Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260-266)
RT HON
HAZEL BLEARS
MP AND MR
LIAM BYRNE
MP
22 APRIL 2008
Q260 Chair: Is it the case that CLG
have told DIUS to reverse the changes to ESOL funding that were
made in 2007?
Hazel Blears: No, we would not
be in any position to tell DIUS what to do. What we are seeking
to do is to work together as part of a cross-government action
to use our resources in the most effective way that we can to
ensure that people who need to learn English have the ability
to access that, people who can make a contribution should and
that people who get the benefit from migration should also make
a contribution.
Q261 Chair: Specifically has CLG
got a view about spouses being given access to English language
teaching as soon as they arrive and not waiting for 12 months?
Mr Byrne: DIUS's view is that
there is an argument for greater local flexibility and prioritising
ESOL spending locally. If you look at my community, for example,
Hodge Hill has the fourth highest unemployment in the country.
A great deal of that unemployment is concentrated amongst Pakistani
women and there is a lack of access to English. The priorities
that I might argue for in my part of East Birmingham may be totally
different to the priorities that Hazel would argue for in Salford
and they may be different to Cornwall. There is a consultation
which is exploring how local priorities should be set. We need
to approach this question with absolute clarity that this is an
important part of progressive politics. We know that command of
English is good for wages, and for many of the communities that
we came into politics to serve that is an effective route out
of poverty, but second guessing that from Whitehall would probably
be an error.
Q262 Anne Main: May I say that on
extremism within the settled population, Barking and Dagenham
felt that it was a particular case because it has 12 BNP councillors.
Would the Government accept that that is a barometer of the failure
of communication that we have 12 BNP councillors and indeed that
they managed to put across a message that is evidently believable
to a large number of people who then elected them. I feel that
the Government has to accept that failure and improve that communication
and improve that myth-busting because that is a form of extremism
that we cannot ignore. We cannot tackle extremism that we believe
we may have imported and unfortunately Barking and Dagenham made
that very clear. They felt that they were a special case for having
put themselves now in a position of a council that may well not
be working towards that agenda that we also wish to happen because
the councillors have a fundamental problem with it.
Hazel Blears: First of all, I
think it is a responsibility of all of us—national government,
local councillors, civic leaders—as citizens to stand up,
to be absolutely implacably opposed to the people who peddle messages
of hate, whatever kind of extremism that is, who seek to divide
people rather than bring them together and I think that this is
a really serious challenge for a liberal democracy. I am hugely
proud of our democracy in Britain, but I think in some areas it
is under challenge and therefore the responsibility on all of
us to redouble our efforts, and I do think it is about communication,
but it is also about being active out there on the streets in
touch with people, talking to people from every single community
and bringing people together. I think it is much more difficult
to hate someone if you have had an experience of working with
them, of sharing a community project, of having your children
come together. The new duty, for example, on schools to promote
community cohesion, to bring those young people together I think
is extremely important.
Q263 Anne Main: What the Honourable
Member for the area says, that the majority of people are thinking
of voting BNP, surely that should have come back to the Government
as a message that there are some pockets of our communities who
are under severe tensions, severe pressures, and that is addressed
as a fundamental issue and they need support, not pretending the
problem is not there.
Hazel Blears: I would not, Mrs
Main, for one moment pretend; I am not that kind of politician.
You have to be having the same debate as the public are having,
you have to be in touch with people, you have to be prepared to
discuss it. I read Trevor Phillips' speech last night at 11 o'clock,
all 44 pages of it, and what Trevor was saying was that we need
to be prepared to talk about this in very straightforward language
and recognise that people have concerns and that is absolutely
where I am, but equally I would say there is a responsibility
on all of us not to contribute to things that are simply not true;
not to sustain this view that communities are under siege because
they are not; to say that there are practical measures that we
can take to meet the impact on public services, whether it is
health, education or housing; to dispel the myths around particularly
council housing because over 90 per cent of new people in this
country are in the private rented sector, they get no priority
in housing and I think that is our responsibility, yes, to recognise
the pressures, but to redouble our efforts to tackle the insidious
and pretty vile messages that extremists of all kinds put out.
Q264 Andrew George: Following on
the point that Jim made, talking about supermarkets and large
bus companies and large employers addressing the issue, but there
is a lot of informality out there, a lot of small businesses and
a lot of one-man businesses which may not be covered by your efforts.
It is making sure that you are getting the message across of the
opportunity to learn English to the families and to those smaller
businesses as well as the larger ones. I think a lot of us are
very concerned that a lot of those families living in those circumstances,
living relatively isolated from the whole community, and I wondered
what could be done; whether you are actually integrating the voluntary
sector enough to actually assist you in the process of getting
to those people?
Hazel Blears: I think it is a
very fair point and I think often big organisations are able to
set up a system for being able to do it when small organisations
will struggle. That is why the consultation that is going on is
very important—how can we put a significant amount of money,
£300 million, to best use in order to give people the maximum
opportunities? It might be that small employers want to cluster
together to do some work; it may well be that the FE college needs
to be more flexible and send its tutors out to people rather than
expecting them to come in. That means you have to have less time
out of the business which has a significant impact on small employers.
Those kind of practical measures I think are very important. The
other area that I do think is worthy of exploring is we have now
got through our Government's policies a huge number of trade union
learning representatives out there in organisations, not necessarily
in the very small organisations, but across the piece and whether
or not they could be a resource in this area as well. We have
to try and think more creatively rather than a traditional classroom
setting where people would come for a set period and also to make
the English language training more relevant so that it is maybe
a very short course but absolutely fit for work. If you work in
a particular sector you need to learn the words that are relevant
to your particular sector, particularly for health and safety,
so much more flexibility and creativity about how we get best
value out of the money that is going in which is a significant
amount.
Mr Byrne: Alongside those supply
questions has to come the very clear expectation and a very clear
message from government and from others that if you want to stay
for any length of time in the UK—if you want to make the
UK your home—then we expect you to be able to speak English.
Q265 Chair: Are you suggesting any
compulsion on employers to contribute to the English language?
Hazel Blears: DIUS are currently
in dialogue with employers and they hope very much that they will
get a positive response. I do not think that they have ruled out
the possibility of legislation if absolutely necessary but they
are currently in dialogue at the moment.
Q266 Chair: Can I finish off by picking
up on a question that we skated over earlier on which is about
the number of national bodies that seem to have responsibility
for different aspects of migration policy? Apart from CLG and
the Migration Directorate, the Home Office obviously has the responsibility
of immigration and secure borders, the Advisory Board on Naturalisation
and Integration and Migration Advisory Committee, the Migration
Impacts Forum and obviously DIUS. Is there any concern at this
multiplicity of bodies and any plans to simplify it?
Mr Byrne: I think there is an
important message here which is that actually in the modern economy
migration is a lot of people's business. As Hazel said earlier,
this is not something that is somehow confined to the UK. If you
look at the patterns of global migration, migration (defined as
the number of people living outside their country of birth) has
doubled since the 1960s and the UK is around the OECD average
in terms of migration. That is not sometimes the impression you
would get from the media, but nonetheless people do move around
a lot more than they used to and that means that all parts of
government will need to be equipped with a response. In terms
of the way that we set up and coordinate migration policy, I think
there is a constitutional nicety about not talking about Cabinet
subcommittees, but obviously policy is coordinated in the relevant
Cabinet subcommittee. There are then some key advisory bodies
around key pieces of the architecture so the Migration Advisory
Committee and the Migration Impacts Forum are obviously crucial
in helping us understand what is the right system for economic
migration, but of course it is not just economic migrants who
are coming to the UK; there are also spouses, there are also refugees.
Over the centuries people move around for three reasons—love,
work and war—and therefore you have got to have different
approaches to different kinds of movement of people. It is necessarily
complicated because actually it affects the whole gamut of public
policy.
Hazel Blears: I think it is complicated
because the issues are complex but I think it is government's
task to try and make sure that there is a clear way that people
understand how we are dealing with it. One of the reasons we have
established the new Migration Directorate in my Department is
because we want to try and see can we be a kind of corporate approach
across government. That is why we are working with all of our
colleagues on the Migration Impacts Plan which we hope to publish
in June. I think that people will see that there is a coordinated
integrated joint approach for us because I think there is quite
a pressing need. I agree entirely with Liam that different bodies
will be able to feed in on their particular area of expertise.
I am pleased that on the Migration Impacts Forum that is jointly
chaired by my Department and the Home Office together with the
work on statistics. We will be here to deliver in front of the
Committee I hope in a very integrated and joined-up manner.
Chair: Thank you very much indeed.
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