CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1675-ii

Hou se of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

HOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

 

 

Young Black People and the Criminal Justice System

 

 

Tuesday 7 November 2006

REVEREND NIMS OBUNGE and REVEREND LES ISAACS

MR LEE JASPER

Evidence heard in Public Questions 61 - 128

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

 

1. This is a corrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.

 

2. The transcript is an approved formal record of these proceedings. It will be printed in due course.

 

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Home Affairs Committee

on Tuesday 7 November 2006

Members present

Mr John Denham, in the Chair

Mr Richard Benyon

Mr Jeremy Browne

Mrs Ann Cryer

Margaret Moran

Gwyn Prosser

Bob Russell

Mr Gary Streeter

Mr David Winnick

________________

 

 

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Reverend Nims Obunge, The Peace Alliance, and Reverend Les Isaacs, Ascension Trust, gave evidence.

Q61 Chairman: Good morning. Thank you very much for joining us this morning to give evidence in the second session of the Committee's inquiry. Could we start by asking each of our witnesses to introduce themselves and their organisations for the record, and then we will get underway.

Reverend Isaacs: Good morning, everyone. My name is Reverend Les Isaacs. I am the director of a charitable organisation called Ascension Trust that has been running for 14 years. Over the last five years we have embarked on an initiative, as well, called Street Pastors. That was two years in the making and is now three years up and running. We started with 18 people, going out on the streets from 10 o'clock at night until four in the morning to engage young people, in particular, in two boroughs in London. We are over 600 people in 11 boroughs in London and seven cities across the country.

Reverend Obunge: My name is Nims Obunge and I happen to be a pastor of a church called Freedom's Ark and the chief executive of an organisation called The Peace Alliance. The initiative is based around working with community voluntary/statutory/faith organisations, trying to ensure that there is a holistic response to challenges of criminal justice in our community. I am also fortunate to be the acting chair for the London Criminal Justice Board advisory group, and oversee knife crime in that advisory group capacity.

Q62 Chairman: Thank you both very much indeed. We are grateful to you for coming this morning. This is the second evidence session we have had in our inquiry into young black people and the criminal justice system. As two people with the jobs you have, could I ask you what your reaction was when you heard that a Select Committee of the House of Commons was having an inquiry into young black people and the criminal justice system?

Reverend Obunge: About time. My gut feeling was "About time" and the feeling that it has been overlooked, undermined, underplayed and has not been given the effective attention it needs. I suppose in local communities it is more obvious. The dream had been that the centre would pick it up and do something.

Reverend Isaacs: My thought in response was: "I hope this is not just a piece of academic exercise." I felt and hoped that something tangible would come out of this to help us to address the mammoth problems we have in our local communities.

Q63 Chairman: I asked the question because some of the people who have responded to our inquiry have questioned our motives in even having an inquiry with this sort of title, so it is pleasing to have your support. Without asking you to go into the issues in detail, because we will try to cover everything in our question session, if this inquiry is of importance, what for each of you are the key issues you would like to see us discuss when we produce our report - not necessarily setting out exactly what we should include but what are the issues we need to make sure we touch on?

Reverend Obunge: Could you forgive me, for, being a minister, I am quite outspoken and very unhypocritical. I am a bit challenged by the present company, the Committee, because I do not see any black person on it. That, in itself, is a reflection of the challenge we have in the black community. If I am giving evidence, I had hoped to see somebody from my community sat with yourselves who would be able to tune things - and I am not talking about somebody sitting at the back of yourselves, but sitting in the centre. That is why I say you need to forgive me being outspoken; it is just that is the way things are. I already feel challenged at the moment, but I would like to see that maybe the Committee reviews itself first of all, before it reviews ourselves, because if you are not able to do that effectively we will not be able to get what we are looking for and we will end up with a piece of paper that might be a potential tick in the box, a tokenistic exercise, that might not have a sustainable future. That would be my key thing. I would like an internal review before an external examination.

Reverend Isaacs: I would say "Amen" to that.

Q64 Chairman: What you raise is a much wider issue, because we reflect very much the makeup of the House of Commons ----

Reverend Obunge: I understand.

Q65 Chairman: -- so these things are not entirely within our gift. But you have answered the point very frankly and we are grateful to you for that. You know, as we do, that the statistics show an overrepresentation of young black people in crime in the criminal justice system. Do you think that is reflecting a real phenomenon, that there is more crime being committed by young people and more people in the criminal justice system, or is it, as some people suggested to us, a quirk of what the statistics are showing us - perhaps, about poverty or something of that sort - rather than what is happening to young black people?

Reverend Isaacs: I think there is overemphasis on young black men in jail. But the fact is -as I visit jails up and down the country - there is a very high disproportion of young black men in our institutions, hence it has, in one sense, demonised young black boys and men in the public's opinion. Every year I meet up with literally hundreds of black boys and girls who have accomplished their A-levels and are actively engaging in seeking further education at universities, yet they never get a glimpse in the public domain or media. I am very concerned. I also think our courts too readily hand out sentences to our young boys, rather than looking for alternatives within the community to help our young boys go through the most difficult adolescent period. I think there is a lot that can be done, there is a lot that needs to be done, and far too many of these boys are given custodial sentences whereas I believe we could do something different.

Reverend Obunge: I think the first encounter a young black person has with the criminal justice system is most likely with the police. That is the critical encounter. When we look at stop and search rates, the facts speak for themselves. The black community is more likely to be stopped and searched. I have sat on the MPA Stop and Search Scrutiny Panel and the Home Office stop and search Community Panel and the statistics are very high: up to six times more likely in some cases than their white counterparts. When that first encounter is going to take place with the police, black young people already feel persecuted. They already feel that they are going to be targeted, so there is already a reaction to that initial encounter, and in some cases it is not crime. I am not denying the fact that there are some criminals within our community but the fact is that in some cases that criminality is based on persecution. I think we have to look at both sides of the coin. We need to look at the context of stop and search and we also need to explore issues around the drugs trade. So, yes, there are some concerns around how the drugs trade within the black community or gun crime within the black community seems higher than in most other communities. I think you would have seen recently one of the gentleman giving evidence - and I am sure we will speak about it later on today - in the context that there is potential that there are some middle-class white folks who seem to enjoy the drugs trade and enjoy our drugs, and so they encourage black people to get engaged in the drugs trade.

Q66 Chairman: You are both leaders of your communities. In your communities is the current discussion primarily about why some of your young people are getting involved in crime or is the discussion primarily about this experience of your young people at the hands of the criminal justice system? It may be unfair asking you to choose between those two but I would be interested to know how the balance of the discussion takes place.

Reverend Isaacs: Both of those issues are very much high on the radar and the agenda of our communities. There is always discussion about how many of our young, particularly boys/men, are in jail. There is also discussion about the issues of why it is that our young boys, in particular, find it very easy to find themselves involved with the drugs industry and also within the gang culture and the crime culture. Those discussions are never far from the table. It is there in the council flats; it is there in the middle-class agenda. We are always talking about those things.

Reverend Obunge: Why do we talk about it? I think that is important. Why are we having the discussions about over-representation? Why are we having this dialogue? The dialogue is there because there is a frustration. This just did not start today. We are looking at cause and effect. If we look at the context of employment reality - underemployment, underachievement - all those issues act as mitigating factors within the black community. In my submission to you I identified some of the discussions, and we cannot deny that there are discussions and debates around parenting. There are discussions and debates even amongst ourselves. We need to look inside and say: "What else can we do to support our young black people?" There are big debates around what our responsibilities are to our young people and the breakdown of the family structure, but, at the same time, you realise there is this pressure from the lack of opportunities that exist out there and the discrimination and potential racial issues, racism in some contexts - which, cutting to the chase, would be the right word in some cases - for our young black people. That tension exists and I think a lot of our young people are in the criminal justice system not so much because they want to be in there but it is about opportunities. There is a big issue on opportunities.

Q67 Mr Benyon: Both of your organisations are involved with combating gun crime. Gun crime affects a lot of different communities but there is a perception or a reality that it affects black communities and young black males in a much more emphasised way, both as victims and perpetrators. What success have you had in the work you have done? In which direction would you point this Committee towards successfully combating gun crime, and how it can affect your communities for the better?

Reverend Isaacs: I am always very careful about using the word "success". The strategy and policy within our organisation is that it has to be between 10-15 years because this problem is endemic, it is long-term. It is not a one-year project; it is a long-term initiative that we have to work on. That is the first point. The second point is this: we recognise, we constantly have at the forefront, that if we are going to have some tangible bearing and outcome within this issue we have to work and think and have a strategy for us to think about a generation plus. We have started by saying, "Let's just go out and engage people." That is why we looked at the whole issue of when crime happened. We looked at the 24-hour clock with the police and we realised that in the evenings certain things happened. We felt that we had to go out there and get into their minds, build relationships, build trust, and let young people know that we are not there for them because we are getting something out of it but we are there for them because we are genuinely concerned for them. In some of our boroughs we have seen street crime - preventative of a major incident happening - reduced by 90%. By 75% we have seen incidents reduce in some of the areas we are working with. People have even rung us up and said, "Look, I've got a gun. Could you come and get it from me. I don't want this lifestyle any more." We are creating the space for people to say, "If I want to cry out, who do I cry out to and who can help me out of that?" When we talk about success, we realise that there are many, many more guns out there and it is not one or two guns that we want; we want as many as possible. That is how we are seeing things happening and not only with guns but drugs as well. People are saying to us, "Pastor, I've got this. I'm involved. Please, help me. I don't want to do it any more."

Reverend Obunge: The word "success" remains relative. I sit also within the advisory capacity as a member of the Trident Independent Advisory Group and we are very careful when we use that word "success", even though we see, sometimes, our figures go down. You know, one incident is one incident too many. All of a sudden that impacts on the community. The reason I started getting involved in social action, as it were, was because I was, as a minister, being called to bury kids who had been shot or stabbed in our communities. We got to that moment where we said, "We are speaking so often at their deaths, but what do we do to keep them alive?" As a result of that, a raft of campaigns have taken place and these campaigns challenge young people. We are still engaged in that. In my organisation, we developed a 90-minute DVD and a manual for schools/teachers called Untouchable, which has been used around the country. Untouchable is one of the numerous study materials in the toolkit to help young people or to deter them from gun crime. My concern is more around an exit strategy. As a typical example: I had a young man with a gun come over to me. He wanted to come out. He wanted to leave that culture. But when I tried to encourage him, support him out of it, I realised that there was no exit strategy by the Government to help a person out from there. The police did not have the strategy because the police were looking for him to report, to rat out on his community in order to get protective measures because he knew his life was at risk. He was not ready to spill the beans, and because he was not ready to spill the beans he was not given protective custody. Therefore, you find such a person still stuck in that environment because there is no support structure. I have raised this with the Commissioner of Police, I have raised it with Hazel Blears, I have raised it with very senior Home Office officials and nobody has been able to identify effective exit strategies for such young people. We need to think effectively of exit strategies for people who are so vulnerable in their community.

Q68 Mr Benyon: Could you get a copy of Untouchable to the Committee?

Reverend Obunge: Without a doubt. We can get it, and the manual.

Q69 Mr Benyon: The previous evidence session heard advice from a number of people involved in social work that we should look very closely at the cultural factors that are drawing people towards such things as gun and knife crime, and, in particular, rap and hip-hop music. Do you have a view on that?

Reverend Obunge: I think you need, first of all, not to use gun and knife crime collectively. That is dangerous. In reality knife crime does not necessarily disproportionately exist within the black community; it exists also within the white community.

Q70 Mr Benyon: Both crimes exist within both communities.

Reverend Obunge: Holistically combining the notions is a bit of a challenging point. I think it is important that we know that. On the issue around whether hip-hop music encourages gun crime, I think we have had this debate at the Home Office round table - and, at that time, dare I say, the Chair was also involved as Home Office Minister. It was clear that that was not so much an issue. I mean, it is a cultural issue, music is cultural, but young people do not feel per se that that is the single mitigating factor resulting in gun crime. I think we need to look at the culture that exists at this present time amongst young black people and the issues around deprivation, not just music. You see, it is so easy to look at music and not consider the real factors of deprivation: underachievement, lack of opportunities. Music is such a minor issue, it is a blip compared to the more serious issues that I feel the Government needs to be looking at. Leave the music alone and let us deal with the more serious issues.

Q71 Mr Benyon: I have one final question about gender. We are obsessed in this report by young black males. Are we right to be? Why is there a difference between young black males and young black females?

Reverend Isaacs: I think there are some very important factors. One is the very high proportion of absent fathers. These young men are crying out for fathers. I walked into a room at 9.30 one evening - an aunty rang me up and she said, "Come and speak to my nephew." I got there at 9.30. Grandma was there, the boy's mother was there. The first thing he said to me was, "I'm surrounded by all women. I have no men around me as a model." Here is a 19-year old young man, staying in his house all day, leaving at 9.00 at night. That has had an enormous impact on our young men, young boys. You have young boys who sometimes are living with their step-mothers and tension is there. They are looking for that affirmation; they are looking for that identity; they are looking for that role model. They do not find it in the home and they go out and they meet a group of men or young boys who are involved in devious activities, they find affirmation. They get what they want, whether it is a mobile phone or an i-Pod or trainers. They get that protection. In return, they do all sorts of things. You can see that because of the lack of the stability in that fatherly figure, that male role in the home, they come to the point where they sort of yearn for it. We tend to find that it leads them more often than not to the wrong part of activities within the community. Rather than being constructive, they go to a destructive part of the community. From my point of view, whether it is London, Birmingham, Manchester, St Paul's or Nottingham, we have seen the same thing, that, where the father is absent, the more the vulnerability for young boys, in particular, to get involved in crime.

Reverend Obunge: Added to that would be the reality that we are dealing with something that is endemic. We are dealing with the absence. Again, I have to get to the core issue: when we talk about role models or absent fathers, we are talking about men that young black people can look up to. The media gives us notions of a certain model of who the black person is, yet we have some very successful black people in the corporate world, some very successful black people in other spheres of British life. Those black folks do not really feature quite often. When black people do not see themselves - there is something called black pride - it is about: Where is the pride? There is no sense of pride. We are not building that image, unfortunately. I know that the present Government is talking about Britishness, but one of the things is: Does a young black person see Britishness as involving themselves? Does that also celebrate blackness? If Britishness does not celebrate blackness, then the fact is that there is a point of frustration with that. When you look at the black boys, they are fighters - and when I say fighters, I am not talking about the fighters on the street. As a black man, we are fighters in our community, we want to achieve, and if we are not going to achieve in one area we will achieve in another area. But one thing is evident: we have to try to achieve. I just feel it is unfortunate that we might have young black people involved in a lot of criminality, but this Committee needs to understand that even amongst black Africans, who are highly educated, unemployment opportunities exist and so therefore they resort to other forms of employment.

Q72 Mrs Cryer: From what the Reverend Isaac said, there does appear to be a problem of young men growing up in all-female households. I think you are saying there is a lack of role models for them. Are you, as church people, doing anything to encourage more permanent relationships between men and women so that they bring these young men up jointly? Is there anything that government or agencies can do to encourage more families where there are two parents? I recognise that this is a problem in other communities, not just black communities, but from what you have said there does seem to be a particular problem here.

Reverend Isaacs: Unfortunately, I think the Government has sent mixed messages. We say to people that long-term commitment is better than cohabiting. We emphasise that strongly. We do not condemn or judge people, but we encourage people in terms of marriage, in terms of: "Listen, this is a relationship that should last until life." Secondly, we, as a church, a faith group, have particularly developed mentoring. We have an ongoing programme of recruiting men and mentoring men, so that men from the church can adopt a young man in the church or outside the church. We have a programme where we are even adopting men in prison, so we are meeting them six months before they come out of jail, mentoring them in prison, helping them to work through what is life after prison, then mentoring them after prison and seeking to help them educationally. But we recognise that it is one thing mentoring the men who are already in the institution or involved in crime, but it is another thing to mentor young boys who need a very high level of commitment - a very high level of commitment. We are constantly looking at that. For instance, I myself am mentoring two young boys. That is part of my other jobs and commitment that I have. I have to say to myself that it is not a nine-to-five mentoring. I am quite willing to meet up with one of my lads at 11 o'clock, wherever he is, and just spend that two hours with him. We are constantly working on that, emphasising that, coming up with initiatives that would help us to help young people, particularly young boys, on the street. But, again, we come to the point of frustration, where we recognise we could talk to a young lad and say, "Education is important" but then, when we begin to help that young guy and talk about the importance of education, we realise we cannot access the school to say to the school, "Listen, we have been talking with Johnny, this is the support he needs." Part of what we say to the school, is "When something does occur, please touch base with us, because we understand the issues with Johnny. Let us be part of the solution, rather than saying, 'Johnny has been bad, let's exclude him, let's get him off our books,' and then, when Johnny is out of school, because we are not with him for the seven hours that day, Johnny finds someone else or a gang that he is involved with." All the good work that we could be doing with Johnny in the evenings, a couple of hours a week, could be just thrown out because of the lack of cooperation and strategy between us, the school, and, may I say, the police as well.

Chairman: I am going to move us on, if I may. We will come back to this issue a little later on.

Q73 Mrs Dean: Earlier in the questions, there was reference made to perceived differential in the use of stop and search. Are there any other ways in which you believe that there is different treatment by the police and criminal justice system which might be to blame for the young black person's over-representation in the system?

Reverend Obunge: I think the Reverend Les Isaacs also was clear about the court systems. I asked a question quite recently at the London Criminal Justice Board asking for whether there had been a proper study of the courts as to whether various benches seem to disproportionately send certain black people in, and that study has not been done. I think that study needs to be done, so we identify whether magistrates or judges can be brought to be accountable for the way they might potentially criminalise young people. There is work to be done in all tiers of the criminal justice system; dare I say it, within the prisons; and within the Probation Service. The full structure within the criminal justice system needs to be looked at. In London, more recently, Lee Jasper, who will be giving evidence today, and I sit on that board and in every tier of decision-making within the criminal justice system we are asking questions about race. That is being looked at now a bit more effectively. I feel there is a lot of work that has not yet been done, so I cannot give total evidence on that, but I know that there is a gap of analysis.

Q74 Mrs Dean: Reverend Obunge, in your evidence you suggest that the media exaggerates young black people's involvement in crime. You also highlight a perceived under-reporting of black young people as victims. Can you give examples of specific incidents or types of incident that you feel have been under- or over-reported?

Reverend Obunge: I will give a very clear example: on a day I was meant to be speaking on the BBC on a particular news programme, I met an editor of a well-known tabloid. There was a shooting that happened in the black community and he basically said to me - off the record, not on air - that amongst the media they do not pick up on the issues of the black community shooting themselves because it just goes on, and so there is no interest any more amongst the media. It was blatant. He was not apologetic; it was just a statement of fact. There is no need to name and shame but when that statement was made it was a clear indication of the thinking of the tabloids. More recently, just a few days ago, I made a call to another tabloid newspaper on a particular issue and I made reference to certain black issues, and they said, "Look, our readers are not interested in this. Because our readers are not interested, therefore we have no need to pick it up." Essentially, they were saying: "Our readers are mostly white folks and the black itinerary does not fit in here."

Q75 Mrs Dean: Are there incidents of over-reporting that you could highlight, where the perpetrator, if you like, of the crime has been a black person?

Reverend Obunge: My experience and the perception - and sometimes perception is more real than reality - is that there is that image: when it is of having something negative going on in the black community, that is very highly reported. One of the people working in my organisation is Winston Silcott. I employed him when he came out of prison. I had folks from the tabloid sneaking to my offices. We had all sorts of negative reporting around him and another black fellow that we had working in our organisation. Winston, by the way, still works with us. But I felt that the media would negatively portray a black man but not positively portray a black person. That is really the angle that I was coming at.

Q76 Mrs Dean: Reverend Isaacs, do you want to add to that?

Reverend Isaacs: Yes, I think there is, on the ground, a mistrust of the media in terms of how it portrays us but there is also still a mistrust of the police. These young men go on to commit crime because they feel that if they go through the route of the police they will not get justice. You have a culture of young people saying, "I will deal with it myself." So there is a young man being shot, the police go in to interview him on his bed and he says nothing: "Nothing to say." What he is really saying is, "We will deal with it ourselves." I think there needs to be greater emphasis on the police to work with the black community, in terms of the church and other groups - who are doing some fantastic work - and say, "How do we break this vicious cycle?" Where there is confidence, there is trust, and we could stop people committing these revenge killings over very trivial things. I highlight a case last weekend. A mother said to me, "My son was beaten up - him and five other guys - and taken to hospital. Please could you come and see him because someone has offered him a piece" - and a piece is a gun. "They want revenge. They have no confidence to go to the police. They feel that they can't because they may become a victim and subject to inquiry rather than the other people who committed this crime against them." It is those kinds of things that I think we need to look at seriously and to ask those questions of the police. Are we all doing enough to ensure that this cycle is broken? Finally, it has been said on numerous occasions that, whilst our Government is fighting the war in Baghdad and Afghanistan, there is a small war taking place within the black community which nobody seems to give a damn about. There is that feeling on the ground within the community.

Q77 Gwyn Prosser: Reverend Obunge, you have listed nine or ten causes of this over-representation in your written evidence. I would like to look at two - and you have touched on them already this morning. To what extent would you say this over-representation might be due to the issues of deprivation and poverty as compared to perhaps others who say young black people might be taking an active choice in their lifestyle. There might be a connection between the two, and there probably is, but if you were saying which weighs the heaviest in causing this what would be your answer?

Reverend Obunge: A young black person living in Hadley Wood is not likely to be involved with some of the issues that you might find for a young black person living in some areas of Brixton or Tottenham. That, in itself, should clarify some of the issues. If we look at the type of person, if we go into our prisons - I do go into the prisons - and you look at the representation of the black people there and you look at their parental background and their geographical background, there are certain things that are quite obvious: where they live; certain experiences they have had. You will find out that, in some cases, once their brother has been involved in the criminal justice system it is more likely these are the ones that will be involved, because it exists within their family structures. I believe that there is a major issue around communities that do not feel the regeneration impacting on their local families. I am one who believes that the Government does need to take a bit of, should we call it, affirmative action around those areas, or positive action, targeted at such communities. In my borough that is what I am also suggesting, that we target those communities, we target those communities where there is deprivation. In my evidence, I stated, when sitting on the Crime and Disorder Reduction Board for my borough, hearing an analyst walk into the room and say, "If we dealt with the black young people" - and I was the only black man in that room at that time - "we will solve over 50% of our crime problems in this borough." Essentially, when you think about that and an analyst makes that blunt statement, need I say any more?

Q78 Gwyn Prosser: Indeed. You also say there is a perception or even a reality that young black people come to school-leaving age believing there are no jobs out there and that the job market has completely failed them. To what extent is that the reality? Is there a danger of that perception becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Reverend Isaacs: I was out one night in Southwark. Accompanying me was Fiona MacTaggart, who had decided to come out to see what we were doing. She was going to come out for about an hour. It was after ten, so she was scheduled to leave us after 11. She was there until after 12.30. We met a group of boys, something like 15-20 of them, and one guy with his hoody and everything. We got talking to that young boy and it turned out he had done his GCSEs, he has A-levels, and when we spoke to him - and we spoke to him for over an hour - he was frustrated, he felt that there was nowhere for him to go. A bright, intelligent boy, but there he was, at 12.30 of a morning, on the street with a group of boys who were going nowhere. That is the cycle that we have to break, in terms of saying: "If you are bright and you have achieved something, there is somewhere for you to go and there is something for you to achieve." Just last night alone I was speaking to a councillor who rang me up because of one of her boys. She said, "I've spent just a few months with this boy and what we did within that few months was to teach him to spell his name. He has all the ability and potential but there is no one to spend time with him." If we could overcome that, we could see a major reduction in criminal activities amongst these young boys.

Reverend Obunge: I really believe that there are some things that can be done here, if targets were set for the private sector and for the public and voluntary sectors in relation to providing employment opportunities and effective training to enable black people into the employment system. The reality is that there is some work being done but I do not believe it is enough. It is not about perception; it is the reality. I have been to many educational conferences and there are very few black people who are in senior management. The Commission for Racial Equality recently did a study and it was indicative to the fact that a black person on the same management tier as a white person needs to work about five to six times harder than that white counterpart. You do not find even promotions, and if you do not find even promotions within that then those black young people are not going to feel there is a future for them.

Q79 Gwyn Prosser: Coming back to the bright young man with the qualifications, would you tell us a bit more about that. Had he tested the market? Had he made applications for jobs and been rejected? Or had he built up this perception in his mind: "There's nothing out there because my brother didn't get a job"?

Reverend Isaacs: He said he has made numerous applications to companies. He said: "Not even a reply I've received." He was absolutely frustrated by that. I think it is that frustration. Many of them are saying, "What's the use?" For instance a father rang me up and I went to his record shop to meet with his son. He said, "I'm very concerned." After speaking to the son for three-quarters of an hour, I said, "What are you good at?" He said, "I like painting." I said, "Okay, if I get you a job, how would that work?" There goes the challenge, because if you are going to do an apprenticeship in painting or plumbing and you cannot read, you are unable to go to college and to fulfil the basic study that you need in terms of theory. I was speaking to a contract company. They said, "We will do supplementary education for them." Again it is to find the people who will help these young boys to go on a crash course within their context. They do not feel comfortable going to a big college. Let us help them to learn to spell their name, the phonics. Let us help them with the basics and then help them to go on to college. Then they will want to go one day a week. We saw that companies were taking on these lads, who were fantastic painters, but when it came to the college work, one day a week, they struggled and so their drop-out rate was very high. If they drop out and they are not doing that, they will find themselves doing something else. There are those things that we have to look at seriously, so that we can constantly encourage these young boys, young men to go to the next stage.

Gwyn Prosser: Thank you.

Q80 Mr Streeter: In the same spirit in which you challenged us earlier, may I challenge you on this issue of black role models out there in society. Has that not changed in recent years? Is the BBC not now being fantastic - and I totally support it - in presenting black faces on the media. In presenting all kinds of programmes for young people, news and whatever, there are lots of black commentators. In Football Focus on Saturday three or four people on the panel were black. Jeremy Guscott, is a regular on the rugby - which is a much superior sport, as well all know! There are lots of black role models on the media. I know that sport is not the only thing, I am just using that as an example. In the news being read, all kinds of programmes. In lots of TV adverts, black faces - the Halifax, all kinds of products. Are you not out of date? Is there not a bit of a victim culture in what you are saying? It has already changed, has it not?

Reverend Obunge: I attended the meeting of the Windsor Leadership Trust and there were about 400 people there. The Chair of Vodafone was speaking to senior corporate individuals. Of the 400 senior corporate individuals there - and I wondered how I made it there, anyhow - there were four to five black people. Where this country gets changed is not what you have just spoken about. Where it gets changed is where the money is; is where a lot of the corporate decisions are being made. It is not a victim sense. I understand what you just said, but I am looking at corporate Britain, I am looking at here, I am looking at the wider context, and I am trying to say we are under-represented. If there was a black person sitting there, he would say, "Hold on a second, it has nothing to do with feeling that we are just victims; it has to do with we need to do a lot more to reassure our community, to reassure black people in Great Britain that we are doing something for the black community" - and for other communities, dare I say. I would put it to you this way: there is an unfortunate reality that exists in our black community. If that perception exists, that perception is going to throw attitude. If it is a wrong perception, then the Government needs to change that perception by proving that they are wrong. At the moment it is not being able to prove it.

Mr Streeter: Thank you. My real question is this.

Chairman: The Committee is being very ill-disciplined.

Q81 Mr Streeter: I am so sorry - we are prorogation happy! On fatherlessness in the black community, we have had some alarming statistics in our earlier evidence. I have a simple question to both of you: Why is it more prevalent in the black community? It is a problem in every community and all the commentators are now agreeing it is an issue for every child who grows up without an engaged father, whichever community, whichever country. Why is it more prevalent in the black community in this country?

Reverend Obunge: I do not think you can ignore the history. I did politics and international law for my first degree, before I became a minister. I do not think you can ignore what the slave trade did to the black community. I do not think you can ignore the fact that you took a black man from Nigeria and a black man from Ghana and you placed them on a plantation farm, and you took the wife of the Nigerian and placed her with the Ghanaian woman, and, before they could learn each other's language, you took that woman away and placed another person there, and eventually you destroyed the fibre of the black community in the historical context. We need to understand that this was done historically and there is an impact of what happened several hundred years ago that still has a rippling effect today. Let us understand that. Let us not just push that away. It is so easy to pretend that that does not exist today but the reality is that part of your history makes you who you are. It is not to say that we have not fought it in our values within the black community, that we are not challenging ourselves and that we do not have holistic families still, but I think you also have to look at the historical context. That is a big one. Again, how do you go back to that past? I think it is about acknowledging that past and acknowledging the dysfunction that was placed within black communities by the white community. It was not done by the black people. We did not do it ourselves. It was inflicted upon us. I do not hear enough about that on one tier. Then we have the present day reality. Our present day reality is that there is a dysfunction that exists and we are fighting to deal with that dysfunction. I do not want to blame the Government on that, because I think it is wrong to assume that the Government raises a child or raises a family, but the Government can support black fathers, can support black men to be fathers in the community, provide them with job opportunities, have affirmative action, provide opportunities for the men in our community, for the families in our community, so that a woman does not have to work three jobs and a man does not have to work so many jobs that he is out of the house and eventually goes. I am saying provide opportunities.

Reverend Isaacs: I led a discussion with about 80 senior citizens, mums and dads, grandmas and grandfathers in a church in Brixton some years ago and we were talking about how did we arrive at this point in our history. Many of them were very angry with the Government in the sixties and seventies. Many of them were frustrated because they felt and they said that in the sixties and seventies in England they were undermined. Some of the discussions we are having about cultures and other communities we did not have, as the black people arriving here in the fifties and sixties. We did not have: "How do we amalgamate?" "What are their cultures?" There was a culture clash in those days, which we are still bearing the fruits of when the grandmas and grandfathers are saying "Our children don't respect us any more." I could not address someone two years older than me by their first name. In our culture, we could not do that. I still, at the age of 49, have to call my uncle "Uncle". Someone who is not my mother, I still call her "Mother", and I still call him "Father." That is my generation. They have lost that and they felt that back in the sixties and the seventies that was undermined by the Government. There is a combination of things that has contributed to the problems and challenges which we face today. I think what Reverend Obunge was saying was quite right. I think the issue of slavery, again, we have not addressed. I go to Africa a lot. When I go to Africa and meet with my counterpart and we exchange ideas, I go to a village where there are elders. One of my friends is a merchant banker and he says, "When I go back to the village, I have to prostrate before my elders, some of whom are illiterate. But, you see, I honour them because there is where I come from." There has been this tension in this culture clash, this culture confusion. Many things have happened which have caused confusion. The last thing I would like to say is this. A couple of months ago I was speaking to another West Indian woman in Brixton and a young black boy passed us - in fact he walked through us. I stopped him and I said, "Come here." I said, "You are out of order." He said, "What?" I said, "In our culture, when you see two adults speaking, you say 'Good morning' and you walk round them, not through them." He said, "I'm British." I said, "No, you're black as well." He apologised for his lack of respect and he went on his way. When I met him again, I was the first to say to him, "Good morning." I think those kinds of things we have discarded and thrown away which have been very much part of the fabric of the African and Caribbean community. If we bring those things back and understand those things, then I think over some years, 10-15 years, we can see some great reduction in terms of crime.

Chairman: Thank you.

Q82 Mrs Cryer: I wonder if both of you could comment on whether the sort of programmes to engage young black people should be either culturally specific or just mainstream, which would apply to any part of the community.

Reverend Isaacs: I think we have to have a twin-track approach. My approach would specifically be particular young black boys. We do need to develop a stronger mentoring programme. We talk about role models on TV but the biggest problem with role models on TV is that they are not at the grass roots, in the community. It is no use me appearing on TV but nobody can find me during the week. There has to be accessibility. I really believe that we need strong models of men and women who live and work and go to school within the community who are accessible to these young boys. Out of that, I think we could have some stability and normality. My work is not just in Brixton or Moss Side, but is in Wrexham, North Wales, Leeds, Leicester, Southend, and the practices we have, whether they are young black or white, are on being with people We did a survey among young people, saying, "What is your number one need? What is the number one thing you feel would help you to be happy and to be content?" Do you know what they said? "Having access to the adults - access being available for us, to listen to us." That is why we in the church are saying to the church, "For goodness sake, get off your posterior, get out there and be where people are and listen to them and have the time for them." If we can do those two things, whether we are in Brixton, Canterbury or wherever we are, we will find that it will engage young people and help them immensely.

Reverend Obunge: I think it is great to have Black History Month but I think we need to look at the National curriculum around black history itself. I have studied here in the UK and I have studied in many European countries, Sweden, Dublin, et cetera, but I have also studied in Nigeria. My education in the black community was really not here in England or in Sweden or in Dublin, but it was back in Nigeria. I have pride about being a black man. I take pride in my blackness. There was a man who got involved in armed robbery and shot a police officer in the face. He told me how he started his criminal experience. It started with his history class. As a young man, he listened to the history lessons and found out - this is his story, just what he said - there was nothing there about his culture. He suddenly was disillusioned - disillusioned about himself, disillusioned about what they had to say - and for him it had a negative impact. I am not saying that is the truth for everybody else but it impacted that particular individual. I think we need to look at the history. If Great Britain is ready to be multicultural, then it has to be multicultural in its National Curriculum.

Q83 Mrs Cryer: So it goes back to the schools.

Reverend Obunge: Yes, we have got work to do in the schools. I think that also means supporting supplementary schools and more sustainable support for supplementary schools, faith-based schools, et cetera.

Q84 Mrs Cryer: My next question is about black churches and what role they can play. Are you perhaps saying that black churches should do similar to what the mosques do and have supplementary schools to provide information on the culture?

Reverend Isaacs: They do have it. They have been running supplementary education for the last 30 years or so. They are finding a lack of support from local government/from the Government to do the job that they are doing. The vast majority of black people who are conscious about education would send their children to some sort of supplementary school, particularly if they feel that the school is not giving them enough. We are looking at: Is local government/is central Government really supporting them in doing what they are doing?

Reverend Obunge: This is one of the challenges the church has. You made reference to the mosques: Should they do like the mosques? That is one of the problems we are having within the church community. It seems as if the Government has not realised that the church has been at this for a long time, long before the mosques came in - and we have no problem, because we work with our Islamic brothers and friends - but I think the Government needs to appreciate what has already been in the community. Somebody whispered at the back: "We started this whole thing." We have been always providing this support to our communities, but it has not been acknowledged, it has not been supported. There has been short-term support for initiatives that ooze out of our community. In South London there are some initiatives that started a number of years ago and now only 5% of those initiatives within the black community exist out of 100%. All of a sudden, there is two years funding/three years funding. We do not have ongoing, long-term support, and I think the Government needs to look at supporting, for the long term, initiatives which promote reintegration, education, employment, et cetera. We do not need short-term funding, because you are in for a short season and then you are out of the door.

Mrs Cryer: Thank you.

Q85 Mr Browne: Reverend Obunge, I want to ask you about responsibility. You have criticised the Government for not providing sufficient opportunities for black people, and specifically black men, but all people, black, white, whatever, have had 11 years of completely free, state-funded education laid on a plate for them. It does not matter who your parents are, it is all put there for you. Yet Reverend Isaacs is talking about people being unable to get jobs because they cannot write their name properly. Do you not think that may be to do with the curriculum, but it may be to do with the choices those individuals make about whether they choose to attend school; whether they choose to concentrate in the classes; whether they choose to better themselves and to take the opportunities that are presented to them?

Reverend Obunge: You are very right, sir. Just in that same context is the choice when you are three or four times more likely to be excluded from school as a black person than your white counterparts; when your teachers are afraid of you because you are black; when you are more likely to be discriminated against in your schools. These are realities that these young black people have. My sister schooled here and she was told by her teacher that she would be best as a secretary or a shop assistant. When the schools do not give you the support structures to believe that you are going to be a doctor, you are going to be a lawyer, in those 11 years brainwashing can take place. If we do not have male black teachers in there, if we do not have enough black male teachers, and if we have white teachers who are sometimes undermining - and I am not saying they all do that -----

Q86 Mr Browne: I do not doubt that there are students of all ethnicities who may be insensitive to racial differences and so on and so forth, but, nonetheless, if you are sitting there and a teacher is teaching you how to write your name down, you have the choice of whether you choose to concentrate in that lesson or not. If, in a class with lots of black children, there was one black boy who was being very disruptive and I was a black parent of one of the other children, I may wish that boy to be excluded so that my son could get on with learning how to spell his name.

Reverend Obunge: A woman in my church had a son who was dyslexic. The school refused to give attention to some of the challenges of that young person until it got very serious. We have some issues around that. If you look at the challenge of mental health in the UK, we are over-represented. Even though we are only 3% of the nation, I think we represent up to 49% - is it 39% or 49%? - of those caught up in the mental health statistics, who are supported in that context. Essentially, I am trying to say that I agree with what you have said. I am not denying personal responsibility but, whilst we fight that battle to challenge our young black people, to challenge parents, to challenge the broad remit of every body in our black community, I think I would want to state clearly for the benefit of this Committee that there are some other challenges that might exist and might be worth looking into, and that is some of the discrimination that happens, even in the educational system.

Q87 Mr Browne: I have the same question about families, but I will not ask that because we have covered that. My final question is about knives and the police. I appreciate that knives are different from guns, but I suppose it could equally apply to guns. Specifically on knives, the case is made - and you have made it yourself - that some young black people, more specifically, young black men, carry knives because they lack confidence in the police and feel that they need them to defend themselves because they do not think the police can do that task adequately for them. I would be interested to hear you expand on that point. If I was a black person, I may want protection from people carrying knives in my community because they may use them on me and I may be suspicious that they were carrying knives because they wanted either to frighten me or because they wanted to use them against me. I may want the police to stop them and to take the knives off them. I might not regard it as part of their reaction against the police; I might regard it as a threat to my safety.

Reverend Obunge: I would do the same thing too. We challenge young people about that. We develop something. There is a whole lot of educational tools in our knife crime manual. One of the things we have done is a three-part comic called What's the Point? which is really about a young person who, having been bullied, decided to carry a knife in order to protect himself. These stories do not exist just in the black community; they exist in the white community too. And because this exists I expect stop and search to exist, but I do not expect it to be disproportionate for the black community, I expect it to be even-handed. Knife crime and gun crime are different. I need to say that very clearly. Even though they may have relationships, they are very, very different.

Q88 Mr Browne: If only white people carried knives, for the sake of argument, would you still think that stop and search should be proportionate, or do you think it would be more sensible for the police to target white people?

Reverend Obunge: If only white people carried knives, which is impossible, I would expect the police to target based on intelligence, not stupidity.

Q89 Chairman: That is a good point at which to end. Thank you very much indeed. May I thank you both for being with us this morning; it has been a very useful session.

Witness: Mr Lee Jasper, Director, Equalities and Policing, Greater London Authority, gave evidence.

Q90 Chairman: Good morning. Thank you very much indeed, Mr Jasper, for joining us this morning. I think you have heard most, if not all, of the previous session. Could you begin briefly by introducing yourself to the Committee and then we will go straight to the questions.

Mr Jasper: Lee Jasper; I am the Policy Director for Equalities and Policing for the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, and I also Chair the Trident Independent Advisory Group, a partnership trying to combat gun crime in the black community, and I have recently become a member of the London Criminal Justice Board.

Q91 Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. Can I ask you as a general opening question, there is statistically, at least, a striking overrepresentation of young black people in the figures for those accused of crime in London and for those who are being dealt with by youth offending teams. In terms of your role working for the Mayor, what is your response in general to those statistics and how has it influenced the work that you are doing?

Mr Jasper: It is clear to me that there is a level of racism within the system. I think all our evidence suggests that, when you take account of the level of offending and the likelihood of offending of black communities, and young, black people in particular, they are no more or less likely to offend than any other community. Therefore, the overrepresentation within the Criminal Justice System is one of emphasis, and that emphasis is on the policing and criminal justice sanctions where offenders are found guilty - and a whole host of other factors. Sitting on the London Criminal Justice Board and as Chair of the Race and Diversity Action Group for the LCJB, I make it my business to find out the statistics in very great detail for London and there is striking overrepresentation, and it cannot be explained, in my mind, by anything other than the level of institutionalised racism in the service. That is not to say that there are not black people who offend (of course there are, and they get treated accordingly), but there is such a striking overrepresentation to be a significant concern for me and a significant concern for the London Criminal Justice Board to be taking proactive action to get to the bottom of the level of disproportionality: because although we think what we know, those are based on figures that are not a full reporting set of figures from the Criminal Justice System. These are usually partial figures with not full compliance rates around monitoring and ethnicity, and I suggest that, when we get to the point when we have full monitoring, we will see even more striking levels of disproportionality revealed as a consequence of a robust ethnic monitoring system. Those are the perceptions that I have. I think it is a crisis. I think it is a crisis for the black community in London, I think it is a crisis for London's criminal justice agencies that there is such a level of disproportionality and really it requires very urgent action indeed, and I think that is the other point I would like to make. I am not impressed by the commitment that I see from not all but from some of the criminal justice agencies to tackling this issue. It is not a priority for them. I think very many of them are failing in their duty to comply with the basic requirements of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act. It is not an issue that is accorded priority. There are exceptions to that, like the National Probation Service, particularly the London Probation Service, who are doing some excellent work on that. The Crown Prosecution Service in terms of its employment practices are doing some work in relation to representation of young, black people being employed and the Metropolitan Police Service, in relation to the employment of black people as police officers, are doing some work, but there remain challenges on the service delivery end, both in terms of stop and search for the Metropolitan Police Service and the disproportionate level of charging of young, black offenders for like-on-like cases where a white offender would receive either a lesser charge, a caution or some other sentence or process at criminal justice level. So, there are mixed messages throughout the system.

Q92 Chairman: Thank you. That is very helpful. I hope we will cover most, if not all of the issues that you have highlighted for us there in the time ahead of us this morning. You have just said that young, black people are no more or less likely to offend than other young people. One of the things that does seem to be clear from the statistics is that there are differences in the pattern of crime, at least as represented by those who go into the Criminal Justice System. Young, white people, for example, are more likely to commit burglary than young, black people but young, black people who appear in London are much more likely to be accused of, or arrested for, robbery in London. I think there are eight black youths accused for every white person accused of robbery in London, and similarly with sexual offences. Are those, in your view, real differences in the pattern of offending that are being shown by the statistics in London, or is it a reflection of the institutional racism that you have just talked about?

Mr Jasper: I think it is a complex mix of both, to be honest. I think the reality is that there are some areas where young, black people are overrepresented. You have mentioned robbery and sexual offences. On the issue of robbery, is that because of the way in which profiling takes place within policing to focus police activity on where they think they will get their greatest results? On sexual offences is it the reality of maybe a propensity for young, black women, and black women in general, to report sexual offences, have a lower tolerance level, or a lack of reporting of sexual offences in the wider community? All those things need to be taken into account, but I think you are right to suggest that there are areas of overrepresentation that deserve more scrutiny and more exploration; and there are disproportionalities in white offenders being involved in racist attacks on black victims, there are disproportionalities in homicide within both communities, domestic violence, rape, violent crime, faith hate crime and others. The issue is, where you find that level of disproportionality, either as a result of offending activity or policing emphasis, how is it that is being reflected throughout the system in all other areas? I think that the sort of experience that I have, and the black community's perception very strongly, is that there is a focused effort around policing around certain crimes which produces a disproportionate effect. That is certainly a very strong perception in the black community.

Q93 Chairman: To take that point a bit further, if you look at the statistics over say the past ten years, some types of crime, like burglary, have fallen very substantially (40 or 45%) across the country as a whole. Other crimes, like street robbery, in which, at least on the statistical basis, young, black people are more likely to be involved, have actually been on a rising trend and have occasionally fallen and have gone up again, and so on. Is it necessarily unreasonable for the police to be putting greater effort into certain types of crime which do not appear to have fallen, in terms of recorded crime figures or British Crime Survey figures, compared with other types of crime we have, and is it not reasonable for them to pursue that even if, as a consequence of that, it is to be entirely disproportionate to young, black people because it is a type of crime in which young, black people seem to be more likely to be involved?

Mr Jasper: You have to balance that with those crimes not solved and the ethnicity of those who are purported to have committed those crimes to make a proper and adequate judgment. Part of the problem here is the lack of research capability within the Criminal Justice Service to answer these very important questions. I do not think it is unreasonable. I am Chair of Operation Trident. We demanded, as a black community, a proper policing response around the issue of black-on-black gun crime, because we thought (and it was the community's perception at that time) that these cases were not being treated seriously and neither was there any effort being put in, in terms of equality and professional policing and response, to solve them, and we demanded that of the police. I can accept where it is a disproportionate problem where both the community and the police have done their homework and have come to a consensus about that issue, then specific activity, I think, is appropriate. The problem is that the overwhelming level of disproportionality and overrepresentation across the system cannot be attributed to that type of activity.

Q94 Mr Winnick: Mr Jasper, you welcome the inquiry?

Mr Jasper: Yes.

Q95 Mr Winnick: Presumably on the basis of what the Mayor told us, that the Committee, he says, has chosen a most pressing and important issue to investigate. Presumably, you reject the criticism which has been made, which perhaps is not familiar to you, of some organisation (which is perhaps more white than black) that this is an inappropriate inquiry?

Mr Jasper: I think it is entirely appropriate. Both myself and the Mayor have commended the Committee for choosing this area of focus. We have, quite literally, a crisis in the black community amongst our young, black people. It very rarely gets the opportunity to be discussed. I am really appreciative that we have an opportunity here to discuss it, and those who would criticise such an emphasis have a real lack of understanding of the internal community dynamics of the black community. This is a debate which is both timely and appropriate, in my view.

Q96 Mr Winnick: The Committee would certainly welcome your remarks. The Mayor's letter draws attention to the high level of young blacks accused of supply and possession of drugs. What do you consider is driving drug use amongst young, black people in London? Is it particularly driving young, black people or would it be right to say white no less than black?

Mr Jasper: I do not think it is a particular issue for the black community. I think when you look at the various patterns of drug usage and drugs testing for offenders who are brought to justice, you see that there is both level evidence of drug use across deprived communities, whatever their ethnicity. I think that invariably we do have the unfortunate collocation of high levels of black youth unemployment situated in precisely the same places where there are multi-million pound drug markets on the streets of London. That drives that activity to a certain extent, where we have a crisis such as I spoke about earlier. We have young people who are completely cut adrift from society, alienated from its values, who see life very much through the prism of their own experience of being completely a double-standard, who do not see their family, friends, their elder brothers, aunts and cousins, nieces and nephews getting the opportunity that their hard work and educational endeavour ought to deserve and, therefore, make a conscious choice to opt out. In those circumstances a multi-million pound drug industry can be a powerful seducer of young people into that sort of drug activity across the board.

Q97 Mr Winnick: There is a perception, I think, arising from what you said - I do not know whether you would agree with this, but presumably not - that the suppliers of drugs and those who make a very nice profit from such despicable activities are more, perhaps, black than white. Would you say that is not the position?

Mr Jasper: I would say categorically it is not the position. I think any routine examination of wholesale importation of cocaine into this country will invariably show you that the major importers are not Afro-Caribbean, not black British, for the purposes of the definition of this inquiry, but are invariably of other nationalities or, indeed, white Europeans. They are the major importers of class A drugs into communities and they are the major importers and converters of armoury and guns into the black community. That is certainly borne out by the activities of the Operation Trident team, who have made arrests around the periphery of London of very many of white criminals who have been engaged in the supply and conversion of regular and converted weapons into the black community. I think that where you begin to unpack the criminality in terms of its ethnicity, if that is what we are seeking to do, then you get an unfocused balance of policing activity on the street end dealing without a consequent focus on level two and level three activity, as it is called in the National Police Intelligence model, which is about the importation and wholesale distribution of crack cocaine and class A drugs in London.

Q98 Mr Winnick: If you take an area like Brixton, where there is a relatively large black population, would it be right to say that the activity of drug dealing, and the rest of it, is more common than in other parts of London?

Mr Jasper: I would not know whether that is the case in terms of its level of activity. There is certainly, to a degree, a high level of activity in Brixton and there is certainly a high level of activity in other black community areas, but I also know of white areas where there are similar levels of activity but less focus in terms of its policing, and so on. There are areas throughout the country, for instance, in Liverpool, in Newcastle, in Sunderland, where we would know there are very great problems of consumption of heroin.

Q99 Mr Winnick: And black communities much less?

Mr Jasper: And black communities much less. I think it is a differing picture right round the country. Nevertheless, we do have a particular problem in black communities.

Q100 Mr Winnick: You referred previously, Mr Jasper, to a problem which, of course, is of tremendous concern to all of us, not least the black community, namely gun violence. Again, do you believe gun violence is affecting the black community more and also, of course, the fact that so many are victims, what is known as black-on-black, as if that was some consolation to the black victims of gun crime?

Mr Jasper: I think so. I am going to say it very starkly, if you will allow me to. If this was white, young people shooting other white, young people in the levels that we have seen sustained for the black community over the last four or five years, it is certainly my belief, as a campaigner around these issues, that much more would have been done about it. I think we have a specific crisis within our own community around levels of violence. Reverend Isaacs and Reverend Obunge spoke earlier about the collateral impact, not just of gun crime, but if you look at the rate of homicide, death by gun, by knife (and other means) in the black community, especially of young black men, it is toweringly disproportionate to any other community in the United Kingdom, and yet we struggle to get appropriate funding to tackle some of the situational factors of education and unemployment failure. We struggle to get appropriate interventions from black voluntary organisations for prevention and deterrent of other young people from joining the ranks of the gangs engaged in this activity, and we struggle to get government focus around the legislation required in relation to guns and their availability, particularly replica weapons that are capable of being converted, and although we have campaigned now for a number of years, saying that the recovered assets of drug dealers within Brixton ought to be returned to the community of Brixton to fund deterrents and prevention and anti-crime and community safety initiatives, we are making slow progress in that regard.

Q101 Mr Winnick: You are saying, in effect - you will correct me if my interpretation is wrong - that as long as it is black-on-black there is far less concern amongst the police and the prosecution authorities. Is that what you are saying?

Mr Jasper: I am saying certainly nationally that is the case. I am happy to say, in the London area, the Metropolitan Police Service, because of the engagement with Operation Trident, has made a real, sterling effort around investigating and prosecuting those that are engaged in black-on-black gun crime. Unfortunately, it has had the effect over the last ten years of taking out a whole layer of gang leaders in their mid to late twenties who are now replaced by gang leaders in their 16, 17 and 18 year-old categories, as the leaders of those activities have been jailed. So, we get to the point where, rather than standing on the river bank watching bodies float by, we now want to go upstream and see who is throwing them in in the first place. That means we have got to get to grips with the situational factors that are producing young people who are vulnerable and can be seduced into this activity.

Q102 Mr Winnick: Yardies: what would you say is the effect of these criminals, sometimes illegally in Britain, on certain black areas?

Mr Jasper: It magnifies, to a very great extent, the feelings of fear, intimidation. The fear of crime amongst young, black people is huge. We did some research at City Hall asking young, black and ethnic minority people about their fear of crime and it was absolutely staggering. I do not have the figures to mind, but we can send them to you as a Committee. It was absolutely staggering, and it was a snapshot poll. When we did further studies through the Metropolitan Police Service, when we looked at the young people's perceptions of crime, what actually drives their activity into gangs, being associated with gangs or carrying weapons is the fear, for the majority, of being attacked and not having adequate confidence in policing and the Criminal Justice System.

Q103 Mr Winnick: Being attacked by other blacks?

Mr Jasper: Being attacked by predominantly other black youth. That is the other gross misperception in the debate about black youth and criminality. We focus almost in entirety on young, black men as perpetrators of crime, but actually they are the majority victims of crime by those young, black people, and the attention given to the black victims of crime is very rare, very fleeting and almost absent from our discourses within the Criminal Justice System?

Q104 Mr Winnick: I asked about Yardies.

Mr Jasper: I am sorry, Yardies.

Q105 Mr Winnick: Do you think that is exaggerated by the media, or is there a real danger of these criminals, apparently mainly from Jamaica, often here illegally, trafficking in their trade?

Mr Jasper: I am a Yardie! It is a term that is a media invention. The reality is that 80% of black-on-black crime in London is committed by black British born youth. This is a wholly homemade phenomenon and we need to be clear about the statistics and who we are arresting. They make up 20%, at the most, of those engaged in this crime, and, of course, in London, just to give you the full figures, 70% of all those murdered by gun crime are from the black community, and they make up 89% of all those suspected of committing those murders.

Q106 Mr Winnick: How far do you agree, Mr Jasper, that there is discrimination by the police in the Criminal Justice System in the overrepresentation of black people in the crime statistics? Are you saying, in effect, that the statistics, which are pretty bleak as far as the black community is concerned, are a reflection of institutional racism, and what would you say to those who say that is only an excuse, that black people in greater numbers percentage wise do commit these crimes and why should they not be reported and prosecuted accordingly?

Mr Jasper: I think it is a complex picture, but, nevertheless, I think, as I said earlier, institutionalised racism is a definite factor in the overrepresentation. I also think policing focus is a definite factor. If you are routinely stopped, all the stops and searches in London, 60% of which are from African, Caribbean and Asian communities, it is no surprise to see those communities beginning to be overly represented given their statistical size in London in the Criminal Justice System. We see differential cautioning rates for like-for-like crimes for first offenders in the London areas, and then we begin to see a ratcheting up of sentences and tariffs and remand and bail decisions right throughout the system. I think I am right in saying that of all refusals of bail and remand decisions in London for all people, 80% of those remand and refusal of bail decisions in London are black youth. You can tell me about offending all you like, that figure cannot be attributed in any real way to an objective assessment of their activity, and when you begin to assess them, sentencing like-for-like, and so on, throughout the Criminal Justice System, you begin to see an amplification of the effect of race as it impacts upon young, black people.

Chairman: Thank you very much.

Q107 Gwyn Prosser: Mr Jasper, in your last answer you have talked about the disproportionate number of stop and searches on black people in London, and in your written evidence you talk about the experience in places like Richmond and Kingston where there is a relatively low black population but still a high proportion of stop and searches. To what extent are you saying this morning that this is due to prejudicial behaviour by the police and to what extent could it be reflecting the age profile of young, black people and the fact (I think it is a fact) that there tend to be more young, black people out and about on the streets?

Mr Jasper: I have heard this said quite a number of times. There are quite a number of Japanese and Chinese tourists about on the streets. I do not see those being reflected in disproportional rates of stop and search in the centre of Westminster. In relation to Richmond and Kingston, there is a massive increase in the probability of being stopped and searched if you are black in these areas, and it is so huge, some 14 to 15 times more likely, that it is, I think, only to be explained by a degree of racial profiling that is leading officers to target black youths in those areas. It is simply hugely disproportionate, but what we have found is that in the areas that are most diverse there is least disproportionality. So, your chances of being stopped and searched in Brixton are actually two to one, but if you move up to Dulwich they increase to six to one within the same borough. The conclusion I draw from that is that officers who are working in hugely diverse areas are much more sophisticated in the use of their stop and search powers than those that are in predominantly white areas where a black face may be something they rarely see and where prejudices may still be driving police activity in relation to stop and search.

Q108 Gwyn Prosser: You have also talked to us about the disproportionality of sentencing and you have just mentioned bail. Some commentators say that the punishment and the sentences and the bail status reflect the gravity of the crime. How would you respond to that?

Mr Jasper: The black community sees this as overwhelmingly evidence of racism within the system. If that is not the case, it is for the Criminal Justice Service, through ethnic monitoring, through its adherence to the provisions of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act, to demonstrate there is no bias in the system. It currently cannot do that because it does not have the kind of sophisticated or nuanced monitoring systems in place to be able to demonstrate that, and the perception of the community (i.e. do the African and Caribbean black rich communities have confidence in the Criminal Justice System) is affected by their perception. If you want my opinion, my opinion is that the system is infected with too high a level of institutionalised racism, that we have seen a massive growth in the number of young, black people being committed to penal institutions over the last ten to 15 years and that the level of incarceration is quite simply unsustainable for the black community going forward. That requires from government immediate intervention, and immediate intervention knowing and understanding that this is a huge priority for our inner city areas.

Q109 Gwyn Prosser: In terms of the stop and search issue and in terms of the sentencing and bail issues, is what you call "institutional racism" getting better, getting worse or has it just been sustainable over the last ten years?

Mr Jasper: Stop and search rates have increased after the recommendations of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, the McPherson Report. I think in London they have increased over the last four years by 115% for the Afro-Caribbean community and 113% for the Asian community. So, we have seen increased activity of stop and search without any consequent increase in the level of arrests made as a consequence of that stop and search activity. Can I tell you why this is particularly dangerous in my view? In the mid seventies and early eighties, as a social justice campaigner, I used to get phone calls from mothers of teenagers, who would say, "Little Johnny has been arrested for robbery and he has gone to court and he has been refused bail and he is in the middle of his A-levels", or in the middle of his GCSEs, or whatever. That phenomenon dissipated throughout the mid eighties and the early 1990s, but has now returned. We are getting increasing reports from within our own community of bail and remand decisions for youngsters who have never been in trouble before in their lives whose lives are being made hell because of those bail and remand decisions and consequently, when they get to court, are acquitted in big numbers, disproportionately so than their white counterparts, and so we have got a level of alienation building up within a community that sees its young people arrested, refused bail or put on remand, go to court, get acquitted and come out the other side completely enraged by the process, and this is why, I think, this whole area is not sustainable. We have to ensure some equitability in justice. It is a primary requisite of being a citizen, and as black citizens we expect no less from our judicial system.

Q110 Mrs Dean: Following on from the last question, have you got the figures for the white community of how much the percentage has increased with stop and search?

Mr Jasper: I think I do have those figures actually. I think it has gone down. I will give you the specific figures in writing. Overall the level of stop and search has reduced. Unfortunately, for the black community it has increased. I draw the inference from that that it has reduced for the white community.

Q111 Mrs Dean: Looking at perceptions, how far do you think the public's perception of young people's involvement in crime corresponds with reality and what do you think drives that public perception?

Mr Jasper: I think the public perception is of a black community that is predisposed to criminality. I think that is the broad public perception. Whatever people may say, I think that when you look at the internet, when you look at the newspapers, when you look at the letters columns, when you listen to the radio shows, invariably the comment is, "Well, they are engaged in criminal activity, so they are facing the full force of the law, so what do you expect. Do you want us to give them special treatment even though they are engaged in criminal activity?" and that is precisely what I am not saying here today. What I am saying is that there is almost a level of demonisation of young, black boys in the British media to such an extent that it affects popular perception and understanding of the black community so that we are miscategorised, we are stereotyped as being overwhelmingly engaged in criminal activity of a range of sorts.

Q112 Mrs Dean: To the extent that some black people are more likely to commit certain crimes, how far do you believe that is due to disproportionate exposure to the general risk factors, such as poor housing and poverty?

Mr Jasper: Obviously, those factors have a huge impact on the black community. When we talk about employment in the black community it needs to be remembered by this Committee that if you took a 25-year look back at the top wards where black people live in the United Kingdom and assessed the levels of youth unemployment and adult unemployment in those areas, you would see a relentless rise in the level of unemployment in both areas in those wards. If all you have ever known as a family is unemployment amongst your father, unemployment amongst your elder brothers, unemployment amongst your family at large, then I say that builds a culture of cynicism, despair, detachment and alienation. We have simply failed to deal with either the collapse of educational standards within the black community through schools, or the extraordinarily high levels of black youth unemployment in very many areas that leaves those young people vulnerable to be seduced into criminality or are predisposed by virtue of their educational failures, family structures, and so on. So, I do think they are more vulnerable as a community, we are more vulnerable as a community, as a consequence of our social and economic condition.

Q113 Mrs Dean: What do you say to claims that elements of what might be referred to as to black culture, and I was thinking in particular about black music and---

Mr Jasper: I am always interested to hear black culture reduced to music.

Q114 Mrs Dean: ---role models, may be encouraging young people to get involved in crime?

Mr Jasper: I think if you look at white youth, they go through their musical phenomena as teenagers. I am sure many people round this Committee, looking like you do today, were not recognisable during your 16, 17 and 18 years, listening to music that your parents disapproved of and generally doing all the things that teenagers do, and it is a period in one's life. I think you grow through it and you go on to establish your careers in education, in politics or in the private sector. I think for young, black people in today's community the overwhelming level of educational failure, the lack of employment opportunities and the absolute deluge of imagery that we get from MTV and others promoting a "get rich quick and die" lifestyle does have its effects. I think they would be empowered to endure those effects, much like any other teenager phenomenon, if they had hope on the horizon, but when they are lying in the gutter, sometimes the kerb can be their skyline, and I see the effects of, not black culture but African, American hip-hop culture, which is a minute part of black culture, having a reinforcing effect of negative behaviour within young, black people. It turns people who would not otherwise be role models into role models and sometimes that can be to our detriment. But the record companies themselves have to take some responsibility, because if somebody starts to get up and sing a hip-hop version of "Somewhere over the Rainbow", it will not get played, but if I go in there bare-chested - not that I would at my age - with rippling muscles, with a fake gun in my holster, saying, "I am going to shoot the next ... that walks into my direction", the chances are I will be acclaimed the next big thing; and so we have to take that into account. It is such a small aspect of what we are dealing with but, I believe, with educational achievement and employment, it would be a passing teenager interest as with any other community.

Q115 Mr Streeter: I am going to ask you about educational achievement in a second, but testing your rather disturbing comments about police profiling and racial profiling and over-focus, and so on, have you done any research about when you have a senior black officer in charge of a duty, or an exercise, or a project? Does that alter the figures on stop and search and the outcomes from the bottom, so to speak? Have you done any research as to whether, if you have a black magistrate considering bail issues, it alters outcomes? If not, would that research be worth doing?

Mr Jasper: I think all research is worth doing on this issue because, frankly, there is such a dearth of objective evidence to give us some purchase on the reality. Black officers are to be welcomed. The Met has increased its black officers by 50% in the last few years, and we are getting near a tipping point now, which is 10%, which is to be welcomed. There is no research to suggest whether a senior black officer has an effect on stop and search. What I can say is that stop and search levels are increasing and black officers are increasing, and that may or may not suggest that it makes little difference in that regard, but representation of black people within the Police Service and the Criminal Justice System is absolutely critical. This Committee does not represent London. It does not represent the community out there. It is a stark reminder for me that of the very many senior strategic boards on which I sit I am the only black face around the table on a day-to-day basis in a city like London of which 40% of its population is black or ethnic minority - very few Muslims, very few Asian people of any other colour, very few African, very few Afro-Caribbeans. So, representation is a critical issue for us and something that this Government, I think, needs to forcibly address.

Q116 Mr Streeter: You know that all political parties are excited about this and we are all trying to get more.

Mr Jasper: Are they?

Q117 Mr Streeter: Absolutely.

Mr Jasper: Excited in what way?

Q118 Mr Streeter: We are all doing our darnedest to attract more people from the black and ethnic communities.

Mr Jasper: I do not believe that is the case at all.

Q119 Mr Streeter: You need to talk to some of the people behind you, because they know some of the things that are going on. In all seriousness, you do need to pick up on that because there is some big stuff going on.

Mr Jasper: I do not believe that there is, sir. That is what I am saying to you. There is some fine talk in high places, there is very little in relation to---

Chairman: We will come back to that in a minute.

Q120 Mr Streeter: What can we do about educational under achievement in the black community? Is it the same from borough to borough in London or are there high spots and low spots? What is the main problem here and what can we do to solve it?

Mr Jasper: There are high spots and low spots. There are some schools in some areas, predominantly in black populated areas, doing some fantastic work, bucking the trend and producing some excellent results, and there are some others, and far too many, almost islands of excellence surrounded by seas of mediocrity would be the analogy I would use, and that best practice from those islands of excellence is not shared, is not pressed by government as a proper educational standard, and so we have a patchy performance. What can be done to achieve it? I think a number of things. If a community does not have hope, then there is no ambition, there is no aspiration. As long as we cannot see black faces in high places, people will continue to believe that that world is not for them and that is not a career that they can aspire to and achieve, so we have got to get more black people into those positions. In particular, we need to get more black people into schools. We have schools which are predominantly black in their pupils, predominantly white in their teaching staff and exclusively white in their governing arrangements. That is not a state of affairs that I think lends to providing aspiration for young, black people. We have also got to tackle the issue of our absent fathers, and here we have to take personal responsibility. There are far too many black fathers with children for whom engagement in day-to-day parental care is a rare, if not non-existent, occurrence. That is not to say, like myself and very many other people, that there are not successful black families. There are, and we want to get that into perspective. I know hundreds, if not thousands, of black men who do take care of their families, and the impression that absent fathers are predominantly black is to be dispelled, but there is a significant minority, whose children are engaged in the kind of activities we are speaking about here today, who routinely fail to look after their young people, and we need to do more as a community to take responsibility for supporting our efforts to get almost a national reconciliation between absent black fathers and their children. The preachers will know well the value of redemption, but even to those that are lost we need as a community to be engaged in some activity that seeks to reconnect them, whatever their past history and their difficulties. The good news is that the Caribbean birth rate is declining; so the phenomenon of teenage pregnancies that we have seen within the black community (and do not forget we have seen these teenage pregnancies for the last 20 or 30 years, we are living with the legacy of teenage pregnancies since the beginning of the eighties within the black communities) means that more responsibility is being accepted by young, black men and women not to have children in anything other than the proper circumstances of joint parents. So, I am hoping we are seeing a declining phenomenon. We are still living with the legacy of it and we need to do more work to address the issues of representation in the classroom, representation in the board rooms and representation by their fathers in too many homes from which they are absent.

Mrs Cryer: Thank you, Mr Jasper, it has been fascinating. Could I just mention before I go on that none of our black MPs applied to be on this Committee. There was one Asian person who did, and then he was promoted and so he left. Since you are the second person to mention it, I thought I would bring it up. I am a member of the committee who puts people on to committees.

Q121 Mr Winnick: The Mayor of London is a white man.

Mr Jasper: Maybe a future mayor will not be, sir.

Q122 Mrs Cryer: The point and purpose of my question is to look at solutions. There is a group of people that we have not talked about much this morning, and that is the law-abiding, peaceful, majority members of the black community who must be protected and, therefore, we need to find these solutions for their sake as much as for anyone else. Is there anything that is not being done at the moment that you feel should be done in order to protect those majority, black, innocent people?

Mr Jasper: If you have crime and disorder partnerships---. We are forever saying to crime and disorder partnerships in London: "Have you done a race audit of the impact of crime on your local black communities?" Some have, some have not. "Have you done the prioritised issue of gun crime for local black communities?" What do we get told? "The PSAs are about how many bicycle thefts we suffer, so what gets measured gets done. Black deaths are not measured in that way, there is not a national target for reduction, and therefore they are not a priority for this partnership", and what we continually see at local, borough level is a failure to identify the impact of crime on black communities. If they did so, they would find in areas where you have got strong black communities a disproportionate level of crime victimisation taking place, but that fact is then not reflected in the allocation of resources designed to bring crime reduction measures and community safety in those areas. It is the failure of those partnerships to prioritise their work within the context of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act that is leading to an acute failure to recognise the absolutely overwhelming number of black people in this country who are victims of crime and who need crime reduction initiatives, who need community safety measures, who need confidence in a criminal justice system that is dealing with the offender. I say to this, look at the level of black people incarcerated, young, black people in London in particular, and then look at the consequent level of black community or voluntary sector organisations or faith groups that are given resources to deter, prevent or rehabilitate those offenders. It is miniscule. It is nowhere near reflecting the size of the constituency that we are dealing with. So, we are overwhelmingly the victims of crime, we overwhelmingly suffer disproportionate emphasis in policing and we are underwhelmed by the available resource priority attached by crime and disorder partnerships or, indeed, government itself in relation to tackling crime in black communities. So, where could more be done? We could do more by bringing on a whole range of organisations, faith groups and voluntary organisations, to intercede into the criminal justice process as a last chance saloon for those offenders who are going to jail. We need much more in terms of youth clubs and youth facilities. I am a great believer that the biggest mistake this government and previous governments have made is failing to ensure that statutory provision for youth services remains statutory, because we have been dealing with the effects of anti-social behaviour and serious other criminality of young people on an unprecedented scale ever since all those youth clubs have disappeared. They have had lack of access to cultural services, lack of access to youth services, multi-million pound drug markets situated in the same places as high unemployment and poverty, overwhelming focus on police activity because of the perceived level of criminality and not enough representation in the Criminal Justice System or the allocation of resources from the Government to enable and empower the vast majority of our communities, who are law-abiding, to do what their citizenship compels them to do, which is to try and make a difference, but they are asked, if you like, to do so with both hands tied behind their back because of the failure of statutory services to recognise how overwhelmingly we are represented in the victims of crime figures.

Q123 Chairman: Mr Jasper, we will return to the exchange you had with Mr Streeter in a slightly different way. You say and the Mayor says in his evidence that he wants us to make recommendations to increase the number of black workers within the Criminal Justice System. What is it that you think should be done that would increase the number of black people in the Criminal Justice System which you say is not being done at the moment? Outside of the Committee we can have a look at what the evidence says about that?

Mr Jasper: I think there is some great work going on. I chair Operation Black Vote, with my other hat on. There is great work being done by the Department for Constitutional Affairs about recruiting more black magistrates and when we have our black magistrate shadowing scheme, what we find is overwhelming numbers of applicants. We usually have about 30 places. We regularly have on a yearly basis over 600 applicants for every one of those places - this is evidence of the overwhelming desire of people to become involved - and, of those people we put on those courses, 80% then go on to be magistrates. We can feed them through if there is a capacity there for the DCA and the magistracy to accept them. More of that needs to be done right across the board, but solving the issue of the representation of black people within the Criminal Justice System is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for attacking black youth criminality.

Q124 Chairman: I want you to look specifically at that issue. You said in your evidence that you want us to make recommendations, you urge us to make recommendations, to increase the number of black workers within the Criminal Justice System.

Mr Jasper: I think you need a period of positive action. I think you need to say, and the agencies need to say, in order to address the areas of disproportionate representation for the next five years we are going to ask the Secretary of State, or the Home Secretary, or the Attorney General that we can engage in positive action, such as they do in Northern Ireland to tackle the underrepresentation of Catholics in the police services and others, so that we can focus on recruitment exclusively in these communities so that we can get that balance right.

Q125 Mr Winnick: You highlight in the Mayor's evidence and also today, Mr Jasper, the difficulties that many black people face of poverty, unemployment, and you also mention (and you have done so in your oral evidence earlier on) disruptive family life, to which you put a good deal of emphasis. How far do you believe that many of these problems need to be resolved within the black community and how far is it a matter for government?

Mr Jasper: I think in relation to family life it is almost entirely a matter for the black community itself. I do not think any amount of lecturing by government or hectoring is going to make a difference. I think there are some things government can do in terms of the extent of income poverty amongst black families, which is a very real and challenging phenomenon: how do we, through our taxes, incentivise people to be looking after families, to be looking after their children, to be engaged in that sort of activity? I think that the particular crisis we face is an historical reality of slavery. We are not talking about the black community generally, we are not talking about African families from the Continent suffering single parent families, we are not talking about African from any other part of Europe. Essentially what we are talking about is a phenomenon that specifically relates to those of Caribbean descent. Those of us of Caribbean descent usually cannot trace our family trees any farther back than our great grandparents because we do not have the historical family connectivity, lineage or history so to do. The children that we are talking about come to this country with a lack of self identity, a lack of familial stability, a lack of familial resources of their wider extended families to rely on in times of trouble, as is the case with exclusively all other families, and, as a consequence of that, we have got young people who are in a very deep crisis. Although government can do a lot in terms of income benefit and tax benefits that can support, there is a very real crisis of a conversation that needs to be had within the black community that says: "How do we understand and cope with 400 years of slavery followed by 200 years of colonialism that has left our family estate, in generational terms, completely bereft of any resources to support our young people today?"

Q126 Mr Winnick: You would not deny, recognising that slavery was one of the most monstrous crimes committed, that the black community needs to recognise (perhaps you agree or not) that these matters must be resolved if only for the sake of the children and generation to come?

Mr Jasper: Very much more so. My own belief is that the issue of reparation from government on the matter of slavery is a very real one and needs to be considered as we approach the bicentennial anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade, but also there is an intellectual and emotional reparation that need to take place within the black community itself, and that is an intercommunity dialogue that will need to deal with some very difficult and painful issues and uncomfortable truths, but, much like an individual (I suppose the analogy would be) that is abused at the age of four or five has kept those matters entirely to themselves and has a nervous breakdown at 40, it is no good saying to us, "Snap out of it, you are way past that now." Unfortunately the emotional damage, the historical, educational, the wealth, the creative base of our communities has been so fundamentally destroyed as to have a contemporary effect on the way in which our family life is constructed today, and we need to have a conversation within our communities to be able to tackle some of those issues.

Q127 Mr Winnick: Do you see any comparison say between the systematic mass murder, the extermination of millions of Jews and the effect it has had on individual Jews in future years' generations and what has happen to blacks, or no such comparison?

Mr Jasper: I see a comparator most definitely. Slavery is a crime unprecedented in human history in terms of its large scale effects, and so on, and we are still living with the contemporary effects. I say to any person round this table who doubts me, let me for a moment wave a magic wand and take away from you the last 400 years of your family history. Let me simply wipe it away, your cultural education, your economic resources, your faith, your literature. Let me take that away. Let me ask you to recreate yourself at the end of the nineteenth century as a free individual and see to what extent you would prosper. I would say you would have the same difficulties that we have now. That is the monumental effect that slavery has had, a very deep and abiding effect.

Q128 Margaret Moran: I want to ask you about research, but before I do that can I just perhaps challenge something you have just said. In my area, in Luton, we are finding a lot of what they call black-on-black crime - black Afro-Caribbean versus Asian. Within the Muslim community there is an increase in stop and search, there is an increase in drug crime (drugs for £30 from one of the local gyms), there is an increase in drug culture. Does that not undermine the argument that you have just made that this is predominantly a Caribbean problem and is this the future?

Mr Jasper: I could give you the same length of responses to the growing alienation of the Muslim community. The focus of your activities is at the Caribbean youth. That is why I have focused in that way. The growing levels of unemployment and educational failure amongst Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims in this country indicates that they have an Afro-Caribbean type future ahead of them if government does not intercede to prevent the growing levels of alienation and descent into criminality that we are now witnessing in the Muslim community.

Chairman: We are going to have to draw to a close now. Thank you very much indeed.