Global Migration and Mobility (EUC Report)

Lord Bishop of Derby Excerpts

Thursday 6th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Derby]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the opportunity to debate this report and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, and his colleagues for their work and insights. I want to shift the focus away from education a little and draw on my local knowledge in Derby and Derbyshire to look at what paragraph 71 of the report refers to as the “valuable role” played by “voluntary and private sector” in what it calls “civil society” in helping to formulate and implement policies of integration. As we know from other debates in the House this week, integration is the great issue of our time. It needs careful work both face to face and on the ground as well as a policy framework. For migration, the issue of integration is the great litmus test.

The Government state in their response that,

“the Government believes that communities, businesses and voluntary bodies should be enabled to lead integration in their local area”.

I welcome that, and I want to give an example of what I am involved in in Derby, with voluntary groups and civil society trying to lead integration—some of the good things and some of the problems we face—and ask whether the report might point in directions that could be helpful to us. With colleagues, I have been involved in initiating something we call “Growing Communities” in Derby. As the provision of welfare and local authority investment in care systems and the social fabric of our city have been withdrawn through the cuts, I have convened a group of faith leaders, voluntary groups and the local authority to see how citizens can work together to grow communities in the city, using our various resources, initiative and ingenuity. As the report recognises, we bring to this good local knowledge, face-to-face contacts and a realistic assessment of what might be done so that integration is acted out between real people.

Let me give two examples of things we are doing that are particularly affected by migration into our city and our need to handle it creatively. Tomorrow, we will hold in Derby Cathedral a food summit, as part of the preparations for the G8 meeting. This is not just about the IF campaign and global hunger, it is about hunger in our own city. One of the things that will happen at this food summit is the launch of an integrated and co-ordinated approach to food banks. Over the past year, there has been an enormous increase in the demand for them. This is not just from the normal homeless people on the street, this is from families who, by the end of the week, do not have enough money to buy food to feed the children. Many of these families are from migrant communities. We are trying to create a co-ordinated response around food banks from voluntary and faith groups, to include a proper integration strategy, which will involve many needy migrant people.

There is a second thing that we are trying to do. We have a great influx of people from eastern Europe, especially Roma people. Their young people not only have language problems but also find it very difficult to integrate. It has been the faith groups, especially the churches, that have set up youth and evening activities and provided resources and space for young people, first to get integrated among themselves as Roma and then to begin to connect with others in the community—local, face-to-face and on-the-spot integration.

I could give lots of other examples but those are just two: hungry people—migrants who have no work and no resources—and young people who are finding it very hard to not just seek security in their own little grouping. However, what we are trying to do is essentially reactive. There is no clear frame for us. We are trying to work with the local authority, and it is trying to work with us, but grants are given and they end after the year. There is a lot of confusion. A lot of good work is done and then does not bear the fruit that it might.

All this is exacerbated by what I am afraid is a frighteningly buoyant and developing industry in our city, which the report mentions, that of human trafficking. Sadly, we were in the papers for a case last year. There is an enormous demand for prostitution, not just in our city but in many cities. This is an issue for government as well as for those on the ground. This is not a nice, free sexual market for consenting adults, it is women and girls being traded in an oppressive, abusive and wicked way. Just in the past two weeks, my colleagues on the ground have told me that a busload of women have come down from Manchester. They are not put on the streets anymore, they go into brothels, because it is below the radar. After a few months, they will probably be bussed on somewhere else. It is seriously and highly organised crime, which is abusing migrant people and women—most of them brought in illegally, I suspect—as part of a terrible industry that many migrants get drawn into, including as pimps and organisers of this kind of work. That creates an atmosphere in cities such as Derby and others that makes it very hard for us in those areas trying to create integration and good healthy relationships. It creates a dark side, especially to the night-time economy.

Through our efforts in civil society, we can deal with the surface issues, such as people who are hungry or young people on the streets plainly needing to be better integrated. However, we cannot deal with the highly organised professional international crime of trafficking, with rogue landlords or with the pressures on schools that come and go. Roma people, especially, keep moving and you cannot make very good calculations. There needs to be a bigger frame for those kind of things. Although civil society is a very neat phrase in the report, in my experience on the ground, civil society means really a ragbag of resources struggling just to make some little impression on integrating legal and illegal migrants into a human kind of society. Civil society has to be recognised as needing to be involved in a much richer and more detailed framework locally. We are trying to work on that, but Governments must take a lead in requiring local authorities to work at these frames and tap the resources of people, money and energy that are there to deal with some of these problems.

I want to end by asking the Minister about a couple of things. First, do the Government have any further thoughts about access to public funds for vulnerable people such as trafficked women and those who are perhaps below the radar of official migration? It is very hard to draw these girls and women out through our support groups if no public funding is available. Our resources are very limited.

Secondly, in my experience of working with these oppressed women, the police and border agencies tend to crack down on them, the victims, because they can get hold of them, and not on the pimps and perpetrators. We have to be much more energetic in trying to crack down on the people who organise this terrible crime.

Lastly, there is a macro issue, which we see in Rochdale and all over the place, about prostitution becoming a highly organised and profitable industry for many people, and migrants being drawn into that and trafficked into it across Europe. Certainly, the great majority of the people drawn into trafficking in our city in the past two or three years are from eastern Europe. We have to work across the European Union on this, and we must take a bolder stand and not just allow a kind of free market in this kind of behaviour from which so many people suffer and are oppressed.