage of consultation with faith communities on taking
some further measures to try and ensure ministers of religion
from abroad can play a full role in the community. That means
non-spoken language, it includes things like civic knowledge,
engagement in communities, pre-entry qualifications, and we want
to explore with the faith communities what ought to be the range
of skills and abilities that people who want to come into this
country as ministers of religion should possess. Again, there
will be a range of views, I have no doubt, in that consultation,
and we will listen to that very carefully before moving on to
the next stage. We have already changed the immigration rules
on spoken English and we are looking at the second stage, which
is a wider kind of view.
Q503 David Winnick: The
Muslim community—presumably you have been consulting with
them—are quite happy with this, are they?
Ms Blears: As far as I am aware,
when the changes were brought in last year, there was consultation
on that basis, and we will be consulting again. I do not know
if Judith could help us any more.
Ms Lempriere: The Minister is
right about the consultation. There have been some concerns about
the effect of requirements on people who the system have treated
as ministers but who are actually more concerned with internal
support to different faith communities rather than actually representing
their communities. Those sorts of concerns are ones which we will
take account of in the next stage of the consultation so that
we can make sure that we are sensitive to different communities'
needs. The idea behind the initial regulations was maybe rather
over-simplistic in terms of the way it has been applied to the
different sorts of people who come to this country to work with
the faith communities here, and we need to be sensitive to those
particular circumstances.
Q504 David Winnick: Minister,
there have been complaints from witnesses while we have been conducting
this inquiry, particularly the Union of Jewish Students, who complain
of anti-Semitism. They complain that, for example, to name a college,
at the School of Oriental and African Studies they are facing
pressure, they are facing anti-Semitic taunts—not physical
attacks. They have complained very strongly about the Open University.
I know that the SOAS authorities have put their foot down and
only last week an Israeli embassy official, who was to be boycotted,
the authorities of SOAS said that would not do, and the person
concerned went to a meeting, so I read in the press. Just as there
can be extremists obviously elsewhere, have you heard these reports
of extremist Islamic elements, again, totally unrepresentative
of the Muslim community, indeed, a particular group who are banned
in the Middle East, who are making it very difficult in certain
universities for Jewish students?
Ms Blears: No, Mr Winnick, I am
not aware of that situation. Clearly, it sounds to be of great
concern, and I will undertake with my officials to find out further
details about what has been happening there. Clearly, if any of
these incidents are breaches of the criminal law, then there is
provision for religiously aggravated offences now in terms of
the provisions that we brought in. But I was not aware that people
are subjected to this kind of intimidation and clearly, that would
be a matter of concern. I will perhaps ask my officials to investigate
that and to let me have a report on it.
Q505 David Winnick: May
I suggest, Minister, that you ask the Clerk for correspondence
relating to the Open University, because the response from the
Open University certainly did not satisfy the organisation that
I have named, and perhaps you may want to see what was written
at the time.
Ms Blears: Indeed.
Q506 Chairman: Minister,
two further questions on that. On our recent visit to the Netherlands
and France, in both countries the issue was raised of recruitment
by extremist groups in prisons. Is that something that you have
identified as an issue here?
Ms Blears: Yes, we think, again,
a small number of people may well be subject to influences in
prisons in a number of ways. They could be subject to influence
from other prisoners, they could also be subject to influence
from the imams who are preaching in prison and ministering to
people there. That is why we want to try and make sure that there
are properly trained imams in the prison service, and we are embarking
on work to make sure that that happens now. I think it is also
important that in our general crime prevention policies we have
a prolific offender strategy, and one of our key strands around
that is resettlement and rehabilitation of offenders, and making
sure people have proper support when they leave custody in order
to break that re-offending cycle. That is important to us and
that is another way that we can try and focus our efforts on giving
people support. But clearly, the prison environment is a closed
environment, one in which people can be subject to some fairly
intense influences, and it is an area that we want to do more
work in. It really connects to what I was saying right at the
beginning, that we want to follow people's pathway and see at
what point they are exposed to these influences and see how we
can counter it.
Q507 Chairman: Is the
Government proposing to fund the education of British-born imams?
The Dutch government, in order to deal with the issues of foreign
imams, is going to provide state funding to the Muslim community
to fund British-born imams. Are there any similar plans in this
country?
Ms Lempriere: Not as far as I
am aware, no.
Q508 Chairman: On education,
Minister, you gave a very positive view about the things that
are going on amongst young people. When this Committee asked a
North West-based group called Peacemaker to do some research amongst
young people on attitudes to the issues in this inquiry there
were a number of things that they told us that gave us cause for
concern, but two I would like to highlight. One was that they
found a number of sixth form colleges and similar very reluctant
to allow the group in even to have a debate with young people
about these sensitive issues, and secondly, they found that some
of the adults working with young people could not adequately explain
the difference between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. I just
wonder whether you are really happy that the school system is
properly equipped to deal with the sensitive discussions of these
issues, which you yourself have said are enormously important
to tackle.
Ms Blears: I think a citizenship
education programme is important, but it has not been around for
that long. It is a relatively new introduction into the curriculum,
and what we have found with all areas of citizenship education
is that it is best taught by people who have a degree of expertise
in it. If you are asking people to do sex education, they ought
to be fairly competent in terms of doing it; it is not a generic
skill and I think there is a danger sometimes in citizenship education
that it can be all things to all people and you ask all teachers
to be able to teach it. That is why in the citizenship curriculum
now there is a real move to try and develop some specialism and
some expertise in each of the strands, and I think, particularly
in this area, when we are talking about extremism and the influences
that are around, it is very complex work that needs to be done
properly.
Q509 Chairman: What advice
has gone to schools to help them discuss these issues? Is that
something DfES has done or the Home Office has done?
Ms Blears: The only guidance around
these issues that I am aware of is from DfES, and that is in relation
to bullying, tolerance and respect in schools. There is not any
specific citizenship guidance around issues concerning Islam and
extremism at the moment. I do not know whether that would be appropriate.
It is clearly not my policy area to discuss, but there is not
any specific advice around these issues at the moment. There is
some general advice around racism, bullying, tolerance and respect
but nothing specifically around this area.
Q510 Chairman: Can I press
you a bit further on the Home Office's role in taking forward
community cohesion in relation to education? The Cantle Report
a few years ago was critical of the impact of mono-faith schools—not
just ones that are designated as a faith school, but schools where
effectively all pupils came from one faith. I do not get the impression
that very much has been done about that over the last three or
four years since the Cantle Report. Is that right?
Ms Blears: It depends whether
you broadly agree that faith schools or schools of predominantly
one faith are, in inverted commas, "a bad thing" and
I think generally, our policy is that in many cases faith schools
and schools with a strong ethos can actually be very good places.
They can help to raise educational attainment. I say this with
some commitment because in my own community I have a Jewish girls'
high school which we have been struggling for the last five years
to bring into the family of maintained schools, and we have just
achieved it. It is a tremendous school. It has fantastic educational
achievement, a good community, it is doing the National Curriculum,
and it is now a partnership school linked with our whole family
of schools in the city and has links in that way.
Q511 Chairman: The Cantle
Report was very specific, was it not? He actually said that there
are too many young people growing up leading separate lives in
different communities, and he identified mono-faith schools—not
designated faith schools particularly, because there are not that
many of them, but mono-faith schools—as a significant problem
that needed to be tackled by the DfES. I repeat, I do not think
that anything has been done in the last four years, has it, to
actually begin to tackle that problem?
Ms Blears: I do not think I am
in a position to give you the detail about what the Education
Department has been doing for the last four years. The information
I have is that . . .
Q512 Chairman: With respect,
are you not still the Minister in the Home Office Department responsible
for community cohesion, a cross-government initiative?
Ms Blears: I am not the Minister
for it, but I am responsible for it today. If I tell you what
I know and then Ms Lempriere can perhaps give you a little bit
of further information. First of all, there is now a foundation
partnership, where we encourage schools to be part of the partnership,
because there is a difficulty about people growing up with separate
lives, and that is not just confined to school. Therefore, if
you have a partnership of schools, which I was trying to illustrate
in relation to my local example, you can then get interaction,
you can get students moving around between schools, you can get
teachers moving around between schools and bringing in a different
kind of input, because I think there is a danger about separate
development in that way. You can also have young people working
together out of school, in sport or art activities, all the out
of school activities that go on now. The new schools that are
established, the new secondary schools, have to specifically look
at how they are contributing towards more inclusive policies and
community cohesion. There are also measures now around admissions.
The admissions forums are able to advise the admissions authorities
how you can have admissions policies that perhaps get a proportion
of your people from the different faith backgrounds into that
faith school. So there is work going on right across that. The
only issue I was taking at the beginning was simply to say that
I do not think faith schools per se are necessarily a bad
thing. In some cases, they can be a tremendously good thing, but
what we have to make sure is that they do not operate in isolation
and that the children within them are not immune from the rest
of the diverse society around them.
Ms Lempriere: Can I add to that?
As well as the partnership schools that the Minister mentioned,
there are increasingly now extended schools, where schools are
embedded in their communities, linked to other services, which
is a way of ensuring that you reduce the effect of the sort of
segregation that you were talking about. We have actually produced
cohesion standards for schools, which give sets of principles
and ideas of ways in which they can support and build cohesion
in their particular communities. There is, as the Minister said,
a requirement that, even in schools which are maintained and formally
faith schools, that they are required to reflect the cultural
diversity of the communities in which they live so that even though
it may appear to be an apparently a narrowing effect, I do not
think it is always the case. Again, it goes back to the sort of
conversations you have been having already, talking about faith,
because the other issue that Ted Cantle identified was the fact
that you had schools that predominantly had white children in
or people from black and minority ethnic groups. One of the things
about faith schools is that quite a lot of them are in fact very
racially diverse. Catholic schools are a good example. You get
people from many different cultural or racial backgrounds in a
faith school.
Q513 Chairman: Can we
stop there, because I did not raise any criticisms of faith schools.
I was raising schools where all the pupils are of one faith. That
is entirely different to an established faith school. We need
not, as far as I am concerned, rehearse the arguments about faith
schools.
Ms Lempriere: I was just explaining
that when we are talking about diversity, faith schools do not
necessarily mean a lack of diversity. I think things have happened,
to return to your main question, in the education sector to build
cohesion, and certainly in the development of new schools, where,
for example, there are significant developments going on in cities,
issues around cohesion do feature in planning of intake and location
to try and overcome some of the problems that Ted Cantle addressed.
Q514 Mr Prosser: How successful
would you say your efforts to promote community cohesion have
been? We have been skating around this subject quite a bit, but
as a specific policy to improve and promote community cohesion,
how successful do you think you have been so far?
Ms Blears: I think it has been
successful in energising government. Whether or not this has translated
to fully achieve our ambitions on the ground I think is perhaps
another matter. I think government now is much more focused right
across on how important cohesion is to build into their policies
from the beginning, and that was not the case before we had the
Cantle Report and the focus on community cohesion. Particularly
in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister now, all the work that
local government does around regeneration is much more focused
on building in community cohesion from the start. To some extent
the things we have just been talking about in education, similarly.
How can schools help to build cohesion? You can say just the same
in relation to transport proposals. How do you make sure that
communities have sufficiently good transport links to enable them
to use the facilities? The whole focus on the community cohesion
Pathfinders that we had has helped to take that agenda across
government. I think there is more work to be done. I am not criticising
our local partners for this at all, but I do think out there on
the ground that there is still a sense that we still have some
big issues to tackle before people really do feel that they have
a very inclusive community. That takes me back to our citizenship
survey right at the beginning, that 71% of people say people round
here get along with each other. Obviously, the task is to try
and increase that number.
Q515 Mr Prosser: The Chairman
has been asking you about the Cantle Report and another area of
criticism from them was the so-called area-based regeneration
strategies. What changes have the Home Office made to help bring
this about?
Ms Blears: I think area-based
initiatives were singled out for criticism on a double-edged basis.
One was that where you had a geographical, inflexible boundary,
people who fell just outside that boundary felt completely excluded
from all the different regeneration that was going on somewhere
else, and that inevitably would lead to a sense of resentment
and community tension. The Home Office and ODPM have actually
issued some joint guidance about how area-based initiatives can
be designed in order to not to have those difficulties. A couple
of the key things for me are, first of all, full and meaningful
involvement of communities, not a sham consultation but real involvement
with local people in designing what the initiative should look
like, what its objects are, where it should operate. Flexibility
in the application of scheme boundaries is absolutely key, so
that even if you are limited to an area base, there is no reason
why the people who fall just outside cannot at least take advantage
of some of the good practice and extend some of the schemes to
them. We will all have experienced New Deal for Communities schemes
in that way, and some of our Surestart schemes have very defined
boundaries, but that is no reason why the principles of a Surestart
operation cannot be adopted elsewhere even if you do not have
the full initiative, and I think that has been very important
indeed. The final thing is we have also issued a guide not just
for the officials but we have also issued a guide for residents
and practitioners about how at a local level they can help to
influence area-based initiatives so they have a sense of ownership
of their regeneration, and that again helps to reduce some of
the community tensions that are about.
Q516 Mr Clappison: It
is clear from the evidence we have received and from the Cantle
Report that local leadership is a key factor. What is the Government
doing to foster local leadership, to support it and to spread
best practice?
Ms Blears: You are right, Mr Clappison,
that leadership is key in these issues, and I think our community
cohesion pathfinders showed us that there is no one simple model
for local leadership. I mentioned the Mayor of Stoke-on-Trent
previously. He had a particular model; he was a man with a mission,
and he was going to go out there and take it on. In other areas
they have found that collective leadership is more appropriate,
shared leadership with the local community. So there is a range
of issues there. I think leadership in local government is absolutely
fundamental to this and it is a key part of ODPM's ten-year strategy
for local government, enhancing the capacity of local councillors
to be able to lead their communities and be champions for their
communities. We are now starting to measure that in a much more
vigorous way through the Comprehensive Performance Assessment.
I think community cohesion and leadership is an integral part
of districts' CPA measurement at the moment, and from this year
it starts to be part of the Comprehensive Performance Assessment
for higher-tier councils as well. So local leadership is absolutely
fundamental to getting these issues right. We are also working
with IDeA, again, the Improvement and Development Agency, to raise
the capacity of local councils to be able to be community champions.
So I think there is a huge amount of work going on, but it is
going to be scrutinised by the Audit Commission in the CPA, and
sometimes, when you shine a light on things through the CPA process,
that is how you can really drive improvement.
Q517 Mr Clappison: It
is implicit in what you have said that you have got the mechanisms
there to identify areas where local leadership is weak. What happens
when you find an area where local leadership is lacking?
Ms Blears: There is a range of
measures that government can take, and councils now are assessed,
I think, as excellent, good, fair, weak and poor. I think those
are the gradings that councils have. Interventions are proportionate
to their grading. Intervention can range from help and assistance
and, at the top end, clearly, ODPM has powers to literally intervene
and take over the running of services. It has not had to do that
so far, but it has sent in some pretty strong remedial managers
to some places to try and increase performance. I know that lots
of council leaders now are getting peer mentoring from other excellent
council leaders, where they are working side by side with them.
I think there is an innovative programme where Kent Social Services
are going in to help Swindon Social Services because their performance
has been judged to be not that good, so they are in there helping
them. It is a bit controversial, I know, but it is new ways of
people helping each other, as well as, if you like, intervention
from the centre.
Q518 Mr Clappison: On
a slightly different note, on a different form of leadership,
inter-faith dialogue seems to be a bit patchy. It is very good
where it is happening but it is a bit patchy. Is there anything
that you are doing to foster it particularly?
Ms Blears: Yes, we are. We have
been encouraging the inter-faith network. This is at local level.
There are currently around 200 local inter-faith groups. We want
there to be more. We would like them to be in every part of the
country, so we do want to try and ensure that we can make that
happen. We have also, as I say, brought together this imam and
rabbi dialogue. We have got the Inter Faith Network for the UK,
which is core-funded by the Home Office, and the Local Government
Association, so that is an interesting joint venture with local
government. We have tried to involve inter-faith groups in all
of our national celebrations that have taken place recently, so
that they have a real place at the table in our national life.
There is a huge amount going on but I think more to do. If we
can have inter-faith groups in every community, where we are all
talking together and sharing ideas, with that kind of robust debate,
but with respect, then I think that could be the way forward for
us.
Q519 Chairman: Minister,
finally, in the Government's recent document "Improving
Opportunity, Strengthening Society", you said that one
of the things you wanted to do was to develop a sense of inclusion
and shared British identity defined by common opportunities and
mutual expectations on all citizens to contribute to society.
Going back to the Cantle Report again, he actually said that there
should be a national debate, one in which young people should
be very strongly representative, to try to define what that British
identity should be for the 21st century. Does the Government think
that debate is necessary or is it pretty obvious enough what British
identity is and it is merely a matter of getting people to share
in it?
Ms Blears: This takes me right
the way back to the beginning of our session today, Mr Chairman,
really. You will be pleased to know that I have about three lines
of briefing on this, so I am entitled to say what I think rather
than my briefing.
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