‘I do think the riots could happen again now in a number of cities’

Ted Cantle’s words should ring alarm bells for all those working in social housing. Three years after the publication of his influential and far-reaching report into the racial disturbances in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in the summer of 2001, Cantle believes there is still much work to be done to promote community cohesion, not least by social housing providers.

To this end, he is planning to establish a permanent centre of expertise in both the theory and the practice of integrating communities, and he believes councils, housing associations and voluntary organisations should play an integral role.

The report he published in December 2001 as chair of the Home Office’s review team into the disturbances made no bones about the contribution social landlords’ allocation policies had made to the segregation of communities, an insight that reflects Cantle’s background in local authority housing departments before he joined the Improvement and Development Agency in 2001 as an associate director.

His reflections on the progress of community cohesion are timely, with an election looming and the main parties seizing the vote-winning potential of the immigration question (fact file).

If there is a repeat of the violence it will take place in unexpected quarters. “Tension is more likely to be in some of the new migrant communities in places like Lincolnshire as opposed to established ones,” he warns. “In places like Oldham, there is much greater recognition of the issues, but not in other towns. Some of the rural areas don’t see it as their problem.”

Tension is more likely to be in some of the new migrant communties rather than the older ones

Helping these new migrant communties from areas such as Iraq, Somalia and eastern Europe to settle in should be a primary concern of housing providers, Cantle believes. Last week, he attended an event on refugee housing organised by the Housing Associations Charitable Trust, at which he urged landlords not to become complacent about the contribution they could make. Speaking to Housing Today afterwards, Cantle says that he had been impressed by the progress that small-scale local organisations have made towards bringing divided communities together, but that they had to look at the wider picture if they were to avoid duplicating the stark separation of new and existing communities that led to the violence in 2001.

Immigration is undoubtedly of considerable public concern, Cantle believes, and trying to ignore the tensions created by an influx of newcomers into an area only exacerbates the problem. “There’s a lot of anti-migrant fear of the newcomer stirred up by some newspapers, and housing providers are going to have to cope with that. When you’ve got extremist parties like the BNP trying to stir things up, they’ve got to be taken seriously. We need to identify potential problems and approach newcomers much more positively from the first instance.”

The Home Office’s National Asylum Support Service is only just beginning to address this in its dispersal strategy, he says. “Some of the government’s policies created a few problems; NASS didn’t do the groundwork with the local communities first. But … local organisations have been successful in getting it to work in a much more integrated way, working out where conflicts are likely to arise ahead of the communities actually coming.”

Joined-up services

When you’ve got parties like the BNP trying to stir things up, they’ve got to be taken seriously

Cantle is impressed by the way the housing sector has responded to the challenges in his 2001 report, but he says services are still not joined up enough. “There’s no point at all having a smashing integrated housing scheme and then finding the residents don’t have jobs to go to.”

Housing providers should draw the different agencies together, he adds. “The problem is that in any given local community, nobody is taking the lead. You’ve got housing profession, educationalists, voluntary organisations, maybe the learning and skills council, and nobody is putting this altogether and looking at how we’re coping across the board. I suspect that housing providers are going to be in the strongest position to do so, in terms of location and resources. They’ve got to set up a very clear partnership with employees from the learning and skills council, schools and local bodies, with people from faith, social and cultural organisations as well.”

Cantle’s final report suggested that local authorities assume this role, and he seems disappointed that it has not been taken on board. His report made 67 recommendations aimed at taking community cohesion from a niche concern to a mainstream occupation at the heart of all departments and policy making. He feels that it has “been embedded in at least part of government” but that “progress has not been as fast as I would like”.

Cantle did get the dedicated Community Cohesion Unit he requested within the Home Office, a body which reviews the impact of government policy and seeks out examples of good practice, and which he says is “quite good”. But he adds that the problem is that it is seen by the rest of government as “a Home Office issue”. In particular, he singles out the Department for Education and Skills for failing to take its responsibilities seriously.

Talking about migrants doesn’t get us anywhere’

The ODPM, says Cantle, has also been “a bit slow to pick up the issues, particularly in the proposals for new sustainable communities”. Cantle says he approached the ODPM to discuss the infrastructure necessary to prevent the growth areas becoming dominated by white, middle-class people, leaving their poorer ethnic minorities neighbours in segregated communities. But he is disappointed with the outcome, or rather the lack of it. “There hasn’t been any point at which the ODPM felt able to respond. I’d like to see a clear commitment to develop new communities in a way that does not just repeat mistakes of the past. In the Communities Plan it doesn’t even mention community cohesion. I understand why they’re trying to develop these communities so quickly, but they’re not taking time to make sure they’re socially sustainable.”

But Cantle is impressed, if surprised, at how widely used the term “community cohesion” has become since his report, even if it’s not always put in practice. “When I used to go to conferences, people would ask ‘what does this mean?’ but now you don’t really get those comments at all. There’s much better understanding of the theory and the practice, and far more schemes developing contact between communities in imaginative ways.”

It’s this that Cantle intends the new institute to harness and he is enormously optimist about Britain’s future. “Despite the problems in Britain, we’re quite a long way ahead of many European countries. Support for the far right is much lower. If we can get community cohesion right, we can become a world leader in race and community relations. In fact, people would probably say we already are in some ways.” HT