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Pursuit of harmony

June 2007: Tailored local initiatives are seen as key to promoting community cohesion.

The Commission on Integration and Cohesion reports today on community segregation and the key theme is expected to be the need to find local solutions to local problems.

Ruth Kelly, the communities secretary, told SocietyGuardian that national solutions make little sense because patterns or migration are so different across the country - from a well-settled Asian community in Bradford to the recent arrival of eastern European migrant workers in the West Country.

To help promote local solutions, the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) has collated cases of council best practice around the country.

For example, in Peterborough a New Link project has been set up bringing together a range of agencies to deal with the impact of new arrivals with little English in an asylum dispersal area. It also provides a one-stop-shop of services and support programmes for arrivals. And the council has established a project - called You, Me and Us - to provide workshops at schools to tackle racism and bullying.

Meanwhile, Office for National Statistics projections show that Slough's population is declining, while the council has found increasing demand for services. The council believes part of this discrepancy is due to the estimated 10,000 Polish workers who have entered the borough since 2004. This has had a significant impact on the housing service, as many recent migrant workers have ended up in crowded accommodation. It is not uncommon to find between 12 and 20 people sharing a three-bed house, using shift pattern sleeping to share beds.

Via interviews on the street and arranged through community groups, housing officers and employers, the council found 57% of new migrants to Slough had not registered with a local GP (a key driver in ONS migration statistics) and 43% of migrants who were eligible to register with the Home Office workers' registration scheme had not done so. The new migrant study also found that seven out of 10 of the migrants planned to stay in the UK. The council is now looking at setting up outreach services and using its research to push for extra central government funding to more accurately reflect its population.

Stockport council has created Islamic educational resource packs for schools to educate young people about Islam and Muslims in order to challenge negative images and to foster understanding and respect for Muslim residents and fellow pupils.

At Waltham Forest council, east London, a community cohesion response team was created following the arrests of 10 Waltham Forest residents last August on suspicion of engaging in terrorist activity. The team convened a meeting of community representatives and sent letters to mosques offering support and media advice; visited mosques with the borough commander and increased street warden patrols.

There are currently around 225,000 people living in Waltham Forest and, in line with many urban areas, the ethnic composition of the borough has been changing since 1981. The broad category of white groups fell from 88% in 1981 to 64% in 2001. The Asian Pakistani community is the second largest in London, after Newham, and the borough has the third largest Muslim population in London. Over a third of people in the borough are under 25.

The council plans work to deal with tensions in schools and has established a high-profile community reassurance campaign under the banner "225,000 people: 1 community".

Source: The Guardian

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