Baroness Berridge
Main Page: Baroness Berridge (Conservative - Life peer)
Baroness Berridge
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the contribution of Britain’s ethnic minorities to faith communities and public institutions in the United Kingdom.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, it is a privilege to lead this debate today, and I am grateful to all noble Lords who are speaking this evening. I declare my interest as outlined in the register.
In a speech on Magna Carta that I gave recently, I was asked what I would put into the first paragraph of a modern-day Magna Carta. My answer was an outline of who we are today as Britons. Whatever your view on Europe or immigration might be, Britain has changed and will continue to do so.
I will outline briefly some numbers and the contribution to our institutions. Of the UK’s 63 million population, 13% to 14% are black and minority ethnic, which is similar to the combined number of residents in Scotland and Wales. Our main cities, London, Manchester and Birmingham, do not just battle it out to be at the top of the premiership table, but as over half of the BME population live in these three cities each is competing to be the first majority non-white city. However, as a supporter of Leicester football club I think they may yet be pipped to the post for that honour.
Looking first through an ethnicity lens, Indians, who amount to 1.4 million citizens, are the most religiously diverse community, spread across Muslims, at 14%; Hindus, at 45%; Sikhs, at 22%; and Christians, who are overwhelmingly Catholic. Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities in the UK are almost entirely Muslim. Black Caribbeans are largely Christian, often from newer denominations, and black Africans are largely Christian but with a significant minority of Muslims, at 20%.
Those of Muslim faith are particularly diverse: 7.8% are actually white, 67.6% are Asian, 10% are black and 10% are other. The recent arrival of the Gurkhas has meant a boost to the 59.7% of Asians who represent the Buddhist faith, and 33.8% of Buddhists are actually white. If you are from the black and minority ethnic community, you are more likely to identify with a religion than the white population, to be religiously observant and to see religion as an important part of your life. In the British Caribbean community, 95% identify as Christian and 57% are in church at least once a week. Overall, between a third and a half of our main ethnic groups attend a religious service once a week. Those same groups believe overwhelmingly—70% of them—that religion plays an important part in their lives, compared with just 14% of the white population.
In my community, Christians are 92.7% white and 3.9% are black. Religious-identity figures of 59% in the census for Christians mask the fact that religious observance for Christians is huge among the black and minority ethnic population, often outside the traditional denominations, although the Catholic Church is the most diverse place of worship in the UK, which I hope the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, will reference. A Nigerian denomination, the Redeemed Christian Church of God, started 296 new churches in the UK in the five years to 2013, the largest of any single denomination. In just over 20 years this has grown to 475 parishes.
In 2013, the University of Roehampton did research and found over 240 new black and minority ethnic churches in the Borough of Southwark. Half of those were in one postcode alone, SE15. The borough has the highest concentration of black Africans in London, who are the fastest growing of the black and minority ethnic communities: 70% are Christian and 27% attend church weekly. As 91.5% do not identify as Anglican, these figures should not be surprising. Twenty per cent of British Caribbeans identify as Anglicans. The remainder are in denominations such as the New Testament Church of God, currently led by Bishop Bolt.
Perhaps these figures explain why 15% of the English population lives in Greater London, but 24% of church-going people in England on a Sunday are in London. Non-conformists are not exempt from this either. Trinity Baptist Church in South Norwood is the largest Baptist church in Europe, with 2,400 members and led by a British Ghanaian. Can the Minister outline how the Government and her department in Whitehall engage with the leadership of this diaspora-led church, which forms a large percentage of the 48% of church-going people each week in England who are outside the Anglican and Catholic denominations?
Although I have said in many Foreign Office debates that western Europe is known for its religious exceptionalism—as the rest of the world got more religious, we did not in the late 20th century—this does not hold for our black and minority ethnic community. This is where our future lies. Between 2001 and 2011, 80% of the UK’s population growth was in the black and minority community. Twenty-five per cent of all under-10s are not white. In London, non-whites already outnumber whites in every age group up to the age of 20. Only 9% of the under-25s in Newham say that they have no religion, as opposed to 39% of their white counterparts.
The debate here might seem obvious as regards the ethnicity of British Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, but without black Pentecostals, Filipino, Polish and Brazilian Catholics, and the Chinese in Anglican churches such as All Souls in Langham Place, the figures for the UK church in the UK would be unimaginable. Livingstone and others must be marvelling at the African denominations planting churches back here in the UK and at their contribution.
I do not want to focus on these people’s great social capital, as there have been many comprehensive debates on this in your Lordships’ House, but on other contributions. I know of many within the black community who when out of work do not claim benefits, even to the extent of paying each other’s mortgages. Often the family, not the state, is the first port of call. I have also heard of this within the Chinese and Muslim communities. There is a very high view of family and marriage. But there is the strange anomaly of the lack of mosques that are registered for the purposes of UK marriage law. Therefore, many Muslim marriages are not legally valid, which often exposes women to vulnerability. The Law Commission is currently investigating, but this is an urgent matter that needs the Government’s attention.
The main contribution of British BME citizens can be summed up in the story of a friend of mine. She has been a teacher for more than 20 years, but for the first time in her career she went to a school with a large number of Muslim students. At parents’ evenings, she found that their concerns were just like everybody else’s. “Are my children behaving in class? Are they making good grades? Are they going to get into the right university?”. These communities are hard-working and industrious and often entrepreneurial. In fact, they are just British. The Government state:
“We will use … the strong personal links between our diaspora communities and other countries, to achieve the best for Britain”.
If a significant number of hard-working British citizens are in transnational—religious—groups that are growing in global influence, especially in some of our emerging markets, such as India, China and Nigeria, how can this be harnessed for economic growth? As 84% of the world’s population has a faith, a growing number of our citizens will be connected to business leaders and decision-makers overseas. I shall give a brief example. The Prime Minister addressed an event of black Christians from the Redeemed Christian Church of God at the invitation of their leader pastor Agu Irukwu. There were more 40,000 people there. The equivalent event in Nigeria attracts 1 million people, so it should come as no surprise that the newly elected vice-president of Nigeria’s previous job was as a Redeemed Christian Church of God pastor.
Have any of our local enterprise partnerships or enterprise zones been encouraged to use their funds and expertise to understand how diaspora communities, their religious leaders and their businesses could be a driver for economic growth? We need to harness our diaspora as a vehicle for growth to benefit everyone.
In our own institution, on the best data from our Library, 50 out of 760 Members of this House are BME, which is 6.6%. In the light of what I have said, I hope someone will appoint from within the black-led church leadership to this House. In the Commons, it is similar at 6%, and the electorate is now about 10% BME, so there is no room for complacency. Since David Cameron became PM, the Conservatives have risen from two to 17 non-white MPs. In the same period the rise in Labour has been eight.
I was not aware when I submitted this Question for debate that there had been a survey of House staff and media coverage and that there is no black person in the senior pay grade in the staff of the House of Lords. The Lord Speaker is apparently to monitor this, but the same dynamic is true of the Commons. Most BME staff are in the lower pay grades. With the great success of the education department of the House, even more school children visit Parliament, and I think that disclosure, without identifying the staff member, MP or Peer, of the ethnic profile of MPs’ and Peers’ staff would be a gesture of support to the House authorities. Children more often than not see those people rather than us or House staff when they do a tour. We may look rather foolish if parliamentary staff change over the next few years, and if parliamentarians have the same issue we will attract similar publicity to Google, Facebook and Twitter, which were in the news last week for being able to put all their black and minority ethnic staff on one jumbo jet.
Sometimes it is the institutions that you least expect that change first, as evidenced by the recent appointment of Ken Olisa, the first British-born non-executive of a FTSE 100 company who is now the lord-lieutenant of London. The key leadership role is a vital statement, so hats off to the palace. This should be the Parliament of the end of the first blacks in this role, where DCLG shows the rest of Whitehall how to relate to diaspora communities and where these personal diaspora links are unlocked, bringing economic benefit for all. I am proud to be British and to be born at this time, when the British population is so ethnically diverse.