Recession and Community Cohesion

I have just come back from a British Council Conference in Manchester on Community Cohesion - my work with the Cowley Road Carnival was a good practice example in a workshop on the arts and cohesion. I will talk in a future post about what the workshop was discussing but here I think I will talk about the cloud that hung over the conference - the impact of the recession.

Before I start talking about this - to clarify: the definition of community cohesion I use is the
Local Government Association/Home Office's definition that a cohesive community is one where:

• there is a common vision and a sense of belonging for all communities;
• the diversity of people's different backgrounds and circumstances are appreciated and positively valued;
• those from different backgrounds have similar life opportunities; and
• strong and positive relationships are being developed between people from different backgrounds in the workplace, in schools and within neighbourhoods.

Ok, that sorted, let's move on.

Community cohesion has been an important focus for our work as regenerators over the last eight years. In fact the attacks of the September 11 and July 7 have made it essential to understand and address where community cohesion does not exist. The arrival of the recession makes it all the more important to do so. As I write there are wildcat strikes in Lincolnshire and further afield in response to the perceived injustice of employing "foreign" (EU) workers instead of locals. Whilst there are plenty of jobs to go round, we are more likely to accept the outsider and when this is not so the semblance of community cohesion disintegrates. This should not be seen as a white working class reaction to foreigners, some of the most vociferous views on the subject that I have heard come from ethnic minority members who resent new arrivals threatening the jobs they have struggled to obtain.

I was interested to see on the slides shown by a Government civil servant that the area around the Wash (which includes Lincolnshire) was identified of one of two areas where community cohesion was weakest. There was a comment that this is an rural area where the central European migrant workers have moved in to take agricultural jobs and where there is no recent history (as there is in cities such Oxford and London) of absorbing immigrants. Near where I live, in the Vale of Evesham in the Midlands, a few years ago the crops were picked by gangs of sari-wearing women bussed in from Birmingham and other neighbouring cities. Now they are picked by Poles and others. In my childhood the workers in the strawberry and onion fields were gypsies, who moved across the country following the harvest north. Thus a succession of ethnic minority communities have replaced each other in this lowly paid economy.

One of the major problems with this area of our work is its evaluation - you can ask people about how they feel about their communities, but such a measure is open to interpretation and influenced by our perceptions. I have observed that one of the by-products of improving a locality is that the community's standards will also rise. Hence our local park which once was a literally a dumping ground (on several occasions I watched as white vans would pull up and throw out black bin bags onto the grass) was transformed into a much loved meeting place. Now the community complains if there is a few pieces of litter. The British Council conference was a welcome attempt to look at what works, but we need more. Another problem with evaluating what we have achieved is the "dog who barked in the night" syndrome. What we are doing is trying to stop something from happening, if something does not happen, can we show it was down to (or even partly down to) our interventions?

The strikers at the Lindsey Oil Refinery remind us of the tensions that lie under the surface of our country and which could boil over with the recession. We cannot afford (and nor can the Government) to take our eyes off the issue of community cohesion.