Examination of Witnesses (Questions 220-239)
30 JUNE 2004
MR SEHDEV
BISMAL MBE, MR
JUNIOR HEMANS,
MR MAHMOOD
KHAN, DR
SADHU SINGH
AND MR
JEREMY VANES
Q220 Chairman: Good afternoon, ladies
and gentlemen. May I call the Committee formally to order, and
may I say how pleased we are to be here in Wolverhampton. The
idea was suggested by Mr Marris, who is now a distinguished, long-term
member of the Committee whose experience in some of the areas
that we are contemplating this afternoon is deep. We decided to
take up his idea of coming and spending two days, trying to learn
for ourselves at first hand what the difficulties are concerning
service delivery to minority ethnic people here in Wolverhampton.
We have had a very constructive, useful visit so far. We have
had informal contact with some of you, and have talked to the
Department; and we are finishing it all off with a session of
formal evidence. The formal evidence is important to the work
of any select committee because it produces the body of material
from which we will draw our recommendations. The inquiry will
be completed in the course of the rest of this calendar year.
We will then make recommendations based on the evidence that we
get both here and from other parts of the inquiry, and we will
put those recommendations to the House, and within a two-month
period the Government is bound, under the rules of the House of
Commons, to respond. We are trying to come up with suggestions
that will make the service delivery to minority ethnic communities,
here in Wolverhampton and in other parts of the United Kingdom,
better. We are assisted in that process this afternoon by a distinguished
panel of witnesses who have a lot of experience in their own fields.
We welcome Mr Mahmood Khan who is a member of the Wolverhampton
Mosques and Chief Executive of TLC College; Mr Sehdev Bismal who
is Chairman of the Wolverhampton Inter-Faith Group; we are joined
too by Dr Sadhu Singh, who is Chairman of the Council of Sikh
Gurdwaras and a member of Wolverhampton Citywide BME Community
Forum; Mr Jeremy Vanes, who is Chief Executive of the Wolverhampton
Citizens' Advice Bureau; and Mr Junior Hemans, who is Treasurer
and a board member of the West Midlands Caribbean Parents' and
Friends' Association. Gentlemen, you are all very welcome. We
are delighted that you have taken the time to help us with our
inquiry. I remind you that the evidence this afternoon is being
taken down verbatim by an official reporter writer; and that is
a difficult task in circumstances where the acoustics are challenging
and there is a bit of background noise. Anything that any of us
say should be said with that in mind. I suggest that because the
CAB has a wide variety of interests across all of this as an issue,
we might invite Mr Vanes, who has kindly produced to us a written
piece of evidence drawn on local experience, to talk us through
very briefly the main suggestions he wishes to make to the Committee
this afternoon. Then there is a series of questions that we would
like to address to all of you individually in regard to your local
organisations. If that is acceptable, we will proceed without
any further ado to ask Mr Jeremy Vanes to address the Committee.
Mr Vanes: Thank you, sir. I have
deposited extra copies of this for the Committee, either to take
now or read later. The points we would make as introduction very
briefly are that the CAB services have been around in Wolverhampton
continuously since 1939, and therefore it has a long history of
observing and participating in policy change. There have been
many debates about the City's ethnic communities over many years,
particularly in the later period of Enoch Powell's role as a constituency
MP here. We would like the Committee to be aware that we believe
the City is solidly involved with the integration and work with
ethnic communities. We have also had the very recent successful
introduction of asylum seekers dispersal here, and some of the
CAB's volunteers at the moment are asylum-seekers. The CAB deals
with 26,000 inquiries a year from approximately 18,000 individuals
in Wolverhampton, of which 600 cases routinely become live legal-aided
cases. Appendix 1 in the document I have given you shows that
the national average of the BME community is about 9-9.2%, and
Wolverhampton's 2001 census recording shows 22.2%, which is significantly
higher. We would point out to you that we have an appendix here
which is the profiling of the school population, which shows that
that population in Wolverhampton is in excess of 30% BME. We believe,
because of other forces as well, that that will continue to grow
over the next few years. That is pertinent to the Committee's
thinking about where the DWP is now and where it needs to plan
to be in the next few years. The present CAB workforce is just
under 38% composed of BME people, and our clients—of those
18,000 clients we see each year, 44% of them are BME. That has
risen considerably over the last three or four years. It has been
about 35% for about ten years, but it has risen in the last two
years to 44%. You have some examples of our leaflets in the pack.
They are translated into Punjabi and Urdu and also British sign
language. The evidence we want to give on the delivery of services
to people from black and minority ethnic communities locally is
firstly that we have contextualised our experience of those services—how
many enquiries we answer and how these rank in comparison to other
providers, and to benchmark those trends over time. Secondly,
there are very few cases that we have picked out which are seriously
concerning to us over the last 18 months we talk about—and
we compare these to the national CAB evidence that the Committee
received in May 2003, so we do not repeat what you already know.
Thirdly, we give you some ideas on where we think further improvement
and planning needs to be undertaken, and we also speculate that
in urban areas such as Leicester, Wolverhampton and Birmingham,
in the next 20 to 30 years we believe that these could be the
first cities in the United Kingdom where BME populations become
a majority of the population instead of a minority. I think that
the various agencies need to think very carefully about that.
Finally, we describe some of the very positive experiences we
have had with the officers and managers at DWP recently. All of
our evidence relates to a set of appendices which you can read
at your leisure, which are obviously too dense for us to talk
about here. In the 12-month period of the last financial year,
we saw at the CAB 9,000 cases that came originally from DWP transactions,
which is about 40% of our workload. About 44% of those clients
were from BME communities. There is no significant difference
there in the ratio of people coming to us there. We looked very
much at the notable social policy cases we had had at the CAB
in Wolverhampton over the last 18 months. We found that there
were 65 shocking cases we had seen in that time. We have analysed
them in appendix 4 for you. However, when we looked carefully,
we found that only six, maybe seven, of those 65 cases originated
from DWP, about 9-10%. Considering that 40% of our service deliveries
from that source, and only 10% of our serious worries, we thought
that was a relatively impressive comment to make about the DWP.
Another six of our cases, however, relate to NASS assisted citizens
here, and we would say to you that that needs to be borne in mind
because if there are positive decisions on asylum status those
clients become refugees and they become normal DWP mainstream
benefit claimants; and you should not look at NASS as a separate
entity. Essentially, a chunk of it is future clients for DWP.
Of the cases that we looked at, there were six or seven, and half
of them were from BME persons. In only two we construed that the
difficulty, the bad service that DWP had given, was in any way
related to the ethnicity. I will talk you briefly through two
of them. Case 18 in our documentation concerns an Angolan refugee
with a significant disability. This is a man from Angola who had
got refugee status here but had lost an arm. He had a disability
living allowance claim. The book was recalled by DWP for adjustment
and uprating, and it was sent back to a post office. He was not
told what had happened to his book, and by the time we got involved
and helped him, he had gone six weeks without any payment. We
think there are major issues there about the DWP not communicating
with this person, or the post office, or in fact anybody sensibly.
We felt that their tardy conduct, combined with an understandable
lack of information that a refugee would have about this country's
civil service, produced that unacceptable situation for him. The
other case that we felt had some relevance was of a pregnant schoolgirl,
who was 15 and of Asian origin, who decided not to continue the
last few months of her schooling. Her mother therefore lost an
active claim for Working Family Tax Credit and Child Benefit,
and DWP stated that they could not replace these benefits until
the child was born. Wolverhampton has one of the highest teenage
pregnancy rates in Europe. It may be speculation that the age
and identity of the schoolgirl increased her feeling of stigma
about returning to school whilst pregnant. Therefore, we also
say that the DWP are probably applying national benefit rules
in a neutral fashion here, and that may not be a case related
to ethnicity; but we felt that it was so typical of Wolverhampton
life here that we would bring it to your attention. The other
four or five cases involved other people of black minority ethnic
origin and white people, and they echo and replicate those sorts
of cases; but we did not see anything distinctive about ethnicity
in there. At this point we compared our findings locally, of these
65 cases, with the evidence you had already had from CAB, and
we found relatively close parallels with that evidence, and we
do not want to replicate that. One thing that was pointed out
to me from the CAB staff I interviewed this week in preparing
this evidence was that in their view the language barriers faced
by some ethnic minority communities, when it comes to form-filling
or communicating by letter, was almost a similar barrier to indigenous
white citizens who have very low literacy or basic skills needs,
and therefore barriers to do with language and literacy and communication
are actually not just related to BME clients wholly, but obviously
are compounded where there is different grammar spoken or some
other issue. We would say therefore that the lack of affordable
interpreting services is one of the main areas where DWP could
improve the whole range of its services and get it more involved
with form-filling. We particularly want to draw your attention,
as I mentioned with the Angolan refugee, that where asylum-seekers
reach a positive decision on their status and do remain, they
therefore lose contact with NASS, as the supporting agency, with
all its specialisation and knowledge, and transfer to DWP on mainstream
benefits or pensions or whatever. I do not think the DWP is quite
prepared at the moment to understand, as we have gone through
a number of years of asylum dispersal, the number of asylum-seekers
in the city, which is a ceiling of about 1,208, will very soon
and thereafter always be outnumbered by the number of refugees
who settled in the community. We have to get past this idea that
NASS deals with asylum-seekers and everybody else is "normal".
I think there is going to be a complexity in the workload of DWP
over the next few years. Examples of practical solutions to help
this might be to produce—NASS and others have—"welcome
to being an asylum-seeker" information packs. We think it
might be good for the DWP to prepare packs that are "welcome
to being a refugee" or "welcome to being a DWP sort
of person". A lot of the other things that need to happen
there are also part of the web of government services: people
need a passport, a National Insurance number, paperwork to drive,
to get a job, and do all sorts of other so-called "normal"
things at that point that they get a positive decision on asylum.
Certain future thoughts we want to bring to your attention is
that if you look at appendix 3, which is our analysis of the profile
of ethnicity of school pupils, 9.5% of school pupils in secondary
education in Wolverhampton have some form of black and therefore
African descent. We would put it to you that, in our view, that
is one of the highest African descent ratios in any city population
in Europe probably north of Marseilles. There may be areas in
London and other cities where there is a considerable African
descent issue, but we think in Wolverhampton that is a very big
issue, that 10% of the future population here is of African descent.
We would just make a small anecdotal sideline here. The implications
for services by DWP and Health and others—we have for the
first time recently started to hear phlebotomists from the sickle
cell detection agencies analyse sickle cell trait in apparently
white people, people who must have some form of Mediterranean
or African descent in their background, either recently forgotten,
or right back to Roman times. The idea that Wolverhampton is black
and white and those simple things is rapidly disappearing in a
lot of change. We need to think about that in the delivery of
other benefits.
Q221 Chairman: I am anxious about time,
because we have a series of six areas of questions, Jeremy. Can
you draw that together? It has been very helpful so far in terms
of setting out the context, but give us a paragraph on the rest
of it. It is written evidence, and valuable written evidence—just
the bits that you want to underscore, just to draw to a conclusion.
Mr Vanes: The very simple headlines
towards the ending are that we think over 30% of Wolverhampton
kids are BME. There is a great proportion in Birmingham, and we
understand in Leicester the majority of schoolchildren are BME.
Agencies like DWP have got to start thinking about these issues
as long-term delivery tasks for them to think about. We are complimentary
on the improvement of forms recently, particularly pensions, and
on the outreach work that has been done in mosques, gurdwaras
and temples and elsewhere, but we do think there needs to be a
long-term view on that and a consistency of staff who are sent
out, rather than rapid turnover. One of the most impressive things
we have had involvement with is the creation of the interpreting
service for Wolverhampton, which you may have heard about earlier
today. One of the DWP officers has been a leader in pushing that
along, to the point where we have a business plan and staff being
brought into post and set up. It is the kind of interpreting service
we have dreamed of here for many, many years. We summarise the
points we have made, but I have just spoken to them in summary
anyway.
Q222 Chairman: That is very helpful,
and beautifully done and very concise. You have covered a huge
amount of ground, and we will return to some of that. Before we
move on to Rob, who will ask some questions about language, I
would like to understand a little, just for the record, about
how each of you—and you must not all feel you have to answer
every question individually from every organisation for the rest
of the afternoon—your own experiences of the role and the
added value that your own sectoral specialisms and expertise in
groups can bring, voluntary and otherwise, to the services we
are all trying to create. Can you say how that feeds in, positively
or negatively in relation to the assistance provided by the DWP
and whether that could be better. I also want to try and get from
you whether you have anything more than anecdotal evidence—particularly
in things like disability benefits where the black and ethnic
minorities are at a clear disadvantage. Trying to quantify that
is very hard, but let us start off with Mr Khan. That is a complex
bunch of questions, but we are trying to learn about the voluntary
sector and how it relates, in partnership with the DWP and what
the real barriers are. Then I will ask the rest of your colleagues.
Mr Khan: I have been working with
an organisation called TLC since 1994. TLC College is an organisation
that has been working in Wolverhampton since 1994, and was funded
initially through City Challenge and was a three-way collaboration
between City Challenge, Bilston FE college and the mosque on Waterloo
Road. The organisation started off as a project, and in 1997 became
a limited company, due to its demand, and so TLC was formed. We
have had years of different funding activities and support packages
within the community of St Peter's but also with the wider community
of Wolverhampton. Going directly to issues around DWP work, in
1999 we started doing some New Deal work with Groundwork Black
Country, and subsequently we have also done the Ethnic Minority
Outreach Service with a pilot for Wolverhampton and Walsall for
two years, and subsequently we have got the contract for another
two years. We are the best performing north Black Country provider.
We initiated a translation service with Jobcentre Plus that we
have been delivering for approximately three or four years. That
is some of the work that we have done. As an organisation, the
client groups that we have—we have approximately a thousand
users a year coming through the door, and the majority of them
are from minority communities, and the majority of them also now
recently have started to come through from the new communities,
the asylum-seeker/refugee communities. That gives you an idea.
We are right next door to the mosque, so in terms of usage—and
we do get a very good selection of the BME community, not just
because it is Muslim or Sikh or Christian, or black, white or
pink; we get a good diverse group of users. Experience with regard
to the services: it has been challenging and very, very difficult
to work with the Department of Work and Pensions, especially Job
Centres initially. Since 1999 there has been so much paperwork
and bureaucracy. There is an issue about quality and accountability,
and value for money; but at the same time the Department does
go too far in its approaches. Some of that has now eased off a
bit, but is still there, and that seriously needs to be looked
at. In terms of the programmes as well, they initially started
off being quite long, and I think they were supportive of the
needs and skills and gaps that people have. The programmes have
now become shorter, and we are focusing more on targets and outputs
and less on supporting those individuals we are trying to support.
It is important to be holistic. Jeremy mentioned issues about
one department not working with another; it has to be done collectively.
Today's client from the LSC programmes or a youngster may be tomorrow's
jobcentre person, so for me it has got to be seen as a whole process.
There have been attempts in Wolverhampton in particular: the district
office has worked with the SureStart nursery programmes, and that
is really good. It is a good starting point if they can see that
through other areas, in terms of teenagers and youngsters, and
through to employment. That is very important. There is an internal
issue, but I will come back to that.
Q223 Chairman: We will be coming on to
the technical issues later. Quantification of the extent of the
problems is something I would like your response to. What evidence,
if any, do you have? Is there any monitoring going on? How big
is this problem?
Mr Khan: The difficulty is that
a lot of our clients and users are scared of the service. For
them, it is seen as bureaucratic and being the state system. It
makes them feel that they are going into a system; they have to
go through so many loopholes; and sometimes it is just the whole
culture of the jobcentres that puts people off from using the
service.
Q224 Chairman: That is a very helpful
start and captures your experience very well. Mr Bismal, can you
go through the same process and give us a feel for how you are
working with DWP and how we can measure the full extent of this
problem, if at all we can?
Mr Bismal: Chairman I am not sure
if you know about the background of the Inter-Faith Group. It
has been going now for the last thirty years. It was first set
up in 1974, when community relations in the city or the town,
as it was then, were far from desirable. The group was set up
with a view to bringing different faith communities together.
At that time, there was a lot of hostility below the surface between
the indigenous communities and the newcomers to the town. That
was primarily because of the lack of knowledge and ignorance of
the ways of life and traditions of the newcomers. So over the
years the overriding priority has been to bring those faith communities
together through collaborative projects and initiatives. It started
with building up friendships between people of different traditions,
and from there on, the emphasis was on doing something jointly
because just talking, sharing views and telling each other about
your faith is not enough to change attitudes. The emphasis was
on doing projects together. I would like to believe that we have
been very successful in doing that, with lots of other groups
contributing to the same principle of community cohesion; but
I think at times of different crises it has proved that intervention
has been very helpful. In terms of membership of the group we
have 300 people who are individually members of the group, but
about 45 faith communities or places of worship are affiliated
to the group. Obviously, quite a number of them belong to minority
ethnic backgrounds. We have worked with a number of statutory
and voluntary organisations, for example we have provided professional
development programmes for the health trust, for the police, for
the probation service; and we are doing a lot for schools, but
mainly in areas of collective worship or about culture awareness.
For example, there is a vast array of resources for use in schools.
We talk in simple terms about the local faith communities. We
have done a lot of in-service training sessions for teachers and
for other providers in the community on cultural issues. However,
we have not had any direct experience of working with DWP. I have
to admit that, because that has not been a priority. But when
ethnic minority people come to meetings and seminars, obviously
if they have any problems or difficulties with regard to their
benefits or pensions, they share their concerns with us. So all
the evidence that I am going to produce in the course of the afternoon
will be on the basis of the feedback that I have received from
different communities.
Q225 Chairman: Would it be fair to characterise
your experience as suggesting that people from black and minority
ethnic communities do have higher hurdles to overcome to get access
to public services like benefits and pensions?
Mr Bismal: I think that is a fairly
accurate observation. The barriers are very high in the case of
minority ethnic communities.
Q226 Chairman: That is very valuable.
Mr Singh, can I ask the same sort of question.
Dr Singh: I represent the Sikh
community, the Council of Sikh Gurdwaras—and there are 10
altogether. We have a strong community of 30,000, which is 40%
of the whole population. We have been going as this umbrella body
since 1997, and our main event is the Vaisakhi festival, which
falls at the end of April, beginning of May. It is a multicultural
event. It has been very successful, and every year it is growing
because it is an event to build better community relationships.
At this event we go out and invite everybody, and all the communities
inter-faith—Hindus, Muslim, churches—all take an active
part, and of course politicians—they jump on the stage,
but they have been very helpful! Everybody has been helpful and
the event is growing more and more and is becoming a community
event. Something like 15-20,000 people come through a day. Coming
back to DWP, whether it is elderly or children, as we mentioned
earlier, disability—on that particular point—our community
is lacking, especially in information. Even for disability in
children, I have been living here for 45 years, and only recently
the voluntary sector started a project called Me Too, making the
Asian community or BME community aware of the benefits available
for disabled children. I was not aware of any of these benefits,
and I learnt from going to the seminars. For the elderly and pensions,
as I mentioned earlier, you have to realise that people of pension
age—fifties and sixties—that is when our elders came
to this country. Those are the people either disabled or receiving
some kind of pension. They have a very big language barrier, cultural
barrier. Research was done about six or seven years ago that was
reported in an Express & Star article. The words they used
were: "Asian elders are rotting away in their own homes."
They said that Asians look after their elders, but they failed
to realise that we are third or fourth generation, and our children
are becoming more and more Westernised, so they get qualified
and move on and leave their elders living with their relatives
or on their own. So they do not know what benefits are available.
Because of the language and culture barrier they are very shy
to go out, so they just sit at home and do not know what facilities
are available. Until six or seven years ago, there were no centres
or anything like that. Since then, a couple of elderly centres
have been set up where some Asian elders meet up. They are brought
by transport in the morning and taken back. The other source which
is failing is information-passing. DWP, social services or any
other department think they have passed the information; they
have translated it and they have passed that information to various
temples, mosques, or where the community gathers. You have to
realise that Sikh temples or mosques are not like churches; they
became more and more cultural events or culture centres or social
centres. Over the weekend you have thousands of people going there.
They have been sending leaflets printed in various languages to
those people centres. The other problem we have is the management
committee, which is supposed to explain all the leaflets and pass
the information to the community. They are not professional people.
They probably do not understand the leaflets themselves. So the
leaflets end up on somebody's desk and they are put in the basket.
There is no way of tracking whether the information has got to
the community; there is no way of monitoring it. That is why I
would like to point out that the next step would be to go out
to the community rather than just sending letters and waiting
for the community to come back. If there can be some kind of monitoring,
some kind of board that can be set up, which can go on a regular
basis. It has been proved in Birmingham in monitoring diabetes
or blood pressure sugar levels: nurses have been going week after
week, monitoring those particular patients.
Q227 Chairman: Your organisation feels
the need to monitor what is going on as well. You have anecdotal
evidence of the problems, but you do not know how extensive they
are. You are very carefully and helpfully describing in great
detail the situation where there is an identified need, but it
is impossible for you, given the information available and the
lack of statistics, as for everyone else, to understand the problem.
Dr Singh: Leaflets are sent, but
nobody has chased them up—"did you receive the information;
has the information been passed?" If we can hold some kind
of seminar on a regular basis, or an officer goes there every
week so that he is sitting there and people get to know him and
build a relationship, then they can talk and information can get
passed properly, and it can be monitored. That is happening at
all levels—elders, young, or even for Asian girls who are
running away from homes. That is a big problem.
Q228 Chairman: I am conscious of the
time. We have only fifty minutes left and we have quite a lot
of territory to cover. Mr Hemans, can you sketch in your particular
thoughts on that little parcel of questions, and then we will
move on?
Mr Hemans: Certainly. The difficulty
with going last is that I will be repeating some of what has been
said, but I will try to present probably the same information
in a different context. The West Midlands Caribbean Parents' and
Friends' Association has been established now for in excess of
forty years. When it was first set up, it was set up to deal with
many of these issues that we are now discussing today, so to some
extent it is a sad reflection that we are still discussing these
same issues of benefits and how we are looking into what was then
new communities, and what are now older established communities
but with new entrants as well. Forty years ago, people came to
the country needing benefit advice and needing to be settled,
needing to understand how the welfare system operated. We have
now gone to the other end of the system, still not fully appreciating
how the system itself works and has evolved. Now, we have an elderly
population needing to make new claims in terms of disability allowance,
attendance allowance, and even their pension; and they are still
not fully understanding how the system works. It demonstrates
at least in my mind that the plugs into the channels of networks
do not exist, or have never been fully developed; or, if they
have, they were cut off somewhere along that line. The older population
need this understanding and need to have access to the benefits
system. The Association, as it did 40 years ago, developed a welfare
advice centre, somewhere where forms could simply be filled in,
because of that cultural understanding. We are now at the other
end, where we provide a black elders group, aimed at dealing with
health-related issues but also with welfare advice issues. We
are also seeing the second and third generation groups not understanding
how this welfare system works, and so we are going back to that
end of the spectrum—people who were born here and understand
to a greater extent how the system is meant to work but do not
fully appreciate how they get plugged in and get their views known
within the system. We have two ends of the spectrum in our community
who need the help and support, and need to understand how the
system works in terms of welfare and benefits, but they are not
really getting access to information. The cultural issues are
still not sensitised sufficiently. Within that, there is still
this degree of bureaucracy; it is very hierarchical, and there
is this lack of cultural sensitisation around understanding how
to raise a question, how to probe and draw out from individuals
the nature of their circumstances. Having spoken to other black
groups within the city, in particular the younger element, there
is this great element of mistrust. Whilst the older population
is not necessarily engaging, we have the younger ones that are
disengaging because of this element of distrust, and they say,
"the jobcentre want to pigeon-hole me and send me down this
career path, and I have aspirations beyond that". To some
extent, it is how we widen the picture so that people can understand
there are opportunities and benefits, and getting them on the
right road, rather than saying, "you can do this; we will
put you here"—rather than making judgment statements.
What we are seeing at least is that there are the networks, and
having read this report for the first time last night and again
this morning, I do think there is a great deal of sensitisation
that needs to be brought to the DWP office here. To some extent,
what I would be expecting from some of those is local accountability
to say, "let us de-layer, and break down our hierarchical
structure here and plug into the local community networks that
exist". We can empower them, train them, and equip them—ICT
or otherwise—deal at a lower level, getting into the system
and getting into that degree of understanding. Then, as people
start to flow up, they have got that groundswell of understanding
and feel a little more comfortable in disclosing what they need
from the system and how best their circumstances can be served.
Q229 Chairman: Those are very comprehensive,
powerful statements, which paint the picture for us perfectly.
I need your help—you cannot have the luxury of long answers.
We have 45 minutes left. Can I ask you to be disciplined about
the size of the questions and answers.
Q230 Rob Marris: I want to talk about
language barriers. Mr Hemans, how big a problem is the language
barrier for the Caribbean and African community?
Mr Hemans: It is still a significant
factor for the older population who came through forty years ago.
They have not yet got the right phraseology, the right understanding
of some of the questions they are being asked. It is still a core
issue, and this is where our drop-in centres for the elderly and
to some extent the younger population of the community gets that
assistance from us, but first it is a matter of de-mystifying
the question and then providing some steer.
Q231 Rob Marris: What about Jamaican
patois? Do you think there is a need for that to be provided through
DWP with translation centres, with meetings on the phone?
Mr Hemans: I would agree. When
you consider—I am not sure of the exact statistics for the
African and Caribbean community, but that population is a reasonable
size. To reflect that back through the DWP offices, it is not
there. If there are any representatives, to some extent they may
feel it is inappropriate for them to use patois to engage with
clients. They may feel then that their colleagues would look down
on them to some extent, whereas that should be encouraged if it
gets through the language barrier, if it breaks down the need
for understanding. When people come to us and ask for advice,
we give it back to them in patois, because that is their level
of understanding. If you want to fully engage with people, that
is something I would encourage within the DWP offices. Staff who
are engaged from the black community should be encouraged to be
black in terms of dealing with their clients, and use the mother
tongue if that sufficiently deals with making that claimant feel
comfortable and getting their claim processed.
Q232 Rob Marris: I want to move on to
Dr Singh and focus more on the Asian community in Wolverhampton.
In contra-distinction to the Jamaican patois, it is the written
stuff as well as the spoken language. Do you think the DWP does
enough in terms of written stuff for people whose first language
is not English but one of the Asian languages?
Dr Singh: I am not very familiar
with the brochures, but from what I have seen and heard, they
are being translated into Hindu, Punjabi and Gujarati and Urdu.
It has been done.
Q233 Rob Marris: It is more a question
of the sort of thing that you and I talked about before, going
out to the gurdwaras, temples and mandirs and talking to the management
committee and cascading information down, rather than a written
leaflet or language?
Dr Singh: That is the problem.
Those people who we are aiming at probably cannot even read their
own language. This information is not getting through. People
are saying that people feel ashamed, especially disabled children.
People are still hiding them. The barrier is still there. I feel
that what Junior said is correct, that people who are social workers
should be fluent in the language of the customer they are dealing
with.
Q234 Rob Marris: You say there is a mismatch
at the moment.
Dr Singh: Yes, there is a mismatch
because people who are employed by the statutory bodies, their
first language is English. They are born here and have studied
here, and they are employed, and when you speak to them they cannot
speak proper Punjabi; they speak very, very broken—not true
Punjabi—and they feel ashamed of speaking it. That is the
other thing, that something nasty is in there. If you are like
my granddad, I will speak to you in my own language. Then the
barrier is broken and you can get the information back and forth.
But that is not happening.
Q235 Rob Marris: Do you get the sense
then that on occasions organisations like the DWP will think that
an employee is fluent in Punjabi, Urdu or Hindi, but in fact that
employee is not? The Department is assuming they are because it
sounds different.
Dr Singh: Whether it is done intentionally
or whether they are assuming that, but people, especially in the
health service—I have seen a couple of girls working there,
and they represent the Sikh community in that particular section.
They have no knowledge of the grass-root problems. They have not
any connection. They are representing the Sikh community. Again,
language is assumed by the employer—"we have a Sikh
girl working for us and she is fluent and can speak Punjabi"—but
that is not true.
Q236 Rob Marris: Do you find this in
another sphere?
Mr Khan: The point varies. From
the minority community, we have certain skills. We may not be
fluent in our own languages on those issues. The service—DWP—has
a duty to make sure the appropriate communication channels are
there for the user. Regardless of the fact that I am Asian, black
or whatever, I should be translating—and, if we can help,
fine, but we should not make the assumption that because this
person is Asian they are automatically going to translate Hindi,
Punjabi or Urdu or whatever—if they are black, patois or
African languages. It is an activity that happens regularly. For
example, as an organisation, we provide translation services.
Locally, in terms of jobs, in some months it is 400 translations
one-to-one that we are doing. That is with Jobcentre Plus. In
addition to that, TLC staff who speak the language will help out.
Staff at Jobcentre Plus or any other services can speak, and they
will all try and help as well. In addition, you bring friends
and family down. So the whole concoction of the support for language
needs to be taken seriously in its own right, as a communication
channel, rather than having bits here and bits there and all over
the place.
Q237 Rob Marris: Do you think, given
the barrier in language that the move by the DWP to try and do
more of its business on the telephone is helpful?
Mr Khan: I think it is personal.
Sometimes, you need to go and be personal with people. For some
people, it will work, but for the majority of people it is like
technology—some people you can throw a computer at them
and they will not use it because they do not know how to use a
computer.
Q238 Rob Marris: Is that worry or difficulty
of it not working greater in the BME community than in other communities,
or is it a general thing, that some people will take to it and
some people will not?
Mr Khan: I think it is more social.
That tradition has always been there in the BME community of closeness,
and sometimes it is important to look at traditional aspects.
Q239 Rob Marris: Sadhu, what do you think?
You mentioned before that some minority language speakers are
not literate in their own language, for understandable reasons.
Do you think it is a good thing if the DWP moves more to a telephone-based
service, or do you think that creates other problems?
Dr Singh: As Mahmood said, the
telephone-based service is personal. If I want a service, or if
you are calling a service, I would rather like to speak on a one-to-one
basis.
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