Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-199)
MS SARAH
SPENCER CBE AND
PROFESSOR RICHARD
BLACK
1 APRIL 2008
Q180 Dr Pugh: As a matter of interest,
how many East Europeans actually do vote in local elections percentagewise?
I should imagine it is a very, very small percentage, is it?
Professor Black: In my sample
it would be none, because they would not have had the right to
do so.
Ms Spencer: Ours would have acquired
the right to do so after they became EU citizens, but I do not
know what proportion of them voted. In the study we published
last week on new migrants we were surprised to find a higher proportion—still
a minority—had voted than we expected.
Q181 Chair: Could you just clarify
that? From the most recent study you did, you do have data on
the proportion who voted.
Ms Spencer: The proportion who
were registered who voted; yes. We were not able to establish
though whether they were eligible to register, which is why I
would not have particularly drawn attention to the data.
Q182 Chair: Can you off hand remember
what the proportion was?
Ms Spencer: No, but I can provide
details.
Q183 Chair: Could you do that?
Ms Spencer: Yes. May I say on
the definition that I agree with Richard about the breadth of
the definition? The dimension of inequality within that definition
is very important and I do worry that PSA21 does not seek to measure
that. There is a separate PSA which covers discrimination and
inequality which means that when government departments and local
authorities are looking at this PSA they are looking at belonging,
they are looking at active participation, all good things, but
the equality dimension is separate. Given the evidence about the
importance of discrimination in both equality outcomes but also
whether people do feel they belong, that is something we need
to watch out for and the funding for cohesion does not cover that
either.
Professor Black: A small difference
in the nature of the question can make a big difference to the
answers. For example when talking of belonging, two thirds of
our sample of new immigrants felt they belonged in the UK but
only one third felt they belonged in their community. Similarly,
if you ask people whether they have participated in civic actions
or feel they can change decisions at a local level, around 20
per cent say they can do that. If you ask people whether they
participate in local clubs and associations and particularly if
you include sports clubs, the figure is back up and there is a
majority. What exactly you are asking about does make a difference.
You cannot simply say you are going to measure belonging. You
have to ask "belonging to what?".
Q184 Dr Pugh: Just to press the point.
Are you suggesting that if it were the case that a sub set of
migrants were very happy where they were and the host community
were very happy to have them but they happened to occupy a low
strata of jobs which were all pretty uniform, pretty unskilled
and so on, that would be an absence of community cohesion even
though there would be no evidence of tension or hostility or anything
like that?
Ms Spencer: The evidence shows
that the low wage jobs that people do, with the mobility they
often have, the shift work, the long hours and the low pay, are
a barrier to them participating more actively in community life
and socially or indeed taking English classes. You ask whether
we need to be worried about that when there is no tension on the
streets. I think tension on the streets would be a rather limited
definition of cohesion and it is a loss for the migrants and a
loss for the community if people cannot participate actively.
There seems to be a willingness there to do so. I might say that
in the study which was published last week, where again there
were rather low levels of participation in community organisations,
something like 25 per cent, but about 40 per cent of people who
had lived in the country ten years. What we did find was a striking
degree of agreement between migrants and non-migrants as to what
the issues were in the local community: crime, drugs, pollution.
Everybody cared about the same things which would suggest that
there was a potential for collective action to address them.
Q185 Dr Pugh: Probably blaming different
causes.
Ms Spencer: Perhaps.
Q186 Dr Pugh: Professor Black, you
are obviously dealing with people from new accession countries
and some of them will not be Christian but Muslim. The model we
have of a community is a rather artificial model but a crude one
that everybody arrives at the Queen Vic or the Rovers' Return
or somewhere like that at some point and clearly there are religious
scruples in connection with this, there are different traditions
and so on. Will people from places like Bulgaria necessarily have
a bigger problem simply because of differences, not just simply
of nationality but differences of faith?
Professor Black: Without having
measured it directly, the group we were concerned with came from
former communist countries where levels of religious observance
were relatively low and largely on a par with the secularism of
British society.
Q187 Chair: I am not quite sure whether
this is a group which you studied but one of you said that for
the East European migrants you looked at, put simply, the better
their English, the better they felt they belonged here. Is that
right?
Ms Spencer: Yes. They were more
likely to feel welcome and to feel treated as an equal.
Q188 Chair: Did you also look at
longer settled immigrant communities, for example Pakistani and
Bangladeshi ones, where many of the women may have been here for
a long time but do not have very good language skills? Was there
any correlation there between English and feeling you belonged?
Professor Black: My understanding
is that there is pretty good cross-national evidence both from
the UK and also from the United States and Canada that learning
English is about the single most useful thing you can do to integrate
in general and in particular in the labour market. Also one of
the findings of our study was that whereas when they came in men
and women had roughly equal levels of English language proficiency—and
indeed women were better educated, around half of our sample of
women had university level education compared with around one
third of men—by the time we interviewed them, men's English
language proficiency had substantially increased whereas women's
had largely not. One of the explanations for that is the kind
of work that people are doing. The immigrants that we interviewed
were very much concentrated in three sectors: in hotels and restaurants,
in cleaning in general and in construction and obviously men were
very much in construction and women were very much in cleaning
and both were doing hotel and restaurant work although often in
different parts of hotels and restaurants. If you think about
it, some of those jobs necessitate working with people and working
with people from other backgrounds, sometimes English, sometimes
from other countries, but where English is necessarily the common
language. To take one extreme, when people were going into cleaning
work, cleaning offices, for example, is an increasingly lone worker
situation. You have your time to go in and clean your particular
part of the office and the only person you ever meet is your supervisor
and companies perhaps even deliberately organise things so that
workers do not need to interact with each other. In such employment,
which is predominantly women's employment, the need to learn English
and the opportunity to learn English is very limited. Contrast
that with a construction site, where people working on a construction
site might well these days be from a variety of different national
backgrounds and where health and safety alone necessitate people
interacting, at least in a rudimentary way. These are the kinds
of workplaces where English language proficiency can sometimes
improve quite dramatically, even in the absence of ESOL I would
say. We need to look at what people are doing in terms of understanding
both what the likelihood is of them improving their English and
also what the need is for them to do so.
Q189 Chair: You have obviously identified
a lack of English as one of the main barriers to integration of
newly arrived migrants. What other barriers would you prioritise
apart from ability to speak English?
Professor Black: The other obvious
thing, speaking about East Europeans, the group we studied, is
that you have a group which, at least in terms of their paper
qualifications, are highly qualified and yet who appear to be
relatively trapped in particular job sectors and particular kinds
of jobs in those sectors. It is difficult from our study to put
our finger on exactly what the problem is here, whether it is
the nature of the qualifications which have been obtained or discrimination
against people who have qualifications of a particular kind. There
does certainly seem to be evidence that people's job mobility
is quite low, particularly in certain sectors and that that has
to do with their lack of qualifications which are recognised by
employers as being useful qualifications, also bearing in mind
that, regardless of how those qualifications are viewed on entry,
if somebody is trapped in a dead-end job for a period of time
without having the opportunity to renew those qualifications,
they would become obsolete anyway.
Ms Spencer: Clearly I raised this
question of lack of practical information and also discrimination.
The study which was published last week included quite a lot of
interviews with service providers and policy makers at the local
level and they said that one of the barriers they felt was the
terms of the national discourse about migration and about Muslims,
that the negative terms of the debate, the suggestion that migrants
were a drain on public services, a perception that they do not
share our values, and association with terrorism, undermined their
attempts to create a more inclusive sense of community, sense
of shared citizenship. They felt there was a lack of balance in
the debate, for instance the sense that migrants were taking services
without that being balanced with the fact that migrants in many
cases were providing services or indeed the research evidence
which suggests, as our study did last week, that there was a lot
of common attachment to the same sorts of values, democracy and
justice and so on. That points to the importance of the terms
of the national debate and about communication strategies and
myth-busting and also the sort of mediation work to be done at
local level when there really are conflicts of interest that need
to be resolved.
Q190 Chair: Since you have mentioned
it, do you have a comment on the House of Lords' report then?
Ms Spencer: No, because I want
to read it properly before I comment. One of my colleagues was
the special adviser and I do not think he would forgive me if
I commented on it without reading it properly!
Professor Black: I have not looked
at it in detail, but it struck me that one key issue was around
whether we should measure the positive economic impact of migrants
through GDP or through GDP per capita. Whilst clearly GDP per
capita makes a difference, the absolute volume of GDP is also
important for the UK economy. This was on the basis of reading
the press reports this morning and I felt the press reports were
unduly harsh on the Government's position.
Q191 Dr Pugh: In terms of that, would
you like to be a little more forthcoming and comment on how it
is relayed in the press? I am just looking at a statement here
which says that it is possible, though not yet proven, that immigration
adversely affects the employment opportunities of young people.
I am sure I came across a statement on the BBC to say that it
did and the report says that it is possible though not yet proven.
Can you characterise on the effect of reporting of that nature
on community cohesion?
Professor Black: It undoubtedly
makes achieving community cohesion more difficult. The problem
is that the effects are complicated. One group which is perhaps
most threatened by immigration in terms of access to employment
at the moment is junior doctors. In the context of more than a
decade of meeting our need for doctors by importing doctors and
now having a situation in which investment in medical training
in the UK is producing a much better flow of trained doctors from
British medical schools, we now have a classic example of an area
in which there is a risk of oversupply reducing the employment
prospects for people at the margin. Of course competition for
jobs as doctors is not something which the public or the newspaper
editors automatically think of in terms of immigration driving
down wages but economically it is not going to drive down wages
because the wages are set; it is going to influence the prospects
of doctors graduating from British medical schools getting the
job they want or not getting the job they want. There are undoubtedly
certain sectors in the British economy where there is competition
for jobs. There are also several other sectors in the British
economy where domestic workers have largely abandoned those sectors
and if you are to find, for example, a workforce to clear Brighton
beach of debris in the early hours of the morning to meet the
council's statutory responsibilities to keep a clean city, then
you are going to have to recruit foreign workers.
Q192 Chair: May I just return to
these barriers? Someone said that as well as understanding English
new migrants need to understand how our society works. The classic
is when you put the rubbish out and what you put out. Do you think
that the local welcome centres that some councils have created
are a useful way of communicating the rules or the way we run
things in Britain?
Ms Spencer: It is for each local
authority or the strategic partnership to decide what is the best
way of ensuring that migrants' information needs are met and indeed
that the needs of service providers are met for information about
migrants. The kind of mediation service which an organisation
like New Link provides, where it is not only talking to migrants
but actually very much addresses the concerns of other residents
as well, should be an important part of whatever service it is,
whether it is a welcome centre or some other unit. I do think
though that while integration is clearly very much a local issue,
and it is for local authorities, police, primary care trusts and
so on to be the deliverers and to engage most with migrants. I
did find in the study that we did with East Europeans and in fact
in work we are doing now for 25 European cities, including some
UK cities, that there is a sense of re-invention of the wheel.
Local authorities to some extent feel they are out there on their
own, particularly those in areas which do not have decades of
experience of migration and that there is a case—and maybe
you are going to come on to ask us about this; I do not know—for
some kind of agency at the national level being the centre of
expertise, the body that has the data which is able to go into
the public debate with the authoritative voice to provide the
facts, but mostly looking towards the local level to be the source
of expertise, the place where they can meet and share experiences,
to be the catalyst which engages employers, engages third sector
organisations and helps to make things happen, monitors change
over time and so on. I am aware that there is now a migration
unit in CLG which is beginning to think in those terms, but would
wonder whether an arm's-length agency would have certain advantages
in being able to fulfil this role rather than only a central government
department.
Q193 Jim Dobbin: I want to get your
view on the need for a new national body for migration. Do you
think it is required?
Ms Spencer: I think it is a good
idea. I say that partly from the research experience, but also
partly from a background as Deputy Chair of the CRE and an awareness
from that of what an NDPB or arm's-length agency can do sometimes
which a Whitehall department cannot. I agree with Trevor Phillips
completely in his evidence to you that this should not be a substitute
for a government strategy. It is not the body which is going to
coordinate Whitehall, which is so urgently needed. However, I
do think there is a case for some kind of arm's-length delivery
agency to be a source of expertise—again, there is some
advantage to it being arm's-length because Government have a problem
in being trusted on their data—to be a catalyst to engage
employers, engage third sector organisations, to monitor change,
to be an informed voice in the public debate, perhaps also to
be the forum where difficult debates can happen over what the
Government should do when there are genuine conflicts of interests
to do with migration, there are some difficult issues, but also
perhaps to research some of the barriers to integration and then
act. So for something like the non-recognition of qualifications
we need a driver—it has been known for a long time with
refugees that this has been a problem—a body which would
pick something like that up and be the catalyst which would go
out and try to do something about it. Yes, there is definitely
a role for such a body, not as a replacement for government strategy
but as a way of helping to deliver it.
Q194 John Cummings: Do you think
it is realistic to expect short-term economic migrants to integrate
totally into the host community?
Ms Spencer: Integration begins
on day one. It actually matters from day one that they get on
well with their neighbours, that they have access to information
about health care, that they know how to get a national insurance
number. Integration is a process, it is not an end state. It is
a two-way process; it involves a reaction by others.
Q195 John Cummings: I can see that
being desirable, but the question is whether it is realistic.
Ms Spencer: It is realistic that
they start the process and they go down that path. How far they
get down that path will depend partly how long they stay, but
also how many barriers they face and what support they get. I
do not think, from our experience, the evidence we had, that the
people who think they are only here for 18 months think they will
just do their job, beaver away at that and they do not want to
talk to anybody else. They want to be part of the community, they
want to experience community life and have a good time, so it
is realistic.
Q196 John Cummings: Are you suggesting
that they actually target these resources or are you indicating
that perhaps they should make the first move?
Professor Black: To answer your
earlier question, it is realistic and nearly 80 per cent of our
sample said they hoped to stay in the UK for at least three years
and that seems to me to be a long enough time horizon to expect
to have a productive interaction with the communities in which
they are living. We need to bear in mind that the British population
is also mobile. People move around the UK from one region to another.
There is considerable population churn in a number of local authority
areas as people move as part of the process of changing jobs and
other lifestyle events. The notion that everybody in Britain stays
in one community and is loyal to that community and remains loyal
to that community for the rest of their lives is a misunderstanding
of the dynamic nature of the population structure of Britain.
Many people move and also have aspirations to contribute to and
benefit from the communities that they move into. Do we need targeted
funding to make sure that this is done? In particular instances
probably yes. It is also possible to overestimate the extent to
which Government need to intervene in this area. Again drawing
from my own sample of East European migrants, these are highly
motivated, relatively well educated, young people who want to
get a job, want to pay taxes in the same way that everybody else
does. They want to participate in life. They do not particularly
want to join a political party or get involved in neighbourhood
associations but most of the British population does not want
to do that either. Some people do and some migrants do as well.
We need to think about targeting government support for integration
in areas where you cannot realistically expect people to do things
on their own and that is actually the same test as you would use
for targeting any other kind of government support. We have targeted
interventions by Government to promote integration of a whole
range of different people who for one reason or another are perceived
as being vulnerable. Migrants are not, by virtue of being migrants,
vulnerable, but the fact that they are migrants may exacerbate
some aspects of their vulnerability and that is what we need to
look out for.
Ms Spencer: I agree that this
is not necessarily an area for huge government resources because
there are other resources we can mobilise. The evidence shows
that migrants rely very heavily on family and friends and their
community when they first arrive and there is a whole untapped
resource of migrant community organisations, other third sector
organisations and employers and trade unions indeed who all play
a bit of a role but nobody has really mobilised them to play a
larger role and we should look there as well as to the Government.
Q197 Jim Dobbin: You touched on this
but I was going to ask you about the important role that employers
do play in helping to integrate migrants. What else do you think
they could do other than provide support for learning English?
Ms Spencer: We ran a conference
about a year ago for employers to look at good practice in the
field and employers who were employing a significant number of
migrants were doing all sorts of things, including taking the
migrants down to the local schools to introduce them so that the
local population did not feel so worried. They were giving them
deposits to help get a rent on a flat, this kind of thing, as
well as giving them access to English classes. What the employers
said was that, with the exception of Northern Ireland where Business
in the Community has a code of practice and is providing some
framework for good practice, they felt they were on their own
in doing it, nobody was giving them a pat on the back or giving
them ideas or bringing them together and that they would very
much welcome feeling that they were part of something. There was
clearly some scope to mobilise more of them to contribute in that
way. Having said that, some of the employers we spoke to in relation
to the low-wage Eastern European migrants had a very small number
of employees and it would not be realistic to think of them as
providing major services; some of them also were clearly out to
make a bit of money and were perhaps not of a mind to put a lot
into it. There, one might be looking just to make sure that the
regulation on working hours and minimum pay and things like that
were respected before going further and expecting them actually
to be proactive in doing more than that.
Q198 John Cummings: Do you have any
indication of what reciprocal arrangements exist in Eastern Europe
for workers from England undertaking work in those countries?
Professor Black: To the best of
my knowledge we have none.
Q199 Chair: You presumably have not
done research on British workers in other countries, have you?
Professor Black: Our centre has
done some work on Brits abroad and we have also looked at bilateral
labour agreements, slightly patchily but worldwide. My understanding
of the major Central and Eastern European countries is that although
there are several developing labour agreements, particularly with
Italy, there is none with the UK.
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