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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 369-iii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE COMMUNITIES AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT COMMITTEE
COMMUNITY COHESION AND MIGRATION
Tuesday 1 April 2008 MR DARRA SINGH MS SALLY HUNT, MR PATRICK WINTOUR and MS BHARTI PATEL MS SARAH SPENCER CBE and PROFESSOR RICHARD BLACK Evidence heard in Public Questions 136-200
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Communities and Local Government Committee on Tuesday 1 April 2008 Members present Dr Phyllis Starkey, in the Chair John Cummings Jim Dobbin Anne Main Dr John Pugh ________________ Witness: Mr Darra Singh, Chair of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, gave evidence. 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 Birmingham and Peterborough. I imagine members may wish to draw on that immediate experience in some of the questioning. May I start off with the CIC'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 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 should be 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. Q140 Anne Main: How much do you think cohesion teams could help? Mr Singh: Obviously if they are structured and resourced appropriately then they can help tremendously and the point we were trying to make in the report is that as a country we have a long tradition of dealing with migration and change. What has really surprised a number of people is the pace of change, which you will have picked up over recent years, and also the fact that the patterns of migration, as Trevor Phillips picked up in his evidence to you, are now very different. It is no longer people from the old Commonwealth countries coming to this country but much more varied. So pace and rapidity are particularly important. Some areas are more acclimatised and are used, through their history, to that kind of change; parts of London in particular. Some of the rural areas, Peterborough in particular and the surrounding environment there, are something which is a newer phenomenon. It is important particularly for those areas for the new teams to be resourced up to an adequate level to be able to say there are challenges faced in other areas, this is an element of good practice we can bring to assist you and try to get underneath the skin of the issues facing them to make suggestions and proposals about how they can respond appropriately. Q141 Chair: Today has seen the publication of the report of the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs. Mr Singh: I thought you might ask about that. Q142 Chair: It would be useful just to have your initial - and we recognise obviously that it is initial - response to their main conclusion, which, as I understand it, is that the economic impact of immigration is neutral. Mr Singh: Having very quickly read the report, obviously there is quite a lot of detail in their and I will need to go through it spending a lot more time on it, it seems to me that one of the things they are calling for is a lot more evidence, more research in terms of how we appropriately measure the economic impact or otherwise of migration. Certainly thinking about it not from the macro level but from Ealing's perspective, in terms of migration and the contributions that migrants make to local public sector services, they are tremendous in Ealing. We recruit social workers from abroad, for example, in children's services and the local hospital recruits nurses and doctors and we have planners from outside the UK. We have a whole range of other services which are dependent to some degree or other on labour from abroad, from outside the UK. It is right that we should also focus on investing in citizens in this country and residents in terms of upskilling them and providing them with the opportunities to access the labour market, but we need to do that in a sustained and measured way rather than saying we should stop one approach and move over to another. Yes, we must always continue to make the case for migration and take the point about effective measurement and evidence. It is interesting that in my reading of the report, in quite a number of the recommendations, though not all, there is a call for better evidence. That must be right. Q143 Jim Dobbin: It has been very interesting for the Committee to look at different parts of the country and the diverse problems which exist across the country. It will be interesting to see how our report turns out. Your Commission's report did not draw any firm conclusions on the significance of immigration as a driver of poor community cohesion. Why was that? Mr Singh: Our report was a very thorough piece of work. As you probably gathered from the report itself, we spoke to something in excess of 2,000 people. We had over 600 written submission, we talked to individuals from across a whole range of different backgrounds in nine regions in England and we also went to Scotland and Northern Ireland. What we were trying to reflect and what we wanted to be was to be as practical as we possibly could be and not to produce a piece of work which was more of an academic nature but to produce a piece of work with recommendations which actually fed off the contributions we received and built upon the good practice which we had seen. In fact we did look at the impact of migration at a local level and that was our remit as opposed to making a comment about national policy on immigration. That was not our remit and I did not really see that as my role as Chair of the Commission. It was really about how localities can adapt to change and what they can learn from what is happening in other parts of the country which purports to be good practice. Q144 Jim Dobbin: If you believe what you read in the media at the present time recent immigration is seen as a driver of poor community cohesion. Would you agree with that? Do you think other factors such as deprivation or crime could be involved in that? Mr Singh: What the research we undertook as a Commission has clearly shown is that we must avoid being simplistic in terms of trying to identify one single cause of either good or poor levels of cohesion at the moment. There is a whole range of different impacts and the levels of cohesion are driven by an area's history in terms of its industrial makeup and so on; the characteristics of the individuals who live there, for example their age, their qualifications, education and so on and also individual attitudes. Yes, deprivation can have an impact and can drive down levels of cohesion, but it is not always the case that happens. Levels of crime and people's fear of crime can also drive down levels of cohesion but that does not always happen and also levels of change, the rate at which an area changes in terms of its population, the so-called churn, can also have an impact. There is not one cause and there is not one solution. That is why each area is unique. Comparing Bradford, for example, to Barking and Dagenham there are different challenges in both those areas and different responses are required. It does not mean you cannot learn something from each other, but you cannot always export an activity from Barking and Dagenham into Bradford and hope it will have the same effect. Q145 Jim Dobbin: Why do you think a new national body for migration is required? Mr Singh: We, as commissioners, felt that the responsibility, therefore accountability in terms of dealing with and responding to the challenges that migration develops in this country, is fragmented. You will be aware from the submissions you have already received that there is at the moment the Migration Impacts Forum, the Migration Advisory Committee, a Migration Directorate has been established in CLG and responsibilities quite sensibly lie with different government departments. What we were really looking for was something which brought all that together, not because we want to add to the layers of bureaucracy which exist at the moment - and as a bureaucrat I assure you of that - but because there needs to be a focal point in terms of responsibility and accountability and also an ability to respond, for example, positively to the report which was issued this morning, to be able to commission research and develop evidence as well as spread good practice and work with a range of other partners to improve resilience and positive relationships between communities. Q146 Jim Dobbin: So you do not see a new body as duplicating the work of all these other organisations you have mentioned? Mr Singh: No, in my opinion a new body should help to bring that work together and provide a clear sense of accountability and responsibility for these issues. In his evidence Trevor Phillips suggested that we should wait until we got some basic building blocks in place. I think actually, whatever those building blocks are, we should respond more positively to that now. CLG are looking to prepare a business case and I look forward to seeing the outcome of that exercise. Q147 Anne Main: I want you to focus on local population numbers. Before you give me an answer to my question, I should just like to remind you of what was said in their Lordships' report, which was that there was a concern "More work needs to be done - by both central and local government - to assess whether or how much extra funding for local services is needed because of increased immigration. The Government should ensure that local councils have adequate funding to provide and pay for the increasing demand". That was in paragraph 151. We have heard from councils that they dispute hotly the numbers supposedly living in their local area. What effect do you think the inaccuracies of local population statistics and any lag behind making sure they are up to date has on community cohesion? Mr Singh: There are several impacts. An issue we face in Ealing, if I may revert to being chief executive of Ealing Council, and we are the third largest London borough by population, is that according to the census we have 303,000 residents. When we look at our information around school children, look at our information in terms of national insurance number registrations or workers' registration scheme numbers or indeed GP registrations, we estimate that is an underestimate, at our best estimate, by about 12,000 people. An issue for us all is how to get more real-time information or as close to real time as possible in terms of population numbers. Yes, it definitely does have an impact. Another issue is that the constant doubts which are expressed about the quality of the data do in some way undermine public confidence in the statements made about the number of people living in the UK and in different localities. There is a knock-on effect there. Obviously it feeds into the financial formula and to some extent drives demands on local public services as well. These are points which have been well made to you and we do pick up the issue in our report about the work of the ONS and the need quickly to improve how robust the data collection mechanisms are. Q148 Anne Main: If you accept that community cohesion needs to be funded adequately - I think you have said that a few times and especially with regard to community cohesion teams - and data is lagging behind, can you give us any idea how you think this could be improved? Mr Singh: Yes. Funding is an important issue but I would also argue that we cannot wait until additional funding is provided, if the case can be adequately made and the resources are available, before we respond to the challenges which we face in different localities. What we set out in our report is a range of recommendations which can be done now. Initiatives around developing clear local visions, working with our partners to have an effective community strategy, initiatives around research on understanding local populations and community dynamics and aspirations, issues around designing and delivering existing services so they are sensitive to the needs of different communities are all things which can be done now and do not need to await additional resources. That is what we are doing in Ealing, in Barking and Dagenham this is happening and in many localities. The question in addition to that of course is how we adequately reflect the additional demand on services and how we adequately resource that within the system. That is a much bigger question but we do not need to wait to answer that before we do the rest of the work. Q149 Anne Main: In which case what should Government be doing to support local authorities experiencing these rapid population changes? Mr Singh: A range of things. Central Government's main responsibility in this is setting the appropriate national framework and some of the elements of responses in CLG's document produced earlier this year --- Q150 Anne Main: Yes, but we have been told by councils under strain that frameworks, strategies, visions and ideas do not pay the bills when they have communities feeling that they are being short-changed somehow because of all these migrants coming in and using resources. This is just putting it blandly. We have just visited a council today which has 12 BNP members trading on those very fears. I would just like you to try to tell us the real elements of how a community is going to deal with accusations that funds are being stretched and resources are being stretched too thinly. Mr Singh: How we deal with them and how many areas deal with them is first of all by actually being transparent about how resources are allocated, what is available in locality, providing plenty of information in terms of what we spend on different services and how individuals access services. We talk a lot in our report about busting myths in terms of access to housing and education and so on for new arrivals. It is not appropriate for us simply to hold our hands up and say we cannot do much because we do not have enough money or we need more money. If we were to say that, we would be neglecting our responsibility in terms of making the best of our existing resources. Q151 Anne Main: You are anticipating my next question but I still want to ask it exactly. Do you believe then that there is or is not a need for a contingency fund to support local authorities so that money is there up front for those experiencing rapid new inward migration. Should an area which is expecting to take a lot of churn with migration have a special casebook for them to have a contingency grant? Mr Singh: I support the LGA's, Local Government Association's proposals in terms of a contingency fund. I note the additional funding which has already been made available in response to my Commission's report, the £50 million and how that has been distributed, and I have had information about that. We need to come forward with some evidence as to why that is not enough and also probably do a bit more thinking about how resources are allocated. Yes, it is right to have a contingency fund, but we need to do some careful work about establishing how that contingency fund is allocated. Q152 Anne Main: So the welcome centre at Peterborough, which people cite as being a useful contact and entry point, is expensive to run. Do you think the Government should be funding welcome centres in areas which are expected to welcome lots of migrants? Mr Singh: I come back to the fact that I do not think Government should be saying they will fund welcome centres or a single initiative in every single area. The case needs to be made by local government and our partners as to what works and why additional resources are required in different areas. We need some evidence to make the case. Coming back to the report issued this morning by the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs, it is all about making the case and providing the evidence. Q153 Anne Main: Do you support that view? Mr Singh: We should provide the evidence. Q154 Chair: Interestingly, we put that question to the council this morning and their view was that they thought that they wished to provide that information to the new migrants in Barking and Dagenham in a different way. Different councils do different things. Mr Singh: Absolutely. Q155 Chair: On the whole question of funding, CLG actually has two funding streams to go to local authorities related to this matter. There is community cohesion but there is also the prevention of terrorism stream. Do you have any views on the interaction between those two streams and whether it is helpful to have separated the money out in that way and whether councils might not be tempted to apply for one stream of funding and then apply it to projects which more properly might be funded under the other. Mr Singh: Yes, I take the point about the two sources of funding. My view on this and certainly talking to colleague chief executives - interestingly this was picked up in the Government's response to the Commission's report - is that whilst different streams of activity are complementary and there are some overlaps, it is right there should be some targeted activity around PVE, preventing violent extremism, as well as mainstreaming our activity in terms of work around community integration and cohesion. The prevention of violent extremism funding goes into the area of base grant, so yes, councils and LSPs, local strategic partnerships, do have an opportunity to flex some of the funding. In my experience the people I talk to tell me they are very mindful of the criteria which attach to that funding and the aims and objectives of the PVE. Yes, there may well always be a temptation; there is some overlap between the integration and cohesion activity and PVE, preventing violent extremism. It depends where localities wish to target their resources. There is always a temptation but I think people will be sensible about it. Q156 Jim Dobbin: If the Government had to agree to the contingency fund it would be difficult to prioritise that, would it not? They would have to ring-fence it for a start. It would not be easy to allocate that across the country. Mr Singh: Absolutely; yes. If a fund were set up, yes, of course there would need to be criteria for the allocation of that funding. It may well be that some of the factors could be the levels of mobility within particular areas, the levels of churn as demonstrated, let us say, by registrations for national insurance numbers, or as demonstrated by demand for GP services for example. Looking at existing data sources, I am using those as a proxy to show that the level of churn is so significant in a locality that there are additional challenges there. If a fund were set up, we would need to do two things: one is for local government and local partnerships to demonstrate their case for the funding to be allocated to particular areas; second is not to use the availability of that funding to divert us from our mainstream activity. Q157 Chair: May I just ask about the question your Commission used to assess community cohesion? I cannot lay my hands on what exactly was asked but it was about how well you feel people of different backgrounds get on in your area. May I relate it to the choices that a number of other local authorities have made, including Barking and Dagenham, to develop their own question to assess community cohesion? I think the Barking and Dagenham one laid stress on fairness and equity within the question they asked. Do you think that it is helpful to tailor these questions for different areas? If it is, how are we going to get any sort of measure across the country of whether certain areas have problems with community cohesion or not? Mr Singh: The question we used was: how well do people from different backgrounds get on with each other in your locality within a 15- or 20-minute distance from where you live? It is a standard question which has been used in various surveys going back several years. The reason we stuck with that question is precisely because of the point you make, which is that there is a level of consistency there and we can track positive or negative results year on year. As I understand it, that question will go into the new place survey, so there will be consistency at the national level, but within that, individual councils and partnerships in different localities undertake their own surveys. Yes, it is right that people have some flexibility to establish their own questions at a local level. We need to have something where we can compare performance year on year and between localities at a national level and the system is there to do that. Chair: Thank you very much indeed. Memoranda submitted by Advisory Board on Naturalisation and Integration and University and College Union
Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Ms Sally Hunt, General Secretary, University and College Union (UCU), Mr Patrick Wintour, Acting Chair and Ms Bharti Patel, Secretary, Advisory Board on Naturalisation and Integration (ABNI), gave evidence. Q158 Chair: We have representatives from two different organisations so I shall leave it to you to decide who responds to the question and if the other organisation wants to add to it, then please do. I should like to start off by focusing on ESOL provision. What effects do you believe the recent changes in ESOL funding have had on the integration of migrants? Ms Hunt: It is fair to say that within the University and College Union we have done extensive work in terms of talking to our members about the impacts on this. What we know is that immediately following the changes there were shifts in waiting lists, there were cuts in courses, there were changes in the numbers of people and the communities who were making use of courses coming in. The difficulty we have had, even though we have submitted in our evidence that which we have got so you can see it, is that it is still quite patchy in terms of being able to assess this. What we are concerned about is that, even though research has been done by the Department on this, it is aggregated so it is very difficult for any outside organisation to break that down. Anecdotally we know that a lot of communities where women do not necessarily work have been impacted upon and are not necessarily applying in the same numbers they were. We know that there have been different impacts, depending on whether it is settled communities or not. What we cannot tell you, and no-one can unless we get the information coming through from the research already done, is quite how that works in terms of the spread across the country. We know that the students have changed. What we do not know yet is how that pattern has developed throughout the year. It is something we are very worried about. Mr Wintour: The Board of which I am Acting Chair advises on naturalisation and integration and our principal concern therefore is with those who could loosely be termed aspirant citizens. In my day job I have been tracking things around ESOL over a number of years and I have to say, having seen various substantial pieces of research by KPMG and NIACE and now looking at this most recent consultation from the Department, DIUS, on the future strategy of ESOL, there does seem to be a very real difficulty around measuring the impact of the current investment in ESOL and being able to identify what is actually happening in terms of the delivery of the teaching of English to the different categories of learners. My experience is that the whole funding of ESOL has remained something of a swamp and I see no signs of that changing. Q159 Chair: The changes which have been announced are giving priority to the groups which one might expect to be applying for citizenship essentially, or indeed some of them may already have it, that is those settled in the UK and overseas spouses and those with refugee status essentially. Are you saying that there is no evidence from either of your organisations whether the investment in free ESOL provision actually has any effect on integration or not? Mr Wintour: We still wait to hear a very cogent explanation of what the impact of the current level of investment of ESOL has been. Members of my Board, which includes those who have been working in this field for many years, continually visit FE colleges and monitor what the situation is. It seems to be very patchy; there are some areas where there are reports of a significant waiting list for precisely the groups one would have thought would be priorities and therefore should be the beneficiaries of possible changes in funding. I suspect that part of the problem is that the FE colleges, who are the primary deliverers of the teaching programmes, do not have any real appetite for identifying groups by their immigration status and therefore the collection of data about who the learners are and what impact the whole ESOL regime is having does seem difficult to unravel. Ms Patel: Anecdotally it is fair to say that probably all of us here would say that the investment into ESOL is having a positive impact. I think Patrick's point is that what it needs is some further evaluation to work out exactly what that impact is in terms of integration. Certainly the Board has undertaken some visits to FE colleges quite recently and when we go out on these visits we talk to the participants, the learners themselves and it is clear to us that the interaction within the classroom is quite beneficial for integration. If you ask the individuals themselves, they say just how valuable the experience has been for them and for their lives and their integration to be able to speak English. I think Patrick is right when he says that we have not yet seen a formal and rigorous evaluation into the money which has been spent versus what is coming out the other end. Q160 John Cummings: How do you measure the success of the enterprise? What tables do you keep? At any one time can you see how many have taken advantage and have succeeded in learning the language proficiently enough to make themselves understood and perhaps to write? Ms Patel: I did qualify my statement by saying I was speaking anecdotally. John Cummings: Do you have any figures to prove the success or otherwise of the scheme? Who audits the scheme? Chair: The issue is that it is obviously easy to measure how many people learn English; that is dead simple. That is not the question. The question is: how valuable is the investment of free English language provision in helping those individuals to integrate into British society? It is a different issue completely, not whether they have learned English. John Cummings: That is why I was quite specific. I am wondering about the success for people attending this particular course and how proficient they become at the end of the exercise. Chair: We can provide that data. The key question is how it contributes to integration. John Cummings: No, it is the key question for me. Q161 Chair: Can we provide the answer to Mr Cummings question and then can we do the integration one? Ms Hunt: I am not clear whether I will give you a satisfactory answer. Where we were trying to explain the difficulty we all have is that the level and the detail you are asking for simply is not there in the way that we want. If you are looking at what is happening in level one, level two and level three, that will change depending on the environment you are in and the people that we are asking about. One of the key points that we within UCU are stressing is that we need to have disaggregated data so you can get the very answer you want. We all know - and this is worth saying simply to state the obvious - that ESOL courses are possibly the most important thing that can happen to an individual in terms of their ability to integrate within a community. Learning a language is the most important part of integration in order that you can then contribute to the civic society, the economy and all other aspects. What we know, following the changes in funding, is that enrolments across the piece were affected. What we know specifically is that learners who need beginner level courses and entry level courses, the most vulnerable in effect, were the ones who stopped coming in in the levels of numbers that they were. The difficulty is, without having that data available in a way we can really break down, we think it is not possible for huge judgments to be made in terms of how we progress matters. If we know that our tutors, who are at the coalface, who are the people who are very experienced in being able to judge the students who normally try to come in the doors, are telling us that it has shifted and immediately so, we know that there is an issue there in terms of the most vulnerable now not having the access to that support that was there. Q162 John Cummings: So you do not have the necessary data to answer the question I have just asked. Ms Hunt: I do not think that at the moment you can have detailed data and that is something you should be asking for very definitely because it is something we all need to have if we are to make that judgment. Q163 Chair: May I just clarify something because the cost issue is very important here? When you equate level one and the one below with vulnerable, it would be the case, would it not that, for example, an A8 migrant coming over here to work might be going in for those entry level courses, just as a refugee or an asylum seeker? Ms Hunt: It could be. Again, it is about being very careful about not making a generic statement about that and you are asking the right question. One of the difficulties that we think needs to be thought about is that whilst you need to have some kind of national framework in terms of Government support and you need to have that integrated into local government planning and therefore there has to be flexibility, we know that, for example, if you are looking at rural communities having a lot of immigration coming in which is based on farming, based on low-paid labour frankly, based on small employers in terms of numbers, the issues there in terms of support and how that is done may be very different to those who are in settled communities in urban areas. Without the detail it is hard for anyone to give you a snap judgment as to whether this policy will work or that will not. There needs to be some level of breakdown there and level of recognition of flexibility. John Cummings: Who is going to collect the detail? Chair: The Government. Q164 John Cummings: Is anyone collecting the detail? Ms Hunt: The LSC have an analysis. What we are suggesting is that something needs to be looked at in greater detail. Q165 Anne Main: One of the interesting things which came out of the Lords' report in terms of economic environment was that the biggest winners, including immigrants and their employers, are immigrants and their employers in the UK. In which case, who should provide or should anyone provide or be responsible for the cost of the English-language classes? Should it be the Government? Should it be employers, if they are the ones who seem to be benefiting, or should it be the individuals? Do you have a view on that? Mr Wintour: There is a very strong case in the sense of the labour market being a very important driver around migration, that employers should bear a substantial responsibility not only for the teaching of English-language skills but also more broadly for the whole integration of employees into their local communities. Q166 Anne Main: You are saying they should bear it. Should bear what? The cost of making sure their employees learn English and register on an ESOL course? Mr Wintour: A colleague who sits on the ABNI Board, Sir Gulam Noon, is such an example. His business is a very significant employer of people whose first language is not English and he does provide exactly those sorts of classes for his own workforce and there are other examples of employers who do just that. Q167 John Cummings: It is not across the piece, is it? Are you saying that there should be some statutory obligation on employers of economic migrants? Mr Wintour: Possibly. I remember as a young man being responsible for a business in the days when there was a levy under the old Industrial Training Board and all I can tell you from my own experience is that employers are extremely adept at being able to find their way round all sorts of statutory requirements in terms of the provision of training. It is important that this is looked at in a much broader context of what the Government are doing in order to engage with employers around skills and training rather than perhaps to target some specific provision around English language. Q168 Anne Main: To stop them sidestepping that then, should any new points-based immigration system include English-language provision as a criterion for the employer should they wish to sponsor an overseas worker? Mr Wintour: That would perhaps be effective for those wanting to get A-star rating under the new proposals under this new points system; that, along with various other requirements on employers to undertake responsibility for the integration of migrant workers. Q169 Anne Main: So you have sort of moved to a stronger position than you probably were a few sentences ago. Mr Wintour: I have to say that whilst I have experience of the old Industrial Training Boards, I have not had experience as an employer of working under that sort of regime operated by the Home Office. It is early days. It will be extremely interesting to see. Q170 Anne Main: Local authorities do have to prioritise and we understand there are priorities for asylum seekers and so on and quite rightly so. However, for the people who are in economic activity and appear to be benefiting themselves and their employer I should like to press you to say whether or not you believe there should be a strong case for the employer to do far more to have community cohesion by somehow being actively involved in having to provide funding or guaranteeing sponsoring and funding at the same time. Mr Wintour: I would be very interested to know what evidence you took from employers on your visits, for example in Peterborough, which has clearly had a tremendous influx of migrants in terms of its geographical location, in terms of all the industries. I would be very interested to know what local employers and people did tell you about what they are currently providing, whether for example they have a new link centre. Q171 Anne Main: Actually one of them in Peterborough said to us that they recognised that quite often, apart from the odd health and safety phrase, many of their employees did not need to have English within the workforce and in fact when they got English they often migrated off to better jobs. That was one of the things they told us. I remember hearing about a fork-lift truck company. Mr Wintour: I remember an employer being asked why they were not investing more in training making precisely that point that if they invested in training their workforce they very often went off to work for somebody else, which suggests that if you want to leave your employees sufficiently incompetent then they will remain with you. It does seem to me a weak argument which I have never found a very attractive one. We are looking at small- and medium-sized employers who very often are working in very low margin industries so, for example, those employers who come within the remit of the new gangmaster licensing authority do not have a lot of margin in terms of their investment and that is one of the difficulties. The sort of businesses which would support government efforts in terms of upskilling the workforce by and large are not the sort of employers who directly employ migrants. Take big supermarkets for example, they are crucially dependent on migrants in their supply chain though they may themselves not see themselves as significant employers of migrant labour. In those areas around agriculture, food, packing, processing, care industry, construction industry, very often you are dealing with employers who do not have a terrific track record in terms of their commitment to skill development and would not see this as a primary responsibility and would much prefer to see it parked at the doorstep of Government. Ms Patel: Pushing on the door of voluntary initiatives as well. Patrick helped to broker something called the employers' pledge a few years ago and it would be worth seeing how much further it can be taken by employers to implement some of the objectives of that, looking at other possible incentives around. One idea which has come out is the possibility of creating a tax incentive for employers to provide language training and so on. It is worth seeing what further efforts can be made to make employers do some of this voluntarily. Ms Hunt: Yes, there is a very strong case for compulsion because the evidence about voluntary contributions shows that it does not work. If we are looking at discussions taking place and potentially coming forward through the legislation around agency workers, we ought to look at how that is actually going to provide some kind of framework that says that if agencies are bringing in migrant workers, then they have to have some kind of responsibility for what happens to them when they are here. We have to look at how local government is also asked to be accountable in terms of measures they have and language should be one of those and there has to be an element of how they are funding that. Equally, it is not reasonable, given that we all say that this is a priority in terms of government policy and social inclusion, for it simply to be the DIUS which funds it. We ought to be looking at much broader government funding for that in the discussion between ministries as to who has to take responsibility for that. It is not unfair to say that the business case is often put in such a way that we all say that it is in our interests for there to be better language. Actually it is in the interests of many businesses not to comply with the legal minimums which are there in terms of employment rights and language is one of the major tools for a worker to be able to express themselves and actually break out of that. It is something which we have to look at seriously and accept that compulsion is something which is about our own responsibility to individuals coming into the country. Q172 Jim Dobbin: At some stage some migrants will want to attain British citizenship and we see ceremonies sprouting up across the country and in town halls around the country. Of course we are talking about language and the importance of learning the English language, but there is inaccessibility to courses across the country. To what extent is that a barrier to migrants achieving citizenship? Ms Hunt: It is a huge barrier. It varies literally from community to community and it varies according to locality. It can also vary if someone is within a settled community or someone who has come into a particular location and they want to move to another location because they can start a course in one area which might not be available elsewhere. It again goes back to whether we are absolutely committed to what has been said. If this citizenship involves language, if we are saying that social inclusion has to have at its heart someone's ability to speak and communicate, then what we have to accept is that the provision of ESOL is not something which can simply be about particular funding streams at a national level. It has to be funding streams which take account of local authorities' and FE colleges' ability to focus on the communities they have and respond in that way. It has to be something that accepts that both those who work and those who do not work have different needs and have different ways of accessing that kind of language. A good example is that there are many people, women in particular, who now are not able to access courses in the most basic way. That is not about them coming into the community as strangers; that is about people who are often coming in to families who are already settled, but because they are women, they are the spouse, they do not get free provision for a whole year. It can be that they are part of a family or the child of that family but because they are over 16 it is three years before they get free provision. We are actually setting up barriers in all sorts of different ways and between people within the same community in a way which makes no sense to me if what we are saying is that language, the ability to speak, the ability to commit, is something we believe is actually at the heart of bringing people together. It makes no sense at the moment. Q173 Jim Dobbin: That brings us on to cost of learning English. Lord Goldsmith made a suggestion that loans should be provided. Do you agree with that? Ms Hunt: No. I did read that and thought very hard about it because I can understand that if we have a limit we have to find different ways of doing it. However, there is something very basic here which is that if you are the least able to provide for your own family financially and if you are not able to earn the kind of income which makes you feel secure in terms of being able to provide for your family, I am not quite clear why us suggesting you take out a loan, that is get further into debt, is going to encourage those people anyway and I certainly do not think it is something the state should encourage those people into. If you are already poor, you are already prevented in so many ways from accessing society and accessing support and opportunities. Saying that you have to go into debt in order to try that when you are already not able and not confident is something I think we should be very, very careful of. The simple answer is no. Either we believe that we want to have community and we want to have the ability to communicate and we accept that is something we all benefit from collectively as a society or we do not. If we believe that, we should support it. Mr Wintour: There is evidence that for those who are progressing on the journey to citizenship - the evidence that we look at is in terms of the test that people take - the pass rates are very significant. The Bangladeshi community, for example, is under 50 per cent, whereas, perhaps not surprisingly in terms of language, the Australians are 97 per cent. There are significant variations and a lot of the evidence therefore about the language needs of different groups comes through quite strongly in the figures we look at in terms of the results from the UK test. I should add, in the context of our discussions about ESOL, that it is very important to remember that we are not just talking about language but we are talking about teaching about life in the UK in its broadest sense. It is very much in our interest to make sure that the contents of this book, which is about life in the UK in its broadest sense, are well understood. Coming back to our discussion about the role of employers, it is important that they take that on as well and not simply think in terms of the technical language that people need in order to operate in the workplace. Q174 Jim Dobbin: A general question about your working relationship with the Department for Communities and Local Government. Can you tell us a bit about your relationship and some examples of how you are working with the Department? Mr Wintour: My colleague and I had a meeting very recently with the new head of this new Migration Directorate in CLG to find out more about what that was focusing on. We were pleased to hear that was drawing together the different strands within communities and local government, because that is all part of the difficulty of working across different government departments, the Home Office, DIAS, CLG. We were pleased to see that CLG were at least drawing together the threads in that Department. My question to him was to see where there were examples that CLG was able to find of local communities doing this well. Our interest in this, in terms of the tripod, would be the teaching and therefore the role of the FE colleges and the other community groups, the test centre and also the town hall in terms of the celebration when citizens finally go through at the end of the exam. We would like to see much stronger links at the local level and therefore in the case of Darra Singh and the London Borough of Ealing we would like to see the local authority taking much more of a lead in terms of drawing all this together around the delivery of cohesion and citizenship. Chair: It might be made easier when the LSC role stops. May I thank you very much for the evidence you have given us. Memorandum submitted by Professor Richard Black and Dr Eugenia Markova Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Ms Sarah Spencer CBE, Associate Director and Programme Head, Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) and Professor Richard Black, Sussex Centre for Migration Research, University of Sussex, gave evidence. 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 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 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 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 association. 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. 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 the right to do so. Ms Spencer: Ours would have acquired the right to do so after they became 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: It was not my study. 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 the 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 --- 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. 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 the devout 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 in 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 in the early hours of the morning of the debris 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, 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 this 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 the 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 that has 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 and that 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 or 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. Q200 Jim Dobbin: Does it matter, is it good or bad, if people from different backgrounds live parallel lives? Professor Black: Yes, it does matter. Our study does not show that directly, but my understanding is that the research evidence is out there, that over the medium term, if communities live parallel lives, the potential for misunderstanding and tension is greater. I would add that there are at least three dimensions in which people can live parallel lives, so we should not make the mistake of feeling that it is only integration in the workplace, for example, that matters. There is residential integration, there is workplace integration and there is also integration in leisure activity. I was very struck by Barack Obama's comments in the American presidential race a few weeks ago saying that the most segregated hour in American life is ten o'clock on Sunday morning when the different communities go off to their separate churches. Chair: Thank you very much indeed. |