Ethnic Minorities

Lord Kennedy of Southwark Excerpts

Monday 6th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, for tabling this Question for debate today. It gives the House the opportunity to debate the important and growing contribution made by Britain’s ethnic minorities to faith communities and public institutions in the United Kingdom.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, said, approximately 8 million people, or 14% of the UK population, belong to an ethnic minority. Most of these communities live in urban areas but I was surprised to learn that half of them live in three cities in the UK, namely Greater London, Greater Birmingham and Greater Manchester. The noble Baroness is right: Leicester is already a majority ethnic minority city. It is also true that, for the BME community as a whole, faith plays an important part in the lives of a considerably greater proportion than it does for the white population of this country. Faith groups and local authorities show one of the very fruitful ways that faith communities and public institutions work together. The contributions made by faith groups to their local communities are varied—from working as street pastors to running food banks, providing debt advice or credit unions and caring for elderly and young people.

Ensuring good community relations or helping to improve community relations is one of the many ways in which ethnic minorities working with and in faith groups have been able to improve situations locally. Although there has always been room for improvement in the interaction between faith communities and local authorities, there appears to be no evidence that faith groups that look to provide caring services seek to do so only wholly within or exclusively for their own community. To improve the situation further, work needs to be undertaken jointly to get over these concerns and to build greater understanding and trust so that there is confidence on the ground. In particular, where it is proposed that services be provided by faith groups, maybe they should work together and be encouraged so that different organisations work together to tackle problems that they all share as a community.

Considerably more work needs to be done to get ethnic minorities elected to public authorities or Parliament and appointed to public bodies through the appointments process, although recently politicians have been elected and appointments made from ethnic minorities in far greater numbers. That is welcome.

We must never forget the contribution, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, of the service men and women from the Commonwealth. They came and fought and died for this country over many years in numerous conflicts. I hope that, while we are commemorating the First World War over the next few years, we ensure that the sacrifice of people from the Commonwealth is properly recognised in those commemorations.

It is always a pleasure to speak in a debate with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark. I agree with his contribution today, particularly on getting members of ethnic minorities into leadership roles in the church. As the right reverend Prelate said, one area of public service that has had a much greater proportion of people from ethnic minorities working in it is the National Health Service. The NHS staff census showed that 41% of hospital and community doctors are from ethnic minorities, along with 20% of all qualified nursing, midwifery and health visiting staff. The NHS is a wonderful institution and we have reason to be thankful for the care it provides for us all. We would all want not to be without it. However, without the contribution from the ethnic minority population, it would be unable to cope with the pressures every day in hospitals and other NHS institutions. The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, made very important points regarding HIV and sexual health plans. Those are things that need to be addressed.

My noble friend Lord Touhig spoke about the contribution of Catholic education. As someone who was a beneficiary of that system, attending St Joseph’s Camberwell and St Thomas the Apostle secondary school in Peckham, I very much agree with his comments. I also agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, about the contribution of the Irish community and the Catholic community to this country.

In conclusion, I hope I can say to the right reverend Prelate that maybe a future debate will include all the Southwarks in the current House, representing every Bench. I again thank the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, for tabling the Question for today. She should be very encouraged by the response. I think we could have gone on for at least another hour if we had had more time.