Communities and Local Government Committee: Community Cohesion and Migration

 

I am pleased to provide below the written evidence of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham in support of the Committee's inquiry.

 

The Council has focused its response around the terms of reference of the inquiry, as follows:

 

1. The effect of recent inward migration on community cohesion, and public concerns about this effect.

 

Barking and Dagenham has the fastest changing demography in the country. This is not simply as a result of migration from outside the UK, but also resulting from the move eastwards of multicultural London in pursuit of (relatively) affordable housing to buy.

 

In 1991, only 6.8% of the borough's population was non-white: this had risen to nearly 15% by 2001, and is now, it is estimated, approximately 25%.

 

PLASC data provided by the Department for Children Schools and Families shows that Barking and Dagenham had the greatest percentage increase in the country of pupils whose first language was not English between 2003 and 2006: an increase of 10 percentage points, from 14 to 24%.

 

This pace of change in a borough which had previously seen itself as removed from the challenges of urban living, has led to strong, yet unfounded, concerns amongst many white residents that public services disproportionately favour black minority ethnic residents as well as new arrivals to the UK.

 

While members of BME communities are generally optimistic and positive about living in the borough, white residents were pessimistic in a recent survey, seeing the area as 'getting worse'. Some reported that they aimed to leave the borough as a result.

 

There are therefore significant implications for community cohesion as a result of migration into the borough, whether from outside or inside the UK.

 

 

2. The role, responsibilities and actions of different bodies on community cohesion and migration.

 

The Council clearly understands that it has a number of roles in relation to community cohesion and migration:

· Service provider: the Council has a legal obligation to provide services to those who are entitled to receive them. Clearly, the more people living in the borough who have this entitlement, the harder the task of matching demand and need, if resourcing does not follow the pattern of new arrivals.

· Community leader: the Local Government White Paper, Strong and Prosperous Communities, (2006) proposes changes which will enable local government to 'use its role as community leader to champion the interests of those who are disadvantaged and discriminated against'. The Council has an important role, as community leader, in ensuring that all those living in the borough are able to live free from fear of discrimination.

· Wellbeing: the Local Government Act 2000 gives local authority the power to do anything which they consider will achieve the promotion or improvement of the economic, social or environmental wellbeing of the area. This Council believes that the promotion of community cohesion is included within this definition.

· Race equality: the Council has specific legal duties, both as an employer, and also as a public authority, in relation to ensuring and promoting race equality.

 

 

3. The effectiveness of local and central government action and expenditure in promoting community cohesion and responding to inward migration flows, with particular regard to:

· Areas that have experienced rapid increases in new inward migration

· Areas that have a lack of experience of diversity

· Areas where new migrant communities mix with existing settled migrant communities

 

The second scenario most closely represents Barking and Dagenham's experience: while change has been rapid, there has not been a sudden influx of one non-UK community, as has been the case elsewhere.

 

The Council has worked with the rest of the Local Strategic Partnership to develop a community cohesion strategy, based on extensive local engagement, which articulates the main actions it can and will take to promote community cohesion. It is confident that its actions will be effective because they are based on a detailed assessment of local needs and concerns. Actions include:

· Delivering excellent services which are most important to local people, thus removing cause for antagonism between communities due to perceived competition for resources.

· Demonstrating that it is a listening Council which responds to people's concerns and needs.

· Giving people opportunities to influence decision-making and get involved being part of the solution in improving the local community, via our new, borough-wide neighbourhood management service.

· Demonstrating that improvements are happening at a local level, where people can see the evidence for themselves, again, via neighbourhood management.

· Creating and supporting the development of opportunities for people from different backgrounds to come together (encouragingly, local research demonstrates that people are keen to see the provision of such opportunities).

 

The Council would argue that central government has not responded as effectively as possible to inward migration flows, as set out in more detail at 5, below.

 

 

4. The role of the English language as a tool in promoting the integration of migrants.

 

This Council believes strongly that English language skills are an essential component in enabling new arrivals in the borough to integrate in the community, and has been alarmed to see a reduction in government funding (via the LSC) for this important activity. The Council has been encouraged to see more positive recent announcements in relation to funding for English as an Additional Language and looks forward to these being followed by appropriate funding improvements.

 

 

5. The impact of recent migration on local communities, including the impact on housing, education, health care and other public services.

 

A major issue in relation to inward migration is the disparity between official population statistics and the actual numbers of population in local authorities. This exacerbates the impact on local public services.

 

The Council believes that the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has undercounted the borough's population significantly. The ONS data for the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham's population in recent years is as follows:

 

2001/02 165,851

2002/03 167,302

2003/04 165,862

2004/05 164,572

2005/06 164,521

 

These statistics suggest that the borough's population has actually fallen by 1,330 since 2001/02. In that same time period, a range of other statistics suggests that the borough's population has been rising. For example:

· National insurance data in Barking and Dagenham shows that there were 2,600 registrations in 2004/05 and 3,200 registrations in 2005/06. This compares to in-migration figures from ONS of 1,906 and 1,910 for the respective periods, suggesting a significant undercount for the ONS data;

· PLASC data from 2003 to 2006 demonstrates that the proportion of white British pupils in schools fell from 72.2% to 61.6%, suggesting significant migration into the borough (the school roll increased by 760 in that period). The percentage of black African pupils increased from 8% in 2003 to 15% in 2006;

· Since 1999, the total people on the electoral roll has grown from 115,000 to over 119,000 in 2004/05; and

· The number of people on GPs registers in 2003 was just under 170,000, by 2006 it was in excess of 176,000;

 

None of these datasets on their own provide sufficiently robust data to estimate the borough's population. The ONS, and Department for Communities and Local Government from which the funding is provided, argue that the ONS data is the most accurate source of information available.

 

However, all of the data for Barking and Dagenham, as shown above, with the exception of the ONS estimates, show that the overwhelming trend is that borough's population is rising. Against this backdrop, the ONS data increasingly seems to lack credibility.

 

The key implication for local authorities of this inaccuracy is that population statistics feed into the grant that the Council receives from central Government (via population projections), with approximately £500,000 received by this Council for every 1,000 resident population. If the borough's population was undercounted by 10,000, this would mean the Council is receiving at least £5,000,000 less grant than it is entitled to per annum.

 

Many of the implications of population increases in terms of service delivery will be invisible, until the increase becomes so great as to provoke a crisis. Greater and greater weights of rubbish will continue to be collected. However, a more accurate method of recording population and of relating grant funding to it, would ensure that the risk of crises occurring is greatly reduced.

 

In 2006 London Councils commissioned work by the LSE to study how local communities are affected by population movement (Fairer funding for councils with population mobility). The Council endorses the findings of that report. The issue of public assistance costs for migrants with no other means of support is a particularly significant one in this borough.

 

Mental Health is a particular area of concern as a result of changing demographics. People from BME communities (a) are greatly over-represented within those using hospital and specialist mental health care generally, (b) experience different healthcare outcomes compared to other ethnic groups eg - BME clients receive more and high dose psychiatric drugs and are more likely to be involved in control and restraint and (c) far fewer BME clients get easy access to mother tongue counselling and psychotherapy than would be expected for their proportion in the population. All London mental health services, particularly in the Barking area, are reporting step change demand for post-traumatic stress disorder in the full range, often relating to adult survivors of abuse, torture, family separation in relation to war zones etc. Some of this talking therapy is highly specialist in nature - for example we have developed intercultural therapy.  More and more people of Eastern European origin are coming to our attention via their homelessness, sofa-surfing and mental health needs / welfare needs. We are observing solicitors acting for asylum seekers / refugees awaiting repatriation, raising mental welfare as a human rights issue and demanding that we provide treatment prior to any deportation.

 

The Council is encouraged that work is underway by the ONS to improve the quality of their statistics, by looking at extending samples within the International Passenger Survey (which informs migration estimates).

 

However, attempts to address the implications of new arrivals saying, on arrival, that they are going to settle in one area, but going somewhere else, give this Council more concern. This has been done in London by taking the ethnic make-up of London boroughs in the 2001 census, and using this as a way of distributing international migration across London. This raises serious concerns for Barking and Dagenham, as the data above, particularly the PLASC data, demonstrates that the ethnic make-up of the borough is fast changing, and is almost unrecognisable since 2001.

 

Work by ONS also does not take into account short term migration, indeed, the DCLG grant calculation does not take into account any short term migration. This is an increasing funding issue for areas such as London since the accession of a number of Eastern European states to the EU in 2004.

 

Further, the grant figures currently have no mechanism for addressing the funding implications of the estimated 300,000 to 500,000 illegal immigrants in the country.

 

A final concern is that the grant does use "population projections" when calculating 3 year settlements. However, it uses historic data rather than data projected forward based on, for example, new housing developments. This penalises boroughs with an expanding population, even if the Councils are supporting the Government's Building Sustainable Communities agenda, as is the case in the Thames Gateway and Barking and Dagenham.

 

The scale of this increase can be demonstrated by a recent study which has forecast an increase of 11,595 additional primary aged pupils over the next 10 years: this is an additional 55.21 forms of entry. Planned new housing developments in the borough are the largest factor contributing to this high demand. Over the same period, 2,875 secondary aged pupils, or over 19 forms of entry are forecast.

 

In conclusion, while the Council supports the work that the Office for National Statistics is doing to improve the country's population statistics, the work currently underway has addressed very few of the critical issues that Councils up and down the country face.

 

6. Actions to take forward the Commission on Integration and Cohesion's recommendations relating to migration.

 

The Council welcomes recommendations in Our Shared Future in relation to migration, specifically:

· The creation of a national body to manage migration

· The provision of English classes for all new migrants

· That ONS should co-ordinate migration statistics with the new Migration Impacts Forum

 

The Council, with its partners, is strongly committed to a challenging programme of work designed to build community cohesion in Barking and Dagenham. The recommendations of Our Shared Future will support this work, but needs to go further, to address the concerns raised above.