Examination of Witnesses (Questions 136-139)
MR DARRA
SINGH
1 APRIL 2008
Q136 Chair: May I welcome you to this
session in our inquiry on community cohesion and migration? It
happens that the Committee members, those of us who are here,
were this morning in Barking and Dagenham, so we have come fresh
from the third of our visits; we have previously been in Burnley
and Peterborough. I imagine members may wish to draw on that immediate
experience in some of the questioning. May I start off with the
Commission on Integration and Cohesion's report? We have taken
evidence earlier from Trevor Phillips who described the Government's
response to your Commission's report as "modest". Do
you agree with that assessment and in what areas would you have
wished to have seen the Government's response go further?
Mr Singh: First of all, thank
you for inviting me. May I say that I welcome your Committee's
inquiry into cohesion and migration? I hope that the outcome of
your work will help to maintain a momentum behind my Commission's
report and the recommendations we made. I am actually a bit more
enthusiastic than Trevor Phillips in terms of the Government's
response to date. I am also quite enthusiastic about local government's
response to the report. You may well have picked that up today
in your visit to Barking and Dagenham but, certainly talking to
people as a chief executive and to chief executives of other councils,
they have taken the report very positively. We made 57 recommendations
in the report Our Shared Future. In terms of the Government's
response published in early February, they demonstrated progress
to one degree or another across all those recommendations. There
was one in particular which they rejected to do with the rapid
rebuttal unit and the one on which I am looking forward to seeing
some further developments is around the recommendation focusing
on the new agency looking at the integration of new migrants.
In overall terms, I do think the pint glass is at least half full,
if not a little bit more, and I am looking forward to the momentum
we have generated being maintained. In terms of the formal response,
they did pick up the work which has been undertaken to date, for
example, the new duty on schools around community cohesion and
the guidance provided there, the new programme around aiming higher
for young people in terms of improving attainment for children
and young people across different backgrounds and a swathe of
other activities, on English for speakers of other languages (ESOL)
for example, and a range of other initiatives, which I will not
go through in detail with you at this stage.
Q137 Chair: Do you think that Government's
new cohesion initiatives such as establishing the specialist cohesion
teams provides the support local authorities need or do you think
further support is required?
Mr Singh: The new initiative does
recognise the point we were trying to make in the report which
is that we should move away from an approach where we assume that
one size fits all, that there is in some way, shape or form an
actual template which can then be applicable to every area. Each
locality is unique and presents different challenges; there are
different histories, different community dynamics. That is the
first point I would make. Secondly, in terms of whether the new
teams are appropriate, it does depend very much on the challenges
within localities and I would hope actually that where further
or additional support is required by different areas, CLG and
Government will be able to respond positively. I do also think
that you will need to keep the work of those teams under review,
so I cannot give you a concrete answer yes or no at this stage.
We will need to see how the initiative progresses and the feedback
we get from localities.
Q138 Chair: May I ask you something
about the integration of migrants? Do you think that the challenges
of integration are the same for all different groups of migrants
or is there variation and therefore should the sorts of actions
that local authorities or the Government are taking be varied
or just the same for all migrants?
Mr Singh: They certainly should
be varied because obviously migrants come from a range of different
backgrounds, come with different levels of affluence, different
levels of education, different levels of aspiration, tend to move
and reside in different parts of the country. For example, in
Ealing we are the fourth most ethnically diverse borough in the
country and have a community makeup which is very different, say,
to Barking and Dagenham or to local authorities in other parts
of the country. What we are trying to get across in our report
is that it is very much down to local councils, the leadership
there, and local partnerships to assess the dynamics and the needs
and requirements in their area and then to craft strategies and
plans which respond to those. For example, I used to be chief
executive of Luton Borough Council, again a very diverse local
authority and very diverse borough. The requirements and challenges
there, let us say around educational attainments and the gap between
the best achievers and the poorest achievers, were very different
to Ealing.
Q139 Anne Main: Given that you were
talking about how best to effect cohesion, possibly with cohesion
teams, how much consideration have you given to the actual pace
of change? It was not the ethnic minorities which were the problem
for cohesion which was expressed in Peterborough and indeed in
Barking, it was the speed and rapidity with which a local area
was expected to adapt to change. How much do you think your cohesion
teams would help with that?
Mr Singh: The cohesion teams are
not mine.
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