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As the provision of welfare and local authority investment in care systems and the social fabric of our city have been withdrawn through the cuts, I have convened a group of faith leaders, voluntary groups and the local authority to see how citizens can work together to grow communities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.

Crime: Women's Safety

Lord Bishop of Derby Excerpts

Tuesday 12th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Derby]

My Lords I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Desai, for introducing this very important topic in your Lordships’ House. I speak as somebody who supports an organisation in Derby, where I am the bishop, called Safe and Sound Derby. It works particularly with women who are the victims of sexual exploitation, violence and abuse. In this debate, I feel that I really need to speak as a Bishop. It seems less obvious to do that when we are discussing pensions, public service and such things but in this debate I want to speak specifically from these Benches as a Bishop.

That is because the Government have the unenviable but vital and necessary task of trying to regulate behaviour. Ever since JS Mill in the 19th century, we have seen Governments trying to regulate behaviour to protect the individual’s right to be who they want and to do what they want. It is difficult to regulate people’s behaviour without—and this is where the church has a role, so I speak as a Bishop—looking at the ideas, imaginations and inner motives within people that lead them to claim freedoms which, in the terms of this debate, have such terrible consequences upon other people, such as violence against women and abuse.

In their attempts to regulate behaviour, the Government need to be in dialogue with faith communities and churches, which are particularly concerned with people’s inner motives and moral values, and the framework within which to try to live their lives. Our culture is dominated by people’s right to feel something, express it and be who they want to be. That has many great effects and outcomes but it also has some terrible ones, as we are hearing in this debate. We have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, about the terrible profusion of pornography and the freedom to access, make and trade it—and to involve people in it. Starting from the base of what people feel they want has seen an inordinate explosion of promiscuity in our society in the past 30 or 40 years, and enormous stress in personal lives. My right reverend colleague the Bishop of Worcester referred to the sexualisation of young people and a sexualised society.

Most violence and sexual abuse takes place in a private space. That is why it is difficult for the Government on their own to legislate about behaviour. Motives, ideas and imaginings can be explored in private spaces, and that creates an atmosphere where people feel intimidated, disoriented and unsure what private space should be about. There are no public norms; you are suddenly in a very small space if you are subject to this kind of abuse and violence. So, besides the Government working with agencies, as the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, has said, and the structures in proposals in the excellent report, I invite us to think about how the Government can work with a problem that largely takes place in private space, below the radar—people claiming their freedom to be who they want to be.

One way of entering into the private space where most of this abuse takes place is through voluntary groups. The Safe and Sound project in Derby, which I support, works with victims and parents in their domestic settings, trying to help them understand what has happened to them and what values those domestic settings need to be about and to defend. In the past nine months in Derby, which is not a large city, Safe and Sound has dealt with 117 young people as well as older women.

We should note that not all these women and girls come from difficult backgrounds. I know that the statistics point that way but this very week in the Derby Telegraph, our local paper, there have been articles on three consecutive days about cases of children from very established and well-off homes being groomed and drawn out of those. The whole ethos of being a teenager, really, is to be uncomfortable in the private space that your family creates and to want to find your own private space; that is what teenage life is about. People who enter that through the internet and other ways, such as taking girls to parties or whatever, begin to create an attractive alternative private space that does not seem to have many moral guidelines. It is called grooming, and young people are increasingly being groomed into sexual exploitation, abuse and trafficking.

Our experience in Derby shows that grooming and abuse are not just happening in an ad hoc way; sadly, in our culture of freedom for people to behave as they think they want to and feel, grooming and abuse are highly organised. They are organised by gangs and by older men grooming younger women. It is a very scientific and commercial operation, sadly, for many people, and young women are manipulated and taken advantage of.

In this context, despite the excellence of the report, its analysis and suggestions, all the evidence shows that there is a significant shortfall in the availability of therapeutic services to deal with women who are confused about what private space is, how to defend one of some quality and how not to get drawn into private space that is abusive and damaging. I hope that the Government will take very seriously, first, the proper resourcing, as other noble Lords have mentioned, of the formal services and agencies that work in this area. Secondly, I hope that they will take seriously the resourcing of the work by voluntary groups such as Safe and Sound, which can enter into that private space of young people and their families and friendships to help people to engage and find a way out of the terrible places into which they are drawn.

Thirdly, and this echoes what the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, was saying, what steps can the Government take to be proactive in the world of education, of the formation of people’s values, priorities and a framework for those inner feelings and imaginations that are powerful in all of us? That partly includes working with schools, as the noble Baroness says, but it also includes working with faith communities and those who give priority to the values that we carry around inside us that guide us, discipline us and challenge us

Speaking as a bishop, I shall end by saying that something that is distinctive about the Christian faith is that it does not begin from saying, “I wish to decide how I feel and that’s who I’m going to be”. It begins from saying, “Love God and your neighbour as yourself”—that is, put others first and yourself second. That is the kind of moral and spiritual discipline that forms an adult person: not to love yourself first and do what that is about but to love others first and put yourself second. That is what Christianity is about. It is that kind of moral and spiritual discipline that is the only chance of complementing the Government’s task of providing models and guidelines of behaviour with encouraging people to learn and carry around within themselves some kind of respect and understanding of what human life is about that is based on some kind of discipline, some kind of self-denial and some kind of honouring of other people rather than oneself. I ask the Minister to comment on how the Government can complement faith groups and others to ensure that better standards of behaviour emerge not just from regulation and agencies but from moral conviction and the culture of self-discipline that make adult people proper citizens and would be a major step in bringing this terrible problem under control.

Minority Ethnic and Religious Communities: Cultural and Economic Contribution

Lord Bishop of Derby Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Derby]

My Lords, I offer just a few quick thoughts in my role as one of the two co-chairs of the Inter Faith Network. I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, for his gracious affirmation of the work of the network, which serves the great faith communities and those interested in relations between them by doing two things. It invites people to work together and appreciate one another and encourages us to work together for the common good. A recent manifestation of the fruits of that work is the development of Inter Faith Week, which will be in November. The Government have generously supported us by making that happen. I hope that the Minister might reassure us about a continuing commitment to enabling that manifestation of the riches of faith communities working together for the common good. It is lovely to see some of our colleagues from the Inter Faith Network in the Gallery.

The Zoroastrian community makes an outstanding contribution to this work of interfaith relations and service to our communities. When the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury visited the community, as the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, mentioned, he explored very creatively the way in which the Zoroastrian community, although small in number, has had, as he said, a vocation throughout history to help different perspectives, cultures and religions interpret themselves to one another. That is part of the power of the noble Lord’s nice image of the sugar and the milk. It is true in Iranian and Indian contexts, and I can testify to the Zoroastrian community’s contribution in our own context today, helping that sweetness and improving the quality of relationships. The community is small in number but very effective.

Those of us who are privileged to lead Prayers in this place often receive requests for the Psalm that begins:

“I will lift up mine eyes”.

That indicates to me a deep instinct in all of us, with varying degrees and various sources of faith, for a recognition that there is something in our hearts that seeks what we would call “the transcendent”—a greater horizon and a greater possibility than we can grab, tangibly, in this life. Yet it motivates us to set out as the noble Lord described in the foundation of Zoroastrianism and the way in which it has developed.

We need to take seriously that faith and desire for a greater horizon, a greater connectedness, as deep in all human hearts. I hope that the Government will continue to recognise the importance of faith in that spirit and the bigger horizon that it offers, and continue to support organisations, such as the Inter Faith Network, which seek to encourage that spirit in which there is a hopefulness and a trustfulness that our world so badly needs when division is so magnified and so destructive.

I thank the noble Lord very much for sponsoring and introducing this debate, and for his very powerful and helpful speech. I congratulate him on this wonderful 150th anniversary.

Food Security Policy

Lord Bishop of Derby Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Derby]

My Lords, I offer some thoughts about food security from the perspective of international development. We have had some amazing, impressive and helpful perspectives about scientific and technological approaches, and I want to offer some thoughts from the perspective of people who suffer from the need of food and that element of the food security issue.

Noble Lords will know that the Christian faith operates through people gathering around a table to share food—people of any culture or race. That is a great picture of an international family and sharing around a common table, which most human hearts can assent to and desire. As we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Stern and others, the fact is that many people do not participate or do not even feel that they are at a common table. That is the risk of the food security issue, which is why I welcome the Government’s concern—and the statement from the Prime Minister yesterday about a summit to consider those issues during the Olympics, when a lot of people will be in this country.

Christians also talk about word and sacrament—that is, you do not just talk about things, you have to do things and act them out as a sign of how things could be better. That is what people who feel excluded from the table are looking for and longing for. We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, about growing population, and about climate change and industrialisation. All those things are threatening the sustainability of human life across the globe for millions of people. Therefore, we have to look at our own consumption patterns and the needs and demands of our brothers and sisters.

I am not going to push this common table analogy too far, but I shall make one last reference. St Paul, writing at a very early stage of Christians trying to gather round a common table, noticed in Corinth that some people took a whole lot of food and drink and got drunk and had a good time and quite a lot of other people did not have anything at all and were not noticed. That is a pretty sharp picture of what human behaviour is often like.

There are two ways of looking at that in our own context. One is the issue of what is called tax justice, for which I have a particular concern. In many countries where crops are grown the result and profit of that enterprise is not reinvested in the country for the well-being of the people who could be round the table in that part of the world; it is shifted out and piled up in front of other people in another part of the table so that they can live well and other people are excluded. That is happening more and more, and is a very major issue about food security. By contrast, Christian Aid, Oxfam and other agencies are trying to work in partnership with people on the ground. One billion people are either landless or small farmers; they need folks alongside them to see their needs and then to use the technology and wisdom that is around to grow things from the bottom up, in partnership with people who are excluded from the table and suffering enormously.

I ask four things of the Government. First, can they target their investment in the area of food need and security to have a special emphasis on the partnership with local people through agencies that can work through genuinely local people, discern their needs and target the technology and food changes appropriately? Secondly, what is the Government’s view on tax justice, which is excluding many and piling up the resources from agriculture in a very few places for the benefit of a very few people. Thirdly, how are the Government going to continue to monitor global institutions such as the UN and the World Bank so that their policies take account of the partnership needs of people at a micro level and not simply just act at a macro level? Fourthly, as we have heard, there is an issue about obesity in our own society, which is costing a fortune. How can the Government take a lead on our own consumption patterns, and on how we literally pile up trolleys in the supermarket and act out what St Paul warned us against—of looking after ourselves and ignoring others? That might say something about advertising and other ways in which messages are conveyed in our society.

I congratulate the Government on their concern with this area. I hope that they consider some of these questions and pay particular concern to human beings—brothers and sisters—on the ground, who need partnership and targeted and tangible signs of hope.