Examination of Witnesses (Questions 175-179)
MS SARAH
SPENCER CBE AND
PROFESSOR RICHARD
BLACK
1 APRIL 2008
Q175 Dr Pugh: You have done an extensive
amount of research. What has your research shown on the difference
between new migrants' experience of community cohesion and that
of long-term residents living in the same neighbourhood? Obviously
they have different definitions of what community cohesion means
to them.
Ms Spencer: That is a very important
question. While it is valuable that migrants have now at last
been brought within the cohesion agenda, there are some distinct
experiences which new migrants have which need not to be forgotten.
They are distinct because of their newness, their lack of familiarity
with the systems in the UK, which brings them information needs,
language clearly, as you were discussing earlier. Sometimes their
experiences before arrival, particularly if they are refugees,
can mean they have health needs. Their limited rights attached
to their legal status can limit their access to jobs, their access
to voting, to services and so on. The fact that at the early stage
all the evidence shows that people do not know how long they are
going to stay; they may not know whether they are going to stay
at all or how long they are going to stay and their ideas about
that tend to change, particularly also perhaps the reaction by
the public to them. From that I would just identify three particular
issues that they experience. One is that we found, for instance,
from our big study of East European migrants, the difficulties
caused for them by the lack of practical information on arrival,
lack of information about how to access a GP, how to get a bank
account, how to get a national insurance number and so on; just
in those early days after arrival when you do not know how the
system works and you need information. Secondly, a lot of evidence
about the importance of English and the difficulties people have
if they do not have English. I do have one or two statistics on
that if you want them. I would also highlight the importance of
the reaction of British people to them. We found in a study we
published with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation last week, Immigration,
Faith and Cohesion in the UK, that a perception of discrimination
and verbal abuse was very important in undermining any sense of
belonging in the UK, that however much people might want to feel
they belonged, the reaction they were getting was that they did
not; some of them were getting that. Also with the East European
study, while most of them were socialising well with British people,
we did find that one in four had no social contact with British
people after two years and while some of that was simply that
because of the jobs they were doing they did not meet British
people, some of it was sometimes because of a negative reaction
but also often just a distance, a lack of interest and ignorance
about migrants and lack of inclination to make friends.
Q176 Dr Pugh: Just stopping you there
for a moment, it seems to me that if you get an influx of people
into a country you create potentially unstable situations and
people on all sides, both the host community and the people arriving,
will want to stabilise that situation. What may count as stability
will vary. You seem to be suggesting that the migrant community
will be relatively happy as long as they do not get abused, know
their way around and can sort out one or two things. That is a
fairly minimal definition of being integrated into your community.
It strikes me the host community may want a lot more before they
believe integration and cohesion exist. They may want to see them
participate in local activities.
Ms Spencer: Our evidence is that
they did want to. Certainly the East Europeans were very keen
to socialise with British people. It was a loss to them when it
did not happen. Most of them did and part of what I am trying
to do is not suggest that there is a major crisis here. There
are some challenges but on the whole it is going well.
Q177 Dr Pugh: That is very interesting.
You are suggesting that a large number of the East European arrivals
are not simply contented to get in, get the money and get out
and know their way around, they really would like a more meaningful
relationship with the community they are living with.
Ms Spencer: That was certainly
the evidence. We did a survey but also in-depth interviews and
people wanted to make friends, they wanted to socialise, they
regretted it when they did not meet British people, they regretted
it when their attempts at friendship were not always reciprocated.
Q178 Dr Pugh: Did this correlate
with uncertain expectations about how long they might actually
be in the host community?
Ms Spencer: It correlated in part
with language and we did find that people who were fluent in English
were more likely to socialise with British people, as you would
expect, than with people with limited English. It was also partly
that the people we were looking at were in low wage jobs but they
were often not people who had limited education; their education
levels were higher than the British born people they were working
with and that might also have been something of a social barrier.
Professor Black: Our work is also
with East European migrants, a specific group of East Europeans
coming from countries which, at the time we did the work, had
not acceded to the European Union. It does compare the levels
of cohesion and the aspirations of people in that group and people
who are long-term residents which includes some people who were
migrants and also others who were native British. It supports
what Sarah says. Broadly speaking there is quite a positive picture.
On a number of indicators, the level of cohesion indicators shown
by immigrants is lower than for long-term residents so people
feel they belong less to their community, they are less actively
engaged in civic activities for example. Over time that appears
to decline or at least it is a snapshot study, so we can say people
who had been in the UK for longer were less likely to feel that
they did not belong in their community, were less likely to say
that they did not feel they could influence a local decision or
less likely to say that they did not volunteer or take part in
associations. We cannot know whether that is a time effect or
a cohort effect. It might be that the people who came in seven
or eight years ago faced better conditions seven or eight years
ago than people who came in two or three years ago. Nonetheless
there is a positive feature over time. The other thing which clearly
does vary over time is language. We found one third of our immigrant
sample when they came in had adequate or fluent English; at the
time of the interviews 78 per cent said they had adequate or fluent
English. Even accounting for self-reporting biases, that still
suggests quite a substantial improvement in English language competence
alongside what appears to be an improved situation in terms of
cohesion of the community they were living in.
Q179 Dr Pugh: In terms of the different
expectations, both of individual groups of migrants and also the
host community, how useful is the Government's definition and
measurement of community cohesion actually to you in giving a
broad view of how well or how badly we are doing; how much of
a problem it is in the first place.
Professor Black: Certainly from
our point of view we found it reasonably useful. We were able
to incorporate questions from the Home Office citizenship survey,
for example, into our survey and they gave us quite an interesting
range of responses from one third to two thirds of our sample
saying they did or did not do various things. Having those set
questions gives us an opportunity to compare across the country
and also to compare across time. With a statistical hat on, I
would say do not change the definitions without having a good
reason to do so because you throw away the opportunity to do really
valuable comparisons. That said, I can see that there might be
some arguments. The Barking and Dagenham insistence, for example,
on looking at fairness and equality seems to me reasonable. The
question would be how you are going to define that and how you
get that into an indicator which you can then monitor over time
because ideally that is what you would want to be doing.
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