Communities

Lord Bishop of Norwich Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Norwich]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the excellent maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Noon, and hope that we will indeed hear from him very often in your Lordships’ House. His services to the British food industry have been enormous, and I imagine that quite a number of us in the Palace of Westminster have taken advantage of the ready meals produced by Noon Products Ltd, especially after late sittings. I am sure that he has fed many of us already with his products; now he is feeding us with his words. The company that he founded in 1989 has become a tremendously substantial employer, and he is known for the quality of his employment practices. We pay tribute to him.

We have of course heard why the noble Lord is so well qualified to speak on this subject today, since he knew what it was to fear for his personal safety when trapped in the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai during those ghastly terrorist attacks. His powerful denunciation of extremists within his own Muslim community, which he has gently repeated here today, is matched by his many positive community engagements. I understand that his company collaborates with the Prince’s Trust in setting up in-school clubs for 14 to 16 year-olds at risk of truancy, exclusion and underachievement—causes of so much of the anti-social behaviour that concerns us in this debate. In addition, he is vice-chair of the Maimonides Foundation, which focuses on promoting Jewish-Muslim relations. All this illustrates why we hope to hear much more from him in future. It has been wonderful to have two marvellous maiden speeches in this same debate.

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, on her report, which is written from the heart and with many refreshing turns of phrase. Quite apart from its other strengths, the report has a pleasing absence of bureaucratic language and dense, impenetrable jargon. For that alone, much thanks. It also has the merit of passion. Of course, it includes the passion of the noble Baroness, which she brings to her theme through her own very painful experience, which she has made, remarkably, the springboard of creative service to others. Her report is also grounded in the passions and stories of so many other people. What unites them is a desire for a better community life. These pioneers in community self-help have made their neighbourhoods safer places.

As the Bishop of Norwich, I am naturally glad to see Norfolk mentioned honourably, although this is generally a report with a very strong urban bias. I know that the noble Baroness does not think this, but we must not imagine that that is because rural communities are all active and safe already. They are not. A rural location is no defence against low-level anti-social behaviour and sometimes much more serious social disruption, too. One can, indeed, lead to another. As the noble Baroness illustrated, as the irritation level grows people retreat into themselves and into their homes. Isolation from neighbours breeds fear of crime, which is surprisingly high in rural areas. Where there are relatively low levels of crime, there are very high levels of the fear of crime. That diminished social interaction creates fertile territory for the growth of more serious offending. This does not happen so easily in communities where there is a strong sense of neighbourliness and social engagement. Where people meet each other a lot, they care for and look out for each other. What the noble Baroness recommends in her report seems to me to be nothing less than what humanity is actually for.

As I have mentioned, I was glad to see Norfolk mentioned on page 26 of the report, which stresses the value of community panels in identifying the tasks to be done in their areas by those serving a community sentence. Far too much community service has been prescribed by statutory authorities and has not always felt beneficial to communities themselves. We need to change this. This report is a spur to doing so more widely, not only in Norfolk.

The report also commends restorative justice at page 22, but I was surprised to see that it did not feature in the recommendations. Will the Minister comment on the place of restorative justice in relation to the picture presented in the report? As your Lordships know, in restorative justice people who have been the perpetrators or victims of a crime or incident come together to consider what happened, to repair harm and to develop a strategy together that will avoid a recurrence. In Norfolk more than 12,000 people have been involved in restorative justice since 2007, and 89 per cent have been satisfied with the outcome. That figure has gradually increased and in the past year was well over 90 per cent. These people believe that this is the best way to deal with low-level crime and anti-social behaviour. The percentage of those reoffending in Norfolk after restorative justice has been just 10.4 per cent for juveniles and 14 per cent for adults. Those are impressive figures. They also illustrate, because the bias is towards the young, that restorative justice is even more effective for younger people as their characters and dispositions are still being formed; you have a chance with juveniles. That is why Norfolk is bidding to become one of the first restorative counties with a designated champion for this work.

However, restorative justice needs a neutral, trained facilitator so that those involved in an incident can engage constructively with each other. It is not a matter of putting perpetrators and victims together, hoping for the best and trusting that they will produce a solution; the third party is essential. That is where someone from one community can help people in another, since we are talking almost entirely about volunteers. The dynamic of care extends. Our communities cannot be silos of safety; they learn from one another and give to each other. The report of the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, helps us raise our sights.

There is one other passing comment in the report that I wish to endorse and develop more fully. The noble Baroness says:

“If communities are to build trusting relationships with their services, then services need to be available when their community needs them. It is crazy … that many staff whose prime function is to support and assist the community only work standard office hours when most people are busy at work or in education”.

That makes good sense, but it illustrates an uncomfortable truth; most of those providing statutory services to our most needy communities do not live in them. A long time ago, when I was working as a curate on a large council estate in Peterborough, my vicar brought together many of the social workers, probation officers, health visitors and some of the teachers working on that estate to share our experiences. It is a commonplace initiative now but 35 years ago it was a bit more radical. I vividly remember from all that time ago that at our first session we discovered two things. The first was that about 10 families on an estate of more than 15,000 people occupied a great deal of all our time. We had not got our act together, nor had we recognised that so many of the problems on the estate were caused by so few. However, only two of us—my vicar and me—actually lived on the estate.

The clergy live in the communities they serve; they do not go somewhere else after office hours. Rectory and vicarage families often experience the same levels of anti-social irritation as their neighbours, even sometimes worse, as an increasing number of tragic incidents illustrate. It is not surprising, therefore, that when there is a major incident the media often seek out the vicar as a community spokesperson. You see it on the television all the time. He or she is often the only official person to be found living in the place they visit. I say this not simply to illustrate the value of the parish system of the Church of England, although I believe in it and believe that it is incredibly valuable, but to endorse the contention of the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, that those who live in a community are best placed to determine how to make it safer. The devolution of decision-making, which we hope will be a characteristic of the Localism Bill, is to be welcomed. Therefore, I confess that I was a bit surprised to see that churches seem strategically marginal to the report, despite the very good example of the Church of England parish of St John at Hackney. I hope that, in following up the recommendations of this report, churches and other faith communities will be fully involved; we are certainly willing to be.

Therefore, I should be grateful if the Minister indicated what steps the Government are taking to extend restorative justice and, in particular, what steps will be taken to ensure that decisions affecting the well-being of communities are increasingly taken by those who live in them.