Citizenship and Civic Engagement (Select Committee Report)

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Monday 19th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, it is good to follow such an excellent speech from a member of the committee and to congratulate her and all the other members under the leadership of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, on a report that is a very interesting read. It is a big report that makes a juicy meal and it deserves to be chewed over for a long time yet. The government response, by comparison, is a shrivelled morsel and extremely disappointing. When I first read it I asked my wife, Heather, who before she retired was a lifelong ESOL teacher, to have a look at the section on ESOL. She laughed every so often, and I asked her why. She said, “Oh, that is something we invented 30 years ago”, and, “We did that 20 years ago”. We know what works with ESOL and we know what works with the hard-to-reach groups, particularly ladies who come over from the south Asian countries. The real problem is that over the past 10 years the Government have cut funding for ESOL by more than 50%. A lot of people have been pushed into the arms of private providers who set up little so-called schools. Frankly, quite a few of them are just ripping people off.

I turn to the particular phrase “fundamental British values”. I have to say that the government response is very disappointing. That phrase is divisive for a lot of people. I wonder if it is separatist, which might be appropriate or not, given what is going on with Brexit at the moment; I do not know. We should remember that for a lot of the people who have come to live in this country over the past two or three generations, the Empire is very much a part of their family life. The phrase is supremacist and in any case it is condescending. It suggests to everyone else that, “Our values are better than yours”. That is wrong. The phrase “shared values of British citizenship” is good because it sets out what the values are but does not say that they are intrinsically or specifically British.

A section in the report I want to refer to concerns active citizenship and civic engagement. I shall talk about my own experience in a small town in Lancashire called Colne. It is where I live and I declare an interest as a local councillor there. Paragraph 12 of the report quotes Dr Henry Tam, who,

“emphasised to us the important distinction between the two”—

active citizenship and civic engagement. Dr Tam went on to say:

“One is volunteering and helping strangers. The other sense, quite different, is about democratic participation. You can do one without the other”.


That is true, but I think that it is much more complicated than that. Where local democracy, involvement and engagement really work—and they still do really work in many smaller communities and some others in this country—the two are closely interrelated. It may be a continuum but it is just a very complicated mixture of people who are local politicians, local volunteers, those getting involved because they are traders, local residents or those working in schools, who then overlap. Colne is a town with a lot of volunteers and lots—too many, some people think—of elected local politicians. They work together and many people are in both roles. We have a series of local organisations and structures where local politicians across all parties work together—at least we do outside election periods—and with other people to get things done locally in an old Lancashire cotton town. Fifty or 60 years ago, two-thirds of the people there worked in weaving mills; now, there are no mills left. It is that sort of place.

Ten years ago, an organisation called Colne in Bloom was set up by a councillor colleague of mine in my ward. It brings together a series of people from across the town, including all sorts of groups and organisations from community centres and schools, and residents who do things in their street alongside the main activities in the town centre. I do not know for how many years we have won a gold award, but it is at least five or six, perhaps more. This is a good example of leadership, which comes partly from councillors, partly from people who are not councillors and partly from people who have been or will be councillors.

Neighbourhood plans are one good thing to have come out of the coalition through the Localism Act. They form a statutory part of the local plan once they are adopted. In areas such as ours, which is entirely parished nowadays—we did that deliberately to involve more people—they are the responsibility of the parish council and town council. In Colne, the initiative has been taken by current town councillors who originally got involved with major residents’ campaigns objecting to inappropriate planning applications. There is a huge overlap there. In the parish where I live, Trawden Forest, we had a referendum last week or the week before that approved our neighbourhood plan. I declare an interest as a largely corresponding member of the little group that put it together. In that collection of people, some people had never been involved in such things before but got involved because they were interested in the plan, some were parish councillors and some were both.

Colne Town Council now runs all the events in Colne, of which the most important each year is the Great British Rhythm & Blues Festival, which happens every August bank holiday. In every month throughout the year, a series of events brings people into the town and gives it a sense of well-being. It involves people; they can enjoy themselves. The council runs it but does not have lots of staff to do that, as a big council would. The town councillors, of which I am not one, roll their sleeves up and do a large amount of the work. The overlap between local politicians elected to the town council on political labels and volunteers is not clear-cut—and neither should it be. We have lots of community centres that we thought we should set up as community hubs 20 or 30 years ago. They are now run by local volunteers and local committees, and so it goes on.

My final point is that Colne is a town. Fortunately, in all the time that I have been involved in it, along with a lot of other people, we have managed to maintain civic culture, civic involvement and “civic society”, if that is what you call it—that is, the involvement of local people in the town, keeping it going in very difficult circumstances. After the local government reorganisation in 1974, a lot of towns lost their councils, civic culture and institutions, suffering very badly as a result. Every change in local government and local democracy nowadays seems to involve making things bigger, amalgamating things and reducing the number of councillors, the number of elections and the amount of local democracy and accountability. It is wrong. We have to go back and look at towns. Big cities are all right—they can cope—but towns need a lot of time, attention and care to rebuild their civic culture if they are to be successful in future.