Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-87)
MR TED
CANTLE AND
MR NICK
JOHNSON
27 FEBRUARY 2008
Q80 Mr Betts: On the issue of community
cohesion, many migrants, and the most recent migrants are probably
the same, tend to move into relatively poor neighbourhoods, but,
despite that, there are still significant differences between
the income levels of the new migrants, their employment levels,
their skill levels, their educational achievement. With all those
differences, can you really get community cohesion?
Mr Cantle: I do not think you
can get community cohesion unless you tackle the basic inequalities
at the same time. At the moment there are a number of groups,
particularly Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, in the labour market,
particularly women, who are very, very disadvantaged compared
with other groups. That is also true, of course, in respect of
some of the different black groups and white working-class groups
in some areas as well. I do not think it is possible to have cohesion
where you have got such a stark set of differences between people
competing in the same area. Part of cohesion and part of the original
definition of cohesion was to tackle inequalities at the same
time, and it has to be done in order to bridge some of those gaps.
I do not see them as being two different things. Of course, if
you do tackle some of the inequalities, then the chances are that
people are going to end up in the same workplace and are going
to interact with each other. They are going to end up at universities
and in schools in order to interact. The process of measuring
inequalities means that you are also maximising the opportunities
for people to relate to each other as well on an equal footing.
Q81 Mr Betts: Is there not one potential
pitfall in this, and certainly I came across it in my own constituency
where we have a number of Slovakian migrants who have moved in
who actually—I am generalising here—unlike most of
the Poles, are probably here as individuals to send money back
and probably will go back themselves at some point. Slovakians
arrive with these extended families because Roma face persecution
in Slovakia, that is one of the reasons they come. They clearly
are getting some pretty poor housing, often overcrowded. There
is a particular need to address that issue, particularly the deprivation
and housing amongst that community. You create a scheme, therefore,
to address it and you forget there are actually still quite a
few white indigenous families who live in equally bad housing.
That is what you have got to be careful of, that in trying to
focus on some of the obvious inequalities you forget some people
who might be left on one side.
Mr Cantle: I think that is absolutely
right, and it goes back to this whole point about single group
funding. The issue here is to focus on the need, and if the need
is in one particular community, then that should be addressed,
but I think you should go out of your way to make sure that where
(maybe not on the same scale) a need exists in other communities,
you actually try to deal with those at the same time. Otherwise
you will get accusations of unfairness and there will be competition
between communities. I think that is absolutely the case, and
single group funding in the past probably has exacerbated some
of those tensions.
Q82 Mr Betts: Coming back to what
the Government can do to help, speaking to the Head of Tinsley
Junior School in my constituency, where there are about 30 kids
from Slovakian families, she was saying, "While we have got
children who do not speak English terribly well from the Kashmiri
community, the children come and they will tend, by and large,
to stay with the school and, therefore, we can adopt a planned
approach to try and assist them with their language; but where
I have got 30 children from Slovakian families, the next month
I will have 30 children but they will not be the same children."
How can we target our funding and deal with it in such a way that
addresses that sort of population churn, which is a real issue
and says something about the very newest migrants that we have?
Mr Cantle: I was listening to
the debate earlier about funding, and one of the dimensions which
was perhaps missed out of that was the need to reflect population
churn within the funding formulas. It is not just about numbers,
it is about population churn, and that is a key issue in funding
which is completely neglected at the moment. There are two ways
in which those sorts of issues which you raise are being addressed
by local authorities. One is to let the schools deal with it on
an individual basis, each coping with a number of Slovakian or
Roma children or groups from other countries, and the other is
to create some sort of local authority-wide assessment centre.
This has been done in a number of local areas, where the children
from those different communities start off in those assessment
centres, they are turbo-charged through English language, they
are assessed for any special needs that they have and then fed
back into the schools at a point where they perhaps become slightly
more competent and able to deal with some of the things which
they will face. I think at the moment local authorities are undecided
about whether to work in those families of schools and across
the piece or whether to leave it to individual schools to sort
out. I feel that probably the best way is to deal with it collectively.
Q83 Mr Betts: At this stage it is
said that it was given no help at all, as I understand it, not
specifically.
Mr Cantle: Again, you heard about
the money given for cohesion. There is a certain amount of money
that comes through the EMEG formula anyway, which is a long-standing
formula. Schools do have certain other funds available to them,
but the general point is right: there is no specific funding which
copes with that. Nevertheless, some local authorities have decided
that they are going to go for some sort of centralised system
of assessment and then pass those children out into schools rather
than simply let them go into schools in the first instance.
Mr Johnson: A general point in
terms of the Commission integrating Egan's recommendations (a
very positive step), the Government has endorsed that a lot of
them do come with a cost and funding is not always attached to
them.
Q84 Chair: On that, do you think
the Government should take up the CIC suggestion to establish
a national body overseeing migration, and, if you do, do you agree
with the point that was put forward by Trevor Phillips? Were you
here at the beginning?
Mr Johnson: Yes.
Q85 Chair: He seemed to be suggesting
that migrants should not be left to go where the jobs are but
should be positively directed at certain bits of the country,
though how exactly you are going to do that, I do not know.
Mr Cantle: I think there is a
danger in setting up another agency within the auspices of government.
At the moment a lot of the integration activities are left to
the local level, they are left to local authorities and their
partners to handle, and I feel, almost irrespective of whether
some sort of national agency was established, it would inevitably
fall on local authorities. Every situation is very different,
and I would be worried about some sort of one-size-fits-all type
of approach to that. I think in the end local authorities, health
authorities, police authorities, all the other agencies have to
work together and sort out their own integration issues. There
has been a big focus on migrants today, but actually cohesion
issues are not just about migrant communities, there are a lot
of long-standing rivalries and differences between generations,
and so on, which local authorities are also working on. In Brighton
the identifiable gay community has been subject to homophobic
violence and the authority there are working on cohesion programmes
in respect of that community. I think letting local authorities
focus on their local issues is crucial, and I think some national
advice and support is inevitable, but a one-size-fits-all approach
would be, I think, pretty well untenable.
Mr Johnson: I think, undoubtedly,
there is a need for better co-ordination at a national level of
policies in this area, be it funding in numbers, English language
provision, joining up the work of various different government
departments on this who do not always talk to one another and
do not always seem to be consistent with policies, is definitely
needed.
Q86 Chair: Would you like to give
a concrete example of where they do not seem to be consistent?
Mr Johnson: I think the decision
on ESOL funding was a case in point, where you had some departments
talking about the need for greater English language provision
while at the same time the DfES, as it was then, was cutting funding
on programmes on English language. That has now been reversed,
but I think that showed just the sort of poor quality of joined-up
government on this.
Q87 Chair: Finally, to what extent
do you think the Government's performance indicators on cohesion
are useful?
Mr Cantle: They are useful. There
is no doubt that the indicator, which is how well people get on
with others of different backgrounds, is an indicator of sorts,
and certainly the ones that have the lowest scores, we tend to
agree, probably have got the biggest problems, and often there
is a coincidence of those low scores with the activity of the
BNP and the far right in those areas, so there is some consistency
in that approach. I am pleased that the Government is introducing
new indicators in respect of interaction, particularly because
that is actually about asking people and measuring the extent
to which there is some cross-community activity. I think it is
essential that that is introduced; a sense of belonging I think
would also be useful. We tend to look at both hard and soft indicators—the
hard indicators being about the incidence of race-hate crime or
homophobic crime, the extent of inequalities and the soft indicators
which are more perceptual—but, most of all, we encourage
local authorities and their partners to keep an on-going framework
for this where they are constantly measuring the tensions in their
communities and they are trying to anticipate the tensions and
the difficulties. We are firmly of the view that tensions like
the Lozells Riots could have been avoided if there had been much
better early-warning systems, much greater intelligence gathering
and sharing between different agencies. I think, in the end, the
performance indicators are fine, but actually it does mean that
local authorities and their partners have to work much more carefully
together and to see their role as not simply service deliverers,
which is, of course, where perhaps local government has focused
in the past, but responsible for anticipating and understanding
tensions and mapping population change. It is a much more sophisticated
approach to what goes on at the local level than some of the service
delivery styles in the past.
Mr Johnson: It is the measuring
and interaction points that are particularly important. I think
we would share some of Trevor's concerns about too much funding
being allocated purely on the perception indicators. I think issues
such as the school issue and intake of schools should be measured
as part of a cohesion indicator across education service delivery
rather than just issues that relate purely to cohesion initiatives.
Chair: Thank you very much indeed.
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