Lord Bishop of Derby
Main Page: Lord Bishop of Derby (Bishops - Bishops)
The Lord Bishop of Derby
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, for securing the debate and for her passion and leadership on this very important issue. I will make a contribution about Roma people, of whom there is a significant community in the city of Derby, where I am privileged to serve. I chair the Multi-Faith Centre, which brings together different faiths and cultures, and we have a particular project working with Roma people in the city. I will draw on that experience to highlight this element of the Question and to point to some things that we might want to consider more deeply.
My colleague the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury has published a book, Reimagining Britain. One of the tables in it shows that Roma people and other groups are a barometer of many of our problems as a civilised society. That is what I want to explore. Your Lordships will know that Roma people are a migrant, unsettled people. They are reputed to have come from northern India more than 1,000 years ago and migrated into the Balkans and parts of Europe. What has been highlighted in our experience of trying to work creatively with Roma people in Derby is that while we have developed a way of handling society and health issues through what I would call settled systems, it is difficult for people who do not have a settled lifestyle to fit into such systems. Rather than thinking that they are old-fashioned people who need to settle down and fit into our settled systems, I think that they bring with them an important challenge that the Minister might like to comment on. My wife lives with me on the edge of Derby and works in London; she is a mobile, modern person. It is very difficult for her to make an appointment with the doctor, for instance, because the system is settled but she has a flexible lifestyle. Many of the Roma people are testing our systems, so we need to be creative. We need to be pushed towards greater flexibility in dealing with these people, not simply making them conform to things that might be too tight for them.
In my experience and that of my colleagues, the scale of deprivation among Roma people is enormously high. Literacy rates are low. There is a history of discrimination, so there is a mentality of not being confident about fitting in. There are high levels of unemployment and smoking. There are low rates of child immunisation and high infant mortality. In 2014 the European Commission said that poor health among Roma people is closely linked to social, economic and environmental factors. People such as the Roma are a barometer of the health of our society, and that is why it is worth taking them seriously and learning from them.
They come with difficult cultural norms. As a long-oppressed people with no real sense of home, there is fatalism and a tendency to live in the moment. We run a youth club for young people because they tend to congregate in open spaces, which is their lifestyle, and it is sometimes difficult to hire somewhere for those young people to meet. There is such an explosion of energy and engagement in the moment and we have somehow to see how that can be a part of our civilisation, something that can be seen to be creative rather than anti-social and not fitting in with our norms.
At our multi-faith centre we run the Roma Community Care project in partnership with Derby City Council. The Minister might like to reflect on how we can encourage local authorities to partner with voluntary energy to reach out and be alongside people to help with integration and to offer health services. We try to use Roma people. We train them within the project and try to develop self-help and development skills. Some things need to be done to put some flesh on engaging creatively with people who bring unsettlement into our settled system. First, as I have said, we need voluntary energy and local authority funding to bring schemes together. Secondly, we need mediators and champions, people who will engage with these communities and raise up people who can come back and engage with us. We need to make home visits, not just to meet people in our territories—our surgeries, our hospitals and in A&E departments—because in Roma culture, people will talk about their health only within the privacy of their own home. They are nervous about talking in what they think of as a more public place. We need to train and equip people from the Roma community as workers and volunteers, and we need outreach programmes.
One of the most interesting things we have learned is that in a culture with low rates of literacy, it is no good producing leaflets to help people access healthcare. Roma people communicate through conversation. Quite honestly, in a civilised society, is it not better to communicate through talking rather than by leaflet? That is why we need advocates—people to make the connection. There is an interesting challenge. Do our systems have enough space for conversation? You have to fill in a form online or ring up to make an impersonal appointment with some sort of machine. Roma people present a challenge that is not just a problem to be overcome but should make us think about our systems slightly more creatively. We have to encourage our professional services to engage with people such as the Roma more on their own terms, with proper cultural awareness.
Finally, the Roma are a very vulnerable people and we have high levels of trafficking in our city of Derby. We have had cases of child trafficking, sexual exploitation and forced labour where there have been prosecutions and Roma people are victims, because they are so vulnerable.
I hope we can look at our systems of housing and health—of connecting with these communities—to see how we can reach out to meet them. We should not just expect them to conform, but should look for a cultural engagement where we give a bit to bring people in and reach out, and they have to learn to give a bit to participate in what we are offering for a healthy society with healthy Roma people within it.