"The people here are wonderful,” says Jenny Sturgeon, a white Englishwoman who
has lived in Slough for 30 years. “And the ethnic mix is wonderful. It’s how
the country should be. But we get a huge number of people coming in from all
ethnic groups. A shortage of money can lead to tensions. The government has
a lot to answer for.”
The town of Slough, which lies outside the M25 near Heathrow, has the greatest
ethnic mix in the UK outside London. By comparison, even Leicester and
Coventry seem blandly uniform.
Take Malinka, a Polish deli near the library. The large majority of shoppers
are Polish but nonPoles go there too. One who enters to buy sausages while
I’m there is Stephen Cordeiro, a Portuguese-Asian who was born in Kenya. And
I notice that in the deli’s window, among the job ads in Polish for nannies,
waiting staff and handymen, that there’s a card written in English, offering
the services of an “African hair stylist”.
Surveys carried out by the council show that a quarter of the town’s
businesses with more than 10 employees use the new migrant workforce because
– businesses reported – they brought higher productivity and a better work
ethic than indigenous workers.
But inevitably there are tensions. One Polish woman, Aneta Kania, says she had
never seen such diversity till she came to Slough. “I was very shocked by
the mix. At first I thought it was a bit scary.”
Another Polish woman, an economist by training, told me darkly that she had
recently been working in retail “for an Indian” but had stopped doing so
“because they don’t respect you”.
A Sikh with a strong Indian accent lent credence to what that Polish woman
said when he told me “there are too many immigrants in Slough”. Polish
drivers with no car insurance jump red lights, he muttered. And last week
he’d been bothered by Bulgarians ringing his doorbell to beg for money.
Ted Cantle, who conducted the official inquiry into the cause of riots in
Bradford, Burnley and Oldham in 2001, believes that migration to the UK can
bring real benefits. “But building cohesive communities to harness the
benefits long term takes resources.
“It is important that councils like Slough are funded correctly for their
population size and complexity to make sure they continue community cohesion
work,” he says. “Com-munity tensions are sometimes caused by the perception
of competition between groups over resources and councils have to be able to
demonstrate this is not the case.”
Perhaps with that in mind, Slough last week formally protested to the Treasury
that it had been severely underfunded because government statistics
underestimated the number of immigrants coming to the town. Richard Stokes,
leader of the council, describes official statistics as “not fit for
purpose”.
“Estimates have failed to keep pace with what is happening on the ground and
public services are suffering as a consequence,” he says. “The migrants that
come to Slough are hard-working and bring great benefit to the local economy
but the council remains severely underfunded because of these poor
statistics.”
Andrew Blake-Herbert, Slough’s strategic director for finance and property,
says the council faces a £15m shortfall. It has managed not to cut crucial
services but cannot make necessary improvements in areas such as children’s
services and recycling.
According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), Slough experienced the
ninth-fastest population increase of any local authority in the country
between 1991 and 2001. But since then, the ONS contends, the town’s
population has declined by 3.3%, to a total of 117,600. Slough’s own data
suggests the total is nearer 130,000.
To support that figure, the council puts forward an impressive array of
evidence. It points to substantial increases in new housing, the rapid rise
in house prices, the increasing numbers of households from which the council
tax is collected, the high fertility rate among women in Slough (66 births
per 1,000 women, compared with 54 in the country as a whole) and even a
substantial increase in the amount of sewage flowing out of town.
Visiting Slough last week, I found plenty more evidence that the migrant
population is getting bigger. I talked to officials, business figures, and
residents from across the entire community – pale-skinned and dark,
European, African and Asian.
To start, I visited the busy road near Slough’s massive trading estate – the
largest in Europe – where coaches from Poland stop illegally to disgorge new
arrivals. And I talked to a resident who watches that happen twice a day,
sometimes more.
Tadeusz Chruscik is Polish but he’s been living here since 1942, having served
in the Polish Air Force. (Some 130,000 Poles settled in Britain during and
after the war.) He says he’s met some people who get off the coach without
the slightest idea where to go, having got on after having too much to drink.
The sheer numbers arriving here simply can’t be housed properly. The council
is paid by central government to ensure that three-storey houses are not
overcrowded but lacks the funds to check buildings with only two storeys. As
a result, many migrants endure dangerously crowded conditions.
Colin Rodgers, manager of the estate agency B Simmons & Son, says: “I’ve
seen places where there are three beds in the lounge and three in the dining
room. “ I’ve also heard stories, from quite believable sources, about people
using those beds in shifts.”
Property, it hardly needs adding, has become unaffordable to many people.
Baber Zafar is 21 and has lived in Slough all his life. In the town square,
Zafar says immigrants have put so much pressure on house prices that he is
moving to Spain.
By a grim irony, the rising property market recently resulted in the closure
of Slough’s immigration counselling centre. It has now moved to Southall,
west London, explains one of the counsellors, Qazi Anisud-din, because
rising rents in Slough made the old premises unaffordable.
Of course, the borough council does what it can. In fact, it does more than
most. In the past 18 months it has placed in schools some 900 children who
arrived in Slough from overseas. In other towns, they might have had to wait
weeks or months to be placed, but Slough established a special assessment
centre to speed the process. But it’s slow work: the centre can take only
eight children a week. Last year two primary schools accepted 50 Polish
children and 60 Somalis in just one term.
Not everyone welcomes the flood of pupils for whom spoken English is not easy.
Aneta Kania sends her daughter to St Anthony’s Roman Catholic school but
says there are so many other Polish children there that seven-year-old
Paulina is making slow progress in English. (Kania has poor English herself.
Though trained as a nurse, she’s obliged to work as a cleaner until her
language skills improve. What with bringing up a child on her own, and her
job, she finds it hard to fit in the lessons.) Another pioneering service
set up by Slough council is devoted to dealing with Roma migrants who have
been arriving by the hundreds since Romania joined the European Union in
January.
Eighty-eight unaccompanied Roma children have asked for support from the
town’s children’s services. Six have babies of their own, and seven are
pregnant. To deal with these Roma children, Slough has set up a specialist
team, at a cost of £150,000 since January.
Fiona Mactaggart, Slough’s MP and a former minister in the Home Office, says
the flawed calculations “will not do”. And the ONS itself recognises the
shortcomings of its statistics. Karen Dunnell, the national statistician,
wrote in May 2006: “There is now a broad recognition that available
estimates of migrant numbers are inadequate for managing the economy,
policies and services.”
Even the Poles don’t relish the arrival of yet more Poles. Kania, the nurse
who came to Slough just 18 months ago, says she dreads June, July and August
because that’s when Polish students come here for summer jobs. “There are
too many people in Slough already,” she says.
The legal tangle
Some days ago a newspaper published a photograph of 21 members of a Roma
family. Apparently there are another 80, all relatives and all newly arrived
since Romania joined the EU in January. A social worker in Slough explained
she had nine teenage Roma girls, several of whom were pregnant, in her care.
In theory, Romanians and Bulgarians are subject to a special regime for a
transitional period of up to seven years. They can only come here to work
legally if they are highly skilled, have been granted a work permit or come
under a special quota for temporary agricultural workers. But there are no
checks on the borders. They only have to show a valid ID card and walk in
and they are entitled to stay as visitors for up to three months.
Back to our pregnant teenagers. Why can they not be sent home? The answer lies
in a tangled web of legal obligations. Successive children acts have placed
an obligation on local authorities to care for children in need. The Race
Relations Act 1976 makes it unlawful to discriminate on the grounds of race
or nationality; foreign children have to be treated as British. As for
access to the NHS, pregnancy is regarded (rightly) as a medical emergency so
treatment is automatic.
On top of that, the Free Movement Directive which came into force last year
severely restricts the government’s ability to expel EU nationals even if
they have committed a crime. In expanding the EU to countries which are far
poorer than our own, we have stumbled into a potential crisis.
The free movement of labour has set in hand movements of workers to Britain on
a greater scale than anticipated. At the same time “harmonisation” of social
security has placed obligations on EU governments to provide benefits in the
richer countries that greatly exceed wages in the poorer ones.
Sir Andrew Green
Chairman, Migrationwatch UK
