“It was the best six days I have had since coming to the UK” Raga Gibreel tells me. Campaign Bootcamp was a great learning experience. Raga met human rights campaigners from all over the world: Latin America, USA, Africa and other regions. She learnt effective campaign strategies and was made aware of how to use the media and engage with politicians – something she had not previously considered for her campaign. Campaign Bootcamp also emphasised the need to take care of her personal health and wellbeing.
It was a rigorous six days. The programme started at 8am and ended at 8pm every day. Raga explained to me that the experience inspired self-growth and made her aim for high goals for her organisation. Raga Gibreel is a Sudanese refugee who has been living here in the UK for the past six years. She comes from Sourth Kordofan where there has been war on and off for many years. Raga’s story is a moving one. Sadly it is representative of what many women and children face when there is political instability in a country. When she got to the UK it took her some time to get over the trauma and stress she had experienced during the war. Raga explained to me that her friends were the biggest support system for her. Also helpful were Sudanese community groups.
The Trauma of civil war
She started volunteering for different human rights organisations, including at a detention centre, with Article 1. Raga couldn’t help but think how lucky she was because she met so many Sudanese refugees detained there. Fleeing from your home during war is very traumatic. Many people die from lack of proper food, poor health facilities, and the long journeys can be difficult. Women and children are the most vulnerable as they are sometimes raped and even sold into sex trafficking businesses. She began to realise how much better off she was than many other Sudanese people. So she decided to help bring change to her country. She started a small organisation called Green Kordofan. Her aim was to provide the children in Yida refugee camp in Sudan with a sports and nutrition programme. After completing Campaign Bootcamp Raga held a fundraising event for her organisation on 20 December 2014. Some of those she had met at Campaign Bootcamp came to support her. “I made friends for life at Campaign Bootcamp and I would not trade the experience for anything. I really appreciate the opportunity Article 1 gave me.” During my interview with her it was evident that Raga has suffered a lot of pain because of the war. However, she is now turning that pain into power to help others.
www.article1.org. Article 1 is a human rights charity whose aims are:
- To help asylum seekers from Darfur and other parts of Sudan to navigate the UK’s complex immigration process
- To collaborate with the British government and relevant organisations to improve the UK’s policy and procedure for Sudanese asylum seekers
- To inform decision-makers and the public about the human rights situation in Sudan
- To raise awareness of Darfur and Sudan amongst the public
The 20th Century can lay claim to being the suburban century. The growth of suburban housing development in the 1930s, the mass production of the car and slum clearance after the war all meant that suburbs became places where young families (both blue and white collar) flocked in their thousands. The opposite was true in city centres characterised by falling populations and growing concentrations of poverty.
However, since the turn of the 21st Century the trend has been in reverse with many of our city suburbs suffering from relative economic decline and social deprivation. The socio-economic geography of suburbia is changing, and on current trends suburbs are losing out to now thriving inner cities.
Population growth in urban areas
Our work at the Smith Institute for Barrow Cadbury is showing that population growth in our major urban areas was significantly faster than outer areas. Greater Manchester’s urban population, for example, grew by 17% and the West Midlands by 16%, whilst their suburban populations have both grown by just 5%. What seems to be driving this change is a mix of policy interventions (including urban regeneration), businesses (re)locating to urban areas, and changes in perceptions of our cities.
In public policy terms, ‘placemaking’ (a people-centred approach to the planning, design and management of public spaces) has for the last decade been dominated by urban renewal and regeneration. As part of this agenda the focus has been on redeveloping city centres to make them attractive places for businesses, consumers and residents. The agglomeration of businesses (especially in service industries) has also led to economic activity becoming more concentrated in the heart of our cities. One of the more startling findings of our research to date has been jobs growth. For example, in outer London 11,000 additional jobs were created over the last ten years whilst in inner London the figure was a staggering 505,000. It is not just the number of jobs that have grown rapidly in city centres and stagnated in suburban areas, but also the quality of jobs, with more skilled work located away from suburbs.
The suburban job market
This could of course mean that those performing those jobs are suburban residents travelling into the centre, with suburbs remaining places of affluence. However, evidence shows that this is not the case. In Greater Manchester the number of jobs performed by suburban residents has increased by 6% versus a 47% rise for those living in urban areas.
This change in the economic fortunes of city centres is mirrored in other social indicators. Whilst it is still the case that urban areas have higher concentrations of deprivation, poverty rates seem to be narrowing. Other social indicators also seem to be following a similar trend, such as crime and education. In London, for example, educational achievement (5* A-Cs) is now the same in inner and outer London. In addition, the dynamics of the housing market and the way social housing is funded also means that more affordable housing is to be found in suburban areas.
Serious economic decline
All suburbs are different, and many remain places of relative affluence and wealth. However, a growing number have and are experiencing higher rates of poverty and are arguably in serious economic decline. This has significant implications for public policy and for those in the third sector providing support for people on low incomes. Challenges such as access to work may be more problematic in suburbs than urban areas, not least because public transport is not as regular or affordable. This is also true for other services which are more costly to provide over a larger distance. Over the coming months the Smith Institute will be examining some of these concerns and discussing what can be done to achieve a lasting suburban renaissance.
Creating places with access to jobs, high-quality public services, decent homes, and a safe environment are critical for growth in both urban and suburban neighbourhoods. However, the evidence suggests that many of the city suburbs are struggling with rising rates of poverty and relatively lower earnings. Knowing more about what is happening is critical to setting out a range of policy responses that can prevent many of our suburbs slipping into a spiral of decline.
Find out more about the work of the Smith Institute. Read Poverty in suburbia: a Smith Institute study into the growth of poverty in the suburbs of England and Wales published in April 2014.
About 100 million people enter the UK every year, and about 100 million leave. Net migration – involving those who come here to stay or leave for at least a year – is a tiny fraction of that, estimated at 260,000 last year. So last year there were 260,000 more immigrants than emigrants. The accuracy of that net migration estimate is limited – it’s based on a survey of just 4-5,000 migrants interviewed at ports, and that means there’s a large grey area. It could very easily be nearly 40,000 less than that in reality, or 40,000 more. Little wonder, then, that it’s been described as “little better than a best guess” by Public Administration Select Committee Chair Bernard Jenkin MP. To that you might well ask: “why not just count everyone in and count everyone out?” And you wouldn’t be alone: it used to be an aspiration shared by government, statisticians and politicians alike. It still is in some cases, but delays, management problems and data issues have made this a more distant prospect.
So how have we got here? Who are we counting now? And can we count people entering and leaving our country in future?
Previous governments abolished paper-based checks
In 1994, the Conservative government of the time partially scrapped exit checks on passengers leaving the UK. In 1998, the Labour government finished the job. Those decisions have provided the background to often–heard criticisms that successive governments stopped ‘counting people in and counting people out’. The justification at the time was that the then paper-based checks amounted to “an inefficient use of resources and that they contribute little to the integrity of the immigration control” according to the Home Office.
In spite of pledges, exit checks still not fully in place
Since then, the prospect of reintroducing exit checks electronically has gained widespread favour. For the past decade, pledges to reintroduce the checks have been made repeatedly, while the timetable for actually doing so has been repeatedly pushed back.
Step forward, ‘e-borders’—the whole solution?
The government has rarely been explicit on how exactly it would implement such checks. Initially a programme called ‘e-borders’ was assumed to be the answer. E-borders was a project first conceived in 2003 aimed at gathering passenger and travel information electronically and using it to help strengthen the UK’s border records and security – similar to a system used in Australia. Starting in 2008, it was expected to gather an increasing proportion of passenger data, culminating in 95% coverage by the end of 2010 (reflecting Gordon Brown’s claim above) and 100% coverage by 2014. In fact, by 2010 only about 60% of passengers were being recorded and today about 80% are. As it stated in its 2007 business case, counting was to be one of the key benefits:
“There are also a number of wider socio-economic benefits, for example the ability, for the first time, to comprehensively count all foreign national passengers in and out of the UK, improving public confidence in the integrity of the border and enabling a more accurate count of migrants for future planning and for informing the population count.”
This sounds impressive. By scanning passports at check-in and departure and making use of other travel information, details such as people’s name, age and nationality can be combined with flight number, times and port of departure or arrival. A survey of a few thousand migrants versus actual passport data on people entering and leaving the country doesn’t sound like much of a contest. Except it is, because while counting everyone in and out is relatively straightforward (though no simple task, as has been found); counting migrants and filtering out everyone else is hard. Passports provide names and numbers, but they don’t tell stories. Your passport doesn’t know why you’re travelling, how long you’re intending to stay, or whereabouts exactly you’re planning to stay. So neither do the authorities — unless you happen to be interviewed on your way in or out.
There are ways around this, but they don’t fully solve the problem. For instance recording the date a person arrives in and leaves the UK: if it was a stay of less than a year, they’re a visitor, if more than a year, they’re a migrant. But that’s not very helpful for finding out about people coming to the UK now. Visas are another potential source of information, and integrating that into an electronic counting system was recommended by MPs last year. That would, of course, be limited to non-EU nationals because EU citizens don’t need a visa to enter the UK. Using the Census every 10 years to help identify migration flows to local areas is another option, but those figures become obsolete very quickly, and they’re not without accuracy problems of their own.
Not the whole solution any more
Because of these limitations, and other problems with implementation, the government has backtracked from its original business case, saying in evidence to MPs last year:
“while valuable, this data is by itself insufficient to provide a direct measurement of migration flows. As the information on entries and exits from the UK gets more comprehensive however it will, when combined with other data sources, help improve our statistics in this area.”
A similar view has since been expressed by the UK Statistics Authority and—after feasibility testing the data itself—the Office for National Statistics. The Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration questioned why the government hasn’t realised this sooner: “It was not clear why the language of counting in and counting out had survived in each of the business cases.” As things now stand, the e-borders’ project has been terminated. The systems are still there, but they’re now referred to as ‘Semaphore data’ and there are separate systems for enforcement purposes. Still, the coverage isn’t comprehensive, and as of last month, rail routes into and out of the UK still weren’t being counted at all. The future for counting is uncertain, but it’s not necessarily confined to electronic measurement.
One recommendation from MPs last year was the possible creation of a new “routine migrant survey”, an option the Home Office investigated back in 2011. That could provide more detailed information on migrants’ reasons for coming and what they’re contributing to the UK. For now, though, the government thinks a new survey would be bad value for money, and continues to indicate its commitment towards bringing back full exit checks at the border. As for meeting this particular commitment, 100% or near 100% coverage isn’t the only condition. As the Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration has commented “it must be capable of facilitating physical interventions where appropriate” — i.e. intercepting departing passengers before they leave, instead of realising they’ve left afterwards. The time needed to do this is running out.
TIMELINE
Charles Clarke (then Home Secretary), 2005: “The new borders technology will record people’s departure from the country”
Home Office, 2006: “We will progressively reinstate exit—in other words, embarkation—controls in stages, starting with the higher-risk routes and people, identify who overstays and count everyone in and out by 2014.”
Gordon Brown, April 2010: “border controls have been brought in and we’re counting people out and in from the end of this year”
Coalition Programme for Government: “We support E-borders and will reintroduce exit checks.”
Home Office, 2012: “The Government have committed to the reintroduction of exit checks by March 2015″
Nick Clegg, March 2013: “we are reintroducing exit checks.”
Nick Clegg, July 2013: [quoted] “I’m not going to pretend to you that exit checks will be restored in full, according to the Home Office’s present plans, by the end of this Parliament”
Home Office, October 2014: “The Government is committed to introducing exit checks by April 2015″
David Cameron, November 2014: “We have also brought back vital exit checks at ports and airports”
Ed Miliband, December 2014: “We will introduce those [proper entry and exit] checks”
The high court did not need to do anything fancy to find that restricting books for prisoners is unlawful.
Nine months of campaigning by the Howard League, together with English PEN and numerous authors, culminated in a fine legal judgment last Friday. The case was brought by fearless public law lawyer, Sam Genen, with barristers Annabel Lee, Victoria Butler-Cole and Jenny Richards.
Mr Justice Collins was asked to rule on whether the restriction on books to prisoners was lawful. He was provided with a web of complex legal arguments based on human rights and the Equality Act 2010. In the end, he decided the restriction was unlawful quite simply because the policy’s effect was contrary to what the justice secretary said he intended.
Our law, built up case by case over time, says that a policy will be unlawful if its effect is contrary to the expressed intention and objectives that it was supposed to promote.
In the case of books for prisoners, the secretary of state and the deputy prime minister had said that there was no book ban. The deputy prime minister went so far as to say: “If there was a ban on sending books to prisoners, I would be the first to demonstrate outside the local prison. It would be ridiculous. It’s outrageous…..Education and training, reading and learning are a critical part of [rehabilitation].”
Yet a forensic examination by the high court found that the policy clearly resulted in a restriction in books, that access through the library services was not sufficient to make up for not having your own books, whether for reference, such as Brewer’s Dictionary or a compendium of a particular author’s works, to be dipped into frequently. The court adopted the desert island philosophy in finding that “possession…can matter as much as access”.
He therefore found the privileges policy unlawful to the extent that it banned books. This simple judgment is unimpeachable. It is not based on human rights or equality but on old-fashioned common sense. The government refused to reflect on the obvious truth that books are not a privilege and learning is central to its own ‘transforming rehabilitation’ agenda. It refused to accept the simple truth that the policy had the effect of banning books. It refused to change the policy of its own accord.
Instead, it took a fully contested judicial review at taxpayers’ expense, with the prisoner’s lawyers acting pro-bono, to enable a high court judge to unravel the spin from the reality of prisoners’ experiences and determine the justice secretary’s policy unlawful on the basis that it was quite simply the opposite of what he said he wanted.
No wonder then that the justice secretary is so keen to restrict the ability of individuals and public interest groups to speak truth to power through the courts. In the House of Commons last Monday, he revealed an astounding lack of knowledge of the way the law works, compounding his disregard for it in the case of books for prisoners. He accepted he was “baffled” by attempts by peers to preserve judicial discretion and sought to reverse them.
Peers have a final chance this Tuesday to defeat the government’s current attempts to restrict judicial review cases. Let’s hope they take it.
Laura Janes is acting legal director at the Howard League for Penal Reform. This blog was reproduced with kind permission of Howard League for Penal Reform.
“We should keep business out of politics” Professor John Kay from the London School of Economics told a High Pay Centre event on 19 November . “We can’t ask business leaders to determine what is good for the public.” Professor Kay was speaking at the launch of a collection of essays the High Pay Centre has published on corporate power entitled “Whoever you vote for, big business gets in.” Professor Kay pointed out that the opinions reflected in the corporate lobby are generally those of the business leaders, not the workforce as a whole.
In recent years, the views of big business have had huge sway at Westminster – often driving the political agenda on to territory that is at odds with the views of the voting public. There are numerous policy issues from taxation to relations with the EU to immigration to cutting the gap between rich and poor where business has an agenda that is different from public opinion.
At the High Pay Centre, we focus on excessive executive pay and the enormous gap that has opened up with the rest of the workforce. Our polling suggests that an overwhelming majority of people support proposals to cap bosses’ pay at a fixed multiple of their lowest-paid worker. However, whenever we press policymakers on this issue, they defer to the business lobby.
Some of our recommendations for tackling top pay came into law last year, but they were mostly watered down by corporate opposition.
Our experience with policies over top remuneration prompted us to look at corporate power in more detail and the impact this has on democracy. In our collection of essays, Richard Murphy from Tax Research UK, presents evidence to show that tax policy is driven largely by corporate interests. For example, on the board of HM Revenue & Customs, the UK’s tax authority, there are five non-executive directors all of whom come from a corporate or financial background, with no other interest group represented. “The result is that … a key element of democracy has been captured for the benefit of a limited but very powerful group in society.” Mr Murphy believes democracy is threatened by financial interests driving the tax system. “This is why, for example, the UK’s budget deficit is being closed by cutting spending and not raising tax.”
Tamasin Cave from Spinwatch, highlights the investment made by businesses in lobbying parliament. “Lobbyists regularly shape public debates through the media, feeding it information they want politicians to see and keeping out inconvenient facts they would rather they didn’t.”
Trust in business and politicians among the public is at record lows. One of the reasons for this is that the public has lost faith in MPs to protect us from rapacious corporations. In a poll conducted for the High Pay Centre in April, 74% of respondents – from all political persuasions – agreed that big business has too much power over government.
The power of big business needs to be tackled if we are to restore people’s faith in our politics and economy.
Download the essays Watch the High Pay Centre video http://youtu.be/4ER9qYEoZDE
Have your say on twitter #CorporatePower @HighPayCentre
The Community Investment Coalition (CIC) campaigns for a radical re-shaping of the provision of affordable financial services in deprived communities. This will reduce reliance on high cost credit, support innovation and competition in financial services markets and give people the financial tools they need to participate in the economy.
Key to achieving this change is increased transparency and public accountability of financial service providers to support consumer choice and allow effective intervention in under-served markets. For this reason, we have championed the need for disclosure of bank lending data at a geographical level. Our campaign is supported by a range of politicians and organisations, including the Church of England.
In its final report, Changing Banking for Good, the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards stated that: ‘Increased disclosure of lending decisions by the banks is crucial to enable policy makers to more accurately identify markets and geographical areas currently poorly served by the mainstream banking sector’.
In 2013, a voluntary framework for the disclosure of bank lending data was agreed, with the first tranche of quarterly data released in December that year. So nearly one year on, with four sets of data released, what do we know? A new report ‘Tackling Financial Exclusion: Data Disclosure and Area-Based Lending Data’ by Coventry and Newcastle Universities is the first significant analysis of the data. Commissioned by Big Society Capital, CIC, Citi Community Development and Unity Trust Bank, the research found that currently, the lending data is limited and publication at postcode sector level increases the technical requirements and costs of meaningful analysis. The data does provide for some analysis of regional disparities of lending. For example:
- Median personal lending per adult in Great Britain in 2013 was £602. Lending per adult in the lowest 10 per cent of postcode sectors was around two-thirds of this figure or less, whereas in most of the highest 10 per cent of postcode sectors lending per adult was around a third or more above the median figure. Data suggests that average personal lending tends to decline as the area’s deprivation level rises.
- Average median SME lending per business in Great Britain in 2013 was £47,072 with lending per business in the lowest 10 per cent of postcode areas below £35,000 and in the highest 10 per cent of postcode areas lending per business was over £68,000.
But this is not sufficient to support effective intervention to tackle under-served markets.
The study concludes that although the UK is now a world leader in disclosing area-based lending data, the existing data sets need to be strengthened and broadened to allow detailed and insightful analysis of which of the UK’s communities are under-served by the UK’s main high street banks.
The Parliamentary Commission, commenting on the voluntary framework, stated that ‘It will be important to ensure that the level of disclosure is meaningful..’ and that ‘the devil will be in the detail of the disclosure regime’. CIC has always and continues to welcome the significant step in bank transparency represented by the existing framework. But we believe that the quality, detail and type of data disclosed needs improvement for it to be able to identify markets and areas poorly served by the UK’s banks.
Jennifer Tankard is Director of the Community Investment Coalition
The biggest levers for real social change are in economic development. Whether it be campaigning for a living wage, getting social value into public procurement, or taking the principle of maximising the local reach of prosperity into how we operate our economy.
The idea that prosperity could be localised led to our work this year to generate practical changes locally, based on the findings of last year’s research into the social outcomes of a more localised approach to economics. There is a need to appeal not just to those of us for whom social issues are our bread and butter, but also to those whose primary role is mainstream economics and who tend to dance to the trickledown tune – that any growth is good growth, and the faster the better, with the question of ‘who benefits?’ being overlooked.
The Localising Prosperity web resource is Localise West Midlands’ attempt to capture this wider appeal. It describes the ‘virtuous circle’ relationship between more locally owned businesses, more local power, better social outcomes and more widespread prosperity. It outlines how this virtuous circle can be fostered through economic interventions, procurement and community activism. It gives some tactics and guidance for these different audiences, and some inspiring case studies and evidence for how effective this model is from the UK and abroad.
We’ve been working with Right Care Right Here, an excellent health sector led partnership across Sandwell and West Birmingham with a strong awareness of the need to tackle the broader social issues that affect health, such as housing and employment; the procurement process is as important as A & E is as a tool for looking after local people’s health.
We’ve also been working with locally-owned businesses to develop a model for SMEs (small and medium enterprises) to win business in the retrofit sector (the transformation of buildings to make them more energy efficient), with the aim of localising prosperity and encouraging social inclusion – learning from case studies of business co-operation in Italy and Spain.
These Black Country and Birmingham collaborations have been very encouraging. The Black Country has a ‘needs must’ track record of work on localising prosperity; Birmingham perhaps less so – its global/second city status historically giving it a rather blinkered fixation on inward investment, conferences and iconic buildings. But more recently, Birmingham has been rediscovering its own potential for generating prosperity. The City Council has seen the need to use new levers to ensure greater fairness within its economy as welfare or grant safety nets are removed. One of its innovations is the Birmingham Business Charter for Social Responsibility, to which its supply chain is required to sign up with its own individually tailored action plan. The Charter requires socially responsible behaviour including commitments to buying and employing locally. From our perspective the real strength of the Charter is its demonstration that if we all share this commitment, we will all prosper.
Leading on from these innovations in the West Midlands area, and mindful of devolution developments across England and of case studies from abroad, wouldn’t it be brilliant to form a ‘Lepa-like’ – a Localising Everyone’s Prosperity stakeholder partnership for the conurbation, with explicit social objectives, and built on local private sector commitment to the area? Matching up local business needs and skills; encouraging local financing models and buying local commitments, at the same time as basing our sense of identity on the enterprise that we own and making work for our collective benefit.
This month I turn 21! In my British years, that is. I made a journey from broken hearted, disillusioned refugee journalist from war-torn Sarajevo in 1993 to passionate advocate for the rights of refugees and migrants and 2014 Churchill Fellow.
According to the latest research by British Future, I, as a naturalised Brit, here for more than 15 years, am also that mythical creature, who according to their polling is trusted by the British public more than any politician of any political party.
I was lucky to survive the worst war and destruction Europe has seen since WW2. I was lucky to find refuge in Britain, amongst people, who despite often harsh policies and negativity around the issue, welcomed me into their lives and families and helped me not only to survive, but also to thrive. I worked hard to educate myself, to work and to contribute to my new country. I love living in London, even though I was forced to leave my country. That does not mean I love Sarajevo or Bosnia less, it just means I belong here now and I want to see London and Britain be the best it can be.
In our approach to refugees and migrants as well as in the way we conduct the immigration debate, for many years now we have not been at our best. It was painful to see the introduction of the Azure card for asylum seekers, while they were prevented from working or studying. I felt angry, guilty and powerless. Despite the passage of time, this is still very personal – it was happening on my watch and if I were to arrive now, my life would be on hold, in administrative destitution or even worse – indefinite detention. With many of my colleagues I feel overwhelmed by negativity and the inhumanity of it all. I felt we needed to do not only more but something different, something positive. We also needed to tell a different, more positive story.
In 2012 we set up Woman on the Move Awards to recognise and celebrate inspirational migrant and refugee women who make contribution to their communities. It worked! I am proud of our amazing winners: superwomen who even Nigel Farage would want to have as his neighbours!
But we have not been able to overturn the tide of negativity partly whipped up by the tabloid press peddling myths of scary immigrants and partly based on real concerns that people experience in their daily lives of which visible immigrants are increasingly both symbol and consequence. So I looked for a success story somewhere else. While we are trapped in a vicious circle of circular debate on numbers and entitlements, our special relations in the US were doing something very interesting. Don’t get me wrong, there were some exciting developments over here, namely the work we did with Citizens UK on the Independent Asylum Commission and on the campaign to end detention of children for immigration purposes. But the DREAMERS were making progress I had not yet seen anywhere else. It was HOPE and CHANGE all over the place! And for real!
I was lucky again as I won a scholarship to travel to the US for two months this summer to learn more about how they did it. I was able to do this due to the generosity of The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, which funds British citizens, (like me) to travel abroad and learn about best practice in the area of their personal interest and bring it back for the benefit of others, their profession and community in the UK. This just one of those things that makes Britain great!
I covered 15,000 miles from London to Alabama, Atlanta, Illionois, Washington DC, Maryland, Virginia, New York, Massachusetts and Washington State. I met more than 200 people organising for immigrants’ rights and achieving the impossible: Chicago police refusing to implement Federal orders to hold people on immigration charges. Massachusetts’ gubernatorial candidates all agreeing that undocumented migrants should have access to drivers licenses and the city of Seattle tolerating labour exchange of undocumented immigrants and funding safety at work training for them.
Wherever I went I learned something inspiring and felt empowered and encouraged that positive change is possible. These are just a few examples of things I have learned. I also learned that America is not the promised land and there are some real problems. This administration has deported more than two million immigrants, and split as many families. But this has just increased the resolve of immigrant campaigners to work harder and they are about to reap the benefits of their hard work. An estimated 11 million of undocumented immigrants are about to become documented. And I wanted to learn how did they get to this place.
I have asked all my new friends all over the US, if they had a magic wand, what is the one thing they would wish for, and every single one of them, from large national coalitions to small local community groups told me: immigration reform. When I asked them if they think they will get it – they all, without an expectation told me that it is just a question of time. I was impressed by their confidence, but having seen how they work, I too had no doubt they will succeed. And it is the ‘how’ that is the most impressive.
There were in the past attempts to deliver immigration reform in the US, but it only started happening when immigrants organised. Firstly young people made the progress for themselves, and now they are fighting for their families. It is hard to put into words the power of organised people, mobilising and registering new voters, drafting their own legislation and using their democratic powers for better society. They will get their reform by the executive order because the Latino vote is no longer a sleeping giant.
We have a long way to go in Britain. The Forum has for many years been a proud member of Citizens UK a broad based community organising alliance. We are working together with schools, churches, mosques, synagogues and charities to make Britain a fair, just and better country. We are spearheading the Citizens Sanctuary campaign to ensure the end of indefinite detention, welcome more Syrians in the UK and reduce the income threshold required from those who fall in love with foreigners.
The Forum has in the past year made progress in bringing organising to migrant and refugee communities. We are working hard to ensure new citizens register to vote and have a say in our democracy.
On Saturday 15th November we tasted the flavour of organising and movement building with our colleagues who work in the refugee and migrant world. Over the last year we worked with colleagues from around the country to organise the first Sanctuary Summit in Birmingham, attended by more than 400 people from more than 100 organisations.
I am very excited to have been involved in drafting the set of principles and asks we now call the Birmingham Declaration, which has already been signed by more than thirty organisations. This is the first time we as refugees, migrants and advocates made a proactive step for positive change. Yes, we have a long way to go to see fairer and more humane immigration policy and debate, but last Saturday in Birmingham we made that first step towards a better, organised, fairer future. I am asking you to join the list of supporting organisations and take the Declaration to your church, school, union, community, ask them to sign it and take the stand for positive change together.
May the force be with us!
http://online.wsj.com/articles/program-offers-reprieve-for-some-immigrants-1409933293
Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) has taken its next step. We now know who the preferred bidders are, and where they will work. These new partnerships are going to herald a significant change in how ‘offender management’ is carried out.
The Ministry of Justice statement on preferred bidders, which came out on 29th October, listed by my count, 14 charities, seven private sector organisations, and two public sector mutuals. This doesn’t give us a true picture of all the providers in the various supply chains, or the extent to which they will be involved in delivering services. It also doesn’t clarify who the primary contract holder is – though it’s unlikely to be a voluntary sector organisation.
What we do know is that this process is liable to change. As of 6 November GEO Group UK withdrew from of the competition because they had “not been able to reach an acceptable agreement” with the MoJ. This means that the GEO Mercia Willowdene partnership is no longer the preferred bidder for Warwickshire and West Mercia CRC. EOS, which is part of Staffline Group plc, are now in discussion with the MoJ and are said to be speaking with Willowdene Rehabilitation (social enterprise) and the staff mutual Mercia Community Action who were formerly in partnership with GEO.
What role will the voluntary sector actually play in delivering services?
It’s clear we need to progress the conversation we have been having around TR. A lot of our focus has been on the commissioning process, and rightly so. The discussion needs to turn to what services the voluntary sector will deliver, what sort of a strategic role they will get, what the volume of work will be, and what payment mechanisms are established to pay them. Close scrutiny of the eight new partnerships will be essential.
The voluntary sector organisations listed in the partnerships announced last week are mostly large (by criminal justice standards) Nacro, Addaction, CRI, and Shelter, and you would expect them to be delivering a significant element of the offender management, but at the moment this role hasn’t been defined. There are also some medium sized organisations such as St. Giles Trust and P3. We must not forget that there are also some comparatively small organisations listed in those partnerships, for instance, A Band of Brothers, Thames Valley Partnership, and Willowdene Rehabilitation Ltd (if they can secure a new partnership). The roles, services, and volume of work that all these organisations undertake will doubtless be incredibly different.
It seems apparent that the MoJ understand the vital role the voluntary sector plays in resettlement and rehabilitation. It makes me ponder, not for the first time, whether any of these partnerships would be able to deliver any of the services they bid for without the expertise and professionalism of their voluntary sector partners.
Why didn’t we get a voluntary sector lead preferred bidder?
I know that many are disappointed that we won’t have the chance to see how the voluntary sector would have done things differently. It has been well publicised that organisations like Catch 22, Home Group, and Turning Point were not successful in becoming listed as preferred bidders, despite a committed effort.
Clinks is disappointed too, and we want to make sure that we know why there was no voluntary sector lead preferred bidder before we can progress on our members’ behalf; we need to know the facts. Some of the reasons why it was difficult for the voluntary sector to bid as lead providers in the first place are well documented in our early (and ongoing) responses to TR e.g. the size of the contract package areas, the financial backing, the financial risk, the introduction of payment by results, and some more ethical considerations about the role that charities should take in delivering orders of the court, and some of the risks often raised in relation to partnering with large private sector organisations. But in the end we don’t know what factors really determined the outcome.
What about the 13,500 other voluntary sector organisations that work with this client group?
We should be clear that the voluntary sector in criminal justice is made up of a small amount of large providers, a slightly larger amount of medium sized organisations, and a vast amount of small ones (See research by TSRC). We know that the bulk of the voluntary sector’s work is at a very local level, in local authorities and neighbourhoods. How these organisations will be involved and engaged in the newly emerging Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) is anyone’s guess at the moment.
The MoJ has spoken about 300 material subcontractors in the bids, with the majority of these being voluntary sector organisations. They have also pointed to the fact that 700 voluntary sector organisations have registered as potential providers with the MoJ. A further 500 organisations have registered on Clinks’ Partnership Finder. Even if we combine all of these databases it only represents a small snapshot of the sector, and it doesn’t tell us anything about how they will be engaged.
For Clinks, the test of these new CRCs will not only be whether they positively impact on reducing re-offending, but also the extent to which they can address the diverse needs of their service users, and how they’ll work with specialist services to make a real difference. We know that the sector offers a wealth of expertise in a number of areas, which include (but are not exclusive to) women’s services, the needs of Black, Asian, and minority ethnic service users, older people, people with disabilities, and care leavers. In Clinks’ recent discussion paper ‘What does good rehabilitation look like?’, we found that the voluntary sector’s role in providing specialist and flexible services is key to improving the lives of people in the CJS.
A longer version of this blog was originally posted on the Clinks website. Clinks is a member of the T2A Alliance. It supports the voluntary sector in Criminal Justice, providing information and voice to the sector, as well as working to bring about positive change for people in the Criminal Justice System. Find out more about their work by going to their website.
This week is Living Wage Week. The Living Wage Campaign calls for every waged person in the country to earn enough to provide their family with the essentials of life. The Living Wage hourly rate is calculated according to the cost of living and set independently every year. Launched by Citizens UK in 2001, the campaign so far has been responsible for generating £210 million of additional wages, lifting more than 40,000 families out of in-work poverty.
The new Living Wage rates for 2015 have been announced today. In London the rate is now £9.15 an hour – a rise of 4% from £8.80 per hour. Outside London the UK Living Wage rate has been set at £7.85 per hour – an increase of 2.6% on the 2013 rate and 21% higher than the national minimum wage of £6.50 per hour – improving the take home pay of low-paid workers across the country who are employed by over 1,000 Living Wage accredited organisations.
The Living Wage Foundation, which accredits companies and organisations as Living Wage employers, can count companies such as Barclays, KPMG, Aviva, Nationwide, HSBC, Legal & General, as well as Oxfam, Save the Children, the TUC and Transport for London, in its ranks. Of course there are still a majority of large corporations and companies who do not pay the basic Living Wage to their workers, or ensure that the supply chain companies and providers they work with – cleaning staff, caterers, security firms etc. – pay a Living Wage.
For Barrow Cadbury Trust, with our long history of supporting equality issues and gender disadvantage (a majority of the low paid are women), not to mention the rights of migrant workers – many of whom will be on low wages, it went without saying that we would apply for Living Wage accreditation ourselves. This proved tricky, however, because our cleaners are not direct employees. Eventually we were able to negotiate to pay them at the London Living Wage rate, after taking advice from the Living Wage Foundation. So now we have our accreditation! Our next task is to persuade the other tenants in the building we occupy that they should commit to Living Wages and to speak to all the companies in our supply chain to find out if they are Living Wage employers.
As a foundation we see engaging with our grantholders and prospective applicants on the importance of building a Living Wage workforce as crucial. But we understand that it is not an easy thing to do, even if it is something we should all be working towards. Keeping the pressure up and our foot on the accelerator is essential. Despite more than a thousand employers signed up to the Living Wage we cannot afford to rest on our laurels.
The Trust will be working with other funders interested in supporting the Living Wage to develop and share good practice on being a Living Wage funder and employer, as well as supporting grantholders such as Citizens UK and Share Action – the latter working to influence and raise awareness amongst shareholders.
The research to back up the benefits of the Living Wage is all there. The report funded by Trust for London in October 2012 on the Costs and benefits of the London Living Wage is one. The Resolution Foundation has also published a report Beyond the Bottom Line: the challenges and opportunities of a Living Wage. And if you go to the Living Wage Foundation website you can read some personal accounts of just how peoples’ lives have benefitted from the Living Wage.
Sara Llewellin is the Chief Executive of Barrow Cadbury Trust.
