Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Communities: Inequalities

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 25th February 2020 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I join all noble Lords in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, for securing this debate and for her excellent introduction to it. I am also pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, in focusing on some positives, because it is important. Sometimes in these kinds of debates we focus on all the problems and difficulties. One of the things I want to do in my brief contribution is to focus on some positives.

However, to begin: the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, was right to focus on scapegoating. That is a real issue, and we as British society need to acknowledge collectively that we have a problem with racism. Some of the most extreme racism is directed at the Roma, Gypsy and Traveller communities. That is a fact, and it is here in this report. We are, however, grouping together three large and very diverse groups here, and as a resident of Sheffield I will focus on one particular community: the largely very recently-arrived Slovak Roma community in Sheffield.

I direct the Minister’s attention to a couple of reports that she may not be aware of, because they are important, positive and constructive contributions to this debate. One is titled Roma in Sheffield: Mapping services and local priorities. We are debating in this House of Lords at the centre of privilege, but we have to start by saying—as this report does: “listen to Roma priorities” to engage and hear what this community in Sheffield, and other communities that we are discussing, have to say. The report finds that there are significant gaps in the knowledge of many staff working with the Roma in Sheffield. The Government can and should be doing more on that, as indeed this report highlights.

We need to stress, and it is worth saying, that we are debating a report that was ordered to be printed on 29 March 2019. The third thing that the report says is that services need to react quickly to changes. In the world we are in now with Brexit, and with many people having come to Britain very recently, there are some real issues here; we have to be more nimble.

The other study carried out in Sheffield is called Nurturing Slovak Roma Children at Secondary School. The title refers to the fact that the first language of many of the schoolchildren is Romany, which is not necessarily a formalised, single language but a group of languages. Their second language is Slovak and their third is English. I point in particular to an article in a Slovak weekly called .týžden that profiles one young man, Andre, who came here as an 11 year-old, speaking no English. He is now a first-year psychology student. He does regular translation work and goes into schools, interpreting between Slovak, English and Romany, but he can also translate from Hungarian and French when required.

I have just come from the APPG on small and microbusinesses. There was a lot of discussion about the problems of Britain—of productivity and skills shortages. Perhaps we should be thinking about this in another kind of way: these communities have an enormous range of skills and can make huge contributions. Perhaps we do not focus on that enough. We know from everything this report tells us that we are not opening up and allowing those skills to flourish.

My final point is that like many of these communities the Roma have moved into some of the most disadvantaged areas of Sheffield, where they are living side by side with people suffering great disadvantage, racism and discrimination. We need to think about how we help communities to live together.