UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 281-xiii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

WELSH AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

Globalisation and its Impact on Wales

Tuesday 19 June 2007

REVEREND ALED EDWARDS and MR CHRIS MYANT

CHIEF SUPERINTENDENT STEVE CURTIS

and CHIEF SUPERINTENDENT PHILL THOMSON

Evidence heard in Public Questions 938 - 1005

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Welsh Affairs Committee

on Tuesday 19 June 2007

Members present

Dr Hywel Francis, in the Chair

Mr Stephen Crabb

Nia Griffith

Mrs Siān C James

Mr Martyn Jones

Albert Owen

Hywel Williams

Mark Williams

________________

Memorandum submitted by Commission for Racial Equality Wales

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Reverend Aled Edwards OBE, Commissioner, Commission for Racial Equality Wales and Mr Chris Myant, Director, Commission for Racial Equality Wales, gave evidence.

Q938 Chairman: Good morning and welcome to the Welsh Affairs Committee. For the record, could you please introduce yourselves?

Reverend Edwards: Reverend Aled Edwards OBE, Commissioner for the Commission for Racial Equality in Wales.

Mr Myant: I am Chris Myant, Director of the Commission for Racial Equality in Wales.

Q939 Chairman: Could I begin by referring to your most welcome memorandum which we found very helpful in preparing for this session. You refer to what you call "the Welsh context" in which the debate on migration should be seen and you also refer to "Wales's distinctive experience of having to embrace change". Would you describe to the Committee what you mean by that?

Reverend Edwards: It is partly a consideration of our history as a people. Going back deeply to our Celtic roots - a long time ago - we would reflect, for example, that Celtic spirituality was very welcoming of a stranger; there was a warm welcome technically to exiles in Wales, a far more embracive approach towards those who found themselves estranged politically from ancient cultures. That goes through to a sense of difference within these islands, a sense of sensitivity, of being perhaps throughout our history different ourselves. You will recall of course that the Welsh word "cymrodd" refers to being one of us; the English word "Welsh" refers to being foreign, by definition, and I think there is a certain distant dynamic to that. Obviously, in our context as the CRE in Wales we would have a more recent reflection of that, very much reflective of the fact that our population increased quite dramatically about 100 years ago, an immigration rate of 45 to 10,000 which is quite exceptional to the extent that it is only second to America. Therefore, we have it in our own experience as a people, an experience of migration which is almost second to none, and a way of handling it in a sense of identity that is perhaps more pluralistic in its approach. In more recent tines, particularly post-devolution Wales, we have reflected very often on developments, for example, to the Welsh refugee community and recently I have had a conversation with Themba Moyo who is the chair of Refugee Voice Wales; his reflections are very concise about what it means to be part of modern Wales, to feel a sense of welcoming that has been led by, if I may say so, MPs and also, more particularly, the Welsh Assembly Government in making sure that people are included within Welsh society. There is there a growing sense of Welshness that is based upon internationalism and diversity. As always we have a choice in Wales of whether we pitch into more traditional mono-cultural patterns of our identity or go perhaps to a more international diverse phase which enables us to have an enriching experience that enables us to cope with the diversities of the modern world. It is something that Gwyn Alf Williams articulated very well in his literature of how we have redefined ourselves from generation to generation and current patterns of global change in migration lead us to yet another time of redefinition for us. That is what I had in mind in the paper when I put that to your Committee.

Q940 Chairman: You are of the view then that in the words of the historian John Davies, where he says that Wales of the late nineteenth century was defined very narrowly in terms of non-conformity of the Welsh language, saboteuriansm and sobriety, we have successfully reinvented ourselves since then?

Reverend Edwards: The word "successful" is a relative one because we do have, as we know in modern Wales, those challenges of inclusion, and it is quite significant that the Welsh Assembly Government uses the word inclusion rather than integration, and how we include people is always a challenge - enabling them to speak English, access to the English language and Welsh when that needs to be, but Wales has now crossed that Rubicon of diversity and I do not think anybody would define it by one language, one faith, one culture, we are far more diverse people and John Davies is right in that analysis.

Q941 Chairman: You may well have answered this question, but in your memorandum you talk about "Wales now stands where it has always stood: largely defined by the migration of diverse peoples", and essentially that is what you have just described, is it not?

Reverend Edwards: Yes, and there are a number of factors there. It is the proximity of England and the movement of people from England to Wales and vice versa, and I would say that that would actually conform very much to a global pattern of migration in the sense that most people will actually migrate to the country next to them. That is something that we are learning to live with. We are also experiencing internal migration from rural areas to urban areas, and one characteristic of that of course is the movement to Cardiff and to the M4 basin. Of late we have been very privileged to have asylum seekers, refugees and also accession country migrants into Wales and, on the whole, we have benefited from that migration and have been able to handle it well. Obviously, that has to be informed by modern policy, by effective monitoring, by the assessment of policy, so what we are actually doing is sharing a national civic aspiration with modern political skills of assessment and monitoring, and enabling policy formers to actually deliver.

Q942 Mark Williams: You touched on EU accession countries and the migration from those places as a benefit. Are there particular problems or challenges in your view in certain parts of Wales with regard to employment, education, housing, social services and, given the challenges of that migration, does CRE Wales have a specific role in that process?

Reverend Edwards: Can I refer to my colleague; he will have the technical answers for that.

Mr Myant: There are challenges and some of them are quite big. There are challenges both in terms of enabling newcomers to live within communities that are welcoming; there are challenges for the communities to be sufficiently welcoming. There are challenges for public bodies in terms of making sure that the right kinds of services are available. If you take a city like Wrexham, the number of children now coming in from Poland or from Portugal, needing English as second language tuition before they can properly access schooling in the town, is quite significant and imposes a burden on the council from a financial point of view. At the same time the parents of those children are doing work which means that companies which might otherwise close or move away from Wrexham are able to contribute to the wealth of the community. It is a complex balance and it is one where our job is to challenge public bodies to make sure that they are addressing these kinds of things in a planned, systematic way that takes account not only of the interests of the incomers, the new needs that are being generated, but does so in a way which enables the existing communities to understand why it is being done and to see that in being done it is something that is of benefit to everyone.

Q943 Mark Williams: Having taken evidence in Wrexham we would concur with that problem, but nonetheless the benefits - the shortfall in certain areas of labour in particular. You mentioned the public sector and in your note you say that "Wales has ... developed strategically significant schemes that offer models of good practice to the rest of the UK in the context of the public sector." What are those models of good practice and how do they differ from other models operating across the UK as a whole?

Reverend Edwards: I would refer you to quite innovative schemes such as the one from Displaced People in Action (DPIA) that took a small number of refugee doctors, mainly Iraqis, worked alongside the Welsh Assembly Government for some initial funding and then mainstreamed the project into delivery within the health service. That has now taken us from a base of about 15 refugee doctors initially in 2003 to 70 registered doctors in the scheme. Welsh devolution may have been a catalyst there for enabling us to embrace one highly skilled profession and to enable them to work within the health service. In the refugee sector again DPIA - it is worth noting their work - has produced a placement to work scheme which will register something in the region of about 150 refugees in South Wales in particular, skill them up with references to ESOL schemes that will help them to gain English language skills and to refer them to places that are good at actually enabling them to deploy their skills base. What we find, particularly with asylum seekers who become refugees and therefore able to work, is that they are frequently highly skilled. They have skills that we actually need in Wales and can deploy, and that again would be a model of good practice from the refugee sector in particular.

Q944 Mark Williams: Do you detect a difference between a policy more generally in the UK as a whole and what you have highlighted in Wales specifically?

Reverend Edwards: In that case I certainly would, because at one point a few months ago you were virtually guaranteed a post if you passed your examinations and your qualifications as a doctor in Wales, but it was much heavier going, heavier weather, in the rest of the UK because there were no specific accessible schemes that married the knowledge and the intimate experience of the voluntary sector with governance on a political level. That is one scheme that offers a paradigm of good practice and good modelling to the UK.

Q945 Mr Crabb: Mr Myant, you have provided a very useful summary of what you describe as the big challenges of inward migration and the burdens on local authorities. Is that to imply that it is the view of the CRE that there are limits to the amount of inward migration that Wales can absorb? I am thinking about some of the hotspots like Wrexham; how close are we to reaching some of those limits, or is it your view that actually the capacity to absorb immigration is limitless?

Mr Myant: The way I would answer that is to say that if we do nothing then the limit is reached when one person comes; if we manage this properly then perhaps there is no limit to how we do it. Communities can change and can welcome incomers if those communities approach the matter in the right kind of way. Some areas of Wales 200 years ago had no people living in them at all and are now densely populated communities. It would not be for the Commission to set limits on that process, either at the bottom or at the top, the job for the Commission is to make sure that whatever movement there is, is done in a way which benefits everybody and that relationships are developed between incomers and those already there. Some of them will themselves have been either incomers in their earlier years or the children or the grandchildren of incomers. Our job is to make sure that that process is properly managed and to alert public bodies, ordinary individuals, politicians, faith leaders whoever it may be, to the kind of things that they need to do. What is quite striking in my experience in Wales, having worked in this field in London for many years beforehand, is not just that you have some practical examples of the kind that Aled was pointing to in response to the previous question, but that you have a context in which these practical answers can be made to work more effectively. Yesterday I was with a number of local authority chief executives looking at how they needed to develop their race equality schemes and pointing out, in particular, the need for them to address issues of good race relations within their local communities. We are able to do that work in quite a hands-on way in Wales because we can be closer to people who are in leadership, which is actually quite hard to do in England, partly because it is bigger but partly because there s a different kind of political culture, and it means that we can be closer and help them approach the solutions in a more open-minded way which then makes the solutions actually work. I do not see the issue from our point of view as being one of what are the limits, I see the issue as what are we doing to make sure that what we have got on the table at the moment actually works for everybody.

Q946 Mr Crabb: So long as there is funding available to support the kind of work that you and other partners are involved in, so long as that support is being given to frontline public services it is your view that actually there are no limits as regards to what can be done.

Mr Myant: I do not have a view on the limits, I have a view about what kind of work should be done to handle whatever happens on the ground. Our job is to deal with the realities on the ground and make sure that is responded to properly. None of us know what way the labour supply or the labour demand will go in three, four or five years time and we might see very different kinds of challenges on the ground in that period of time.

Q947 Nia Griffith: You mentioned the skills that some of the refugees bring and some of the work they can do. What is your view on the people who have not got refugee status going through, perhaps, very long processes to establish their status and their inability under current rules to be able to work; do you see the opportunity to work as being a way of helping the communities to be more cohesive?

Reverend Edwards: I have reflected long and hard because I used to be the chair of the Welsh Refugee Council and therefore my experience of this is quite intimate, as you can imagine. The previous wave of dispersal to Wales was marked initially from our perspective of serving the client as being one of almost deadly passivity; frequently the experiences that had brought them to Wales were quite dramatic and quite painful and they were disorientated. The thing that we would reflect on is that level of passivity and getting them to be active, and in that sense volunteering and training by different agencies is quite useful. There are limits to that; the prohibition of course to work is exceedingly difficult and also the relative poverty of those who wish to access their volunteering capacity because it is actually very difficult to afford to be able to volunteer, but many do and I would remind you that somebody like Themba Moyo was awarded two years ago the Volunteer of the Year Award in Wales which is quite indicative of the vibrancy of that culture. The sector that I feel particularly concerned for is the children of the first wave under that dispersal system, who may have been now in our education system for four or five years, who have passed their GCSEs very well, gained excellent A-level results and find that the door to further education is, because of the funding restriction, closed to them. That is a tragedy. Wales needs to reflect, the Assembly perhaps needs to reflect, on whether you do need to actually regard such individuals as foreign students. That policy change could be quite good. There is, as you are rightly discerning, a limit to the degree to which you can volunteer and there would be certainly an opinion within the refugee world that would say it is much better if you allowed us to work and taxed us in the process and allowed us to be productive. The tragedy is of course that people lose their skills, and if they do find that they are able to return to their home nations they are by then deskilled. That is of itself for many a tragedy.

Q948 Hywel Williams: Can we turn to some questions around identity? You say in your note that because of the nature of Wales we have had "to turn to more creative emblem of national identity: specifically, around how different people recognise each other and get on with each other within communities." What are the particular ways that we are going to bring people together and create communities in Wales, and what makes them distinctively Welsh?

Reverend Edwards: It is very much a subjective analysis but one that is actually echoed by the evidence, for example from the Refugee Voice Wales group of how we handle those issues. As I said, we cannot in Wales define ourselves by one language, one faith, one culture, we have to be diverse, and there are two narratives presented to us always in Wales of whether we can opt for a more destructive pattern - and that is part of our history: some of us will remember the viciousness of the 1911 anti-Semitic riots in Gwent, the 1919 riots in Cardiff, so we have that part of our history as well. What we need to do is be aspirational within our politics, where we do strive to value each other for what we are, and that brings us to the whole debate about the difference between inclusion and integration. It is quite significant that the refugee communities met over the weekend and found that what they valued most about Wales was that they were allowed to contribute of who and what they were to a civic dynamic, and reflected that perhaps it was not the case with such intensity in other parts of the UK. It is an ongoing debate and it is something that is very, very difficult to define, because as a whole people cannot be defined in terms of such a dynamic but they can reflect on what is happening.

Q949 Hywel Williams: Thank you. You say also in your note that "the growing emphasis on the acquiring and use of English ... becomes highly problematic in a bilingual setting when it is used as a measuring stick for integration and identity". I did actually ask David Blunkett when he introduced the Britishness test in his statement to the House "What about the Welsh language?" and he replied "They can learn Welsh if they like", which I personally felt was not an adequate answer and I assume that not many refugees or immigrants have learnt Welsh rather than English in Wales. What problems do you identify with that sort of dynamic in a British context as compared to the situation in Wales and what solutions do you suggest?

Reverend Edwards: I would refer to more positive points in terms of the Welsh language community and the newer communities of Wales. It is particularly pleasing that a welsh medium school such as Plas Mawr in Cardiff now brings in about 10%, one in ten, of its student base from BME communities; that is commendable and that is part of the modern dynamic of Wales. I sat last week for the launch of Our Shared Futures, the result of the Commission on Integration, and I did reflect as a Welsh speaker that there was a certain emphasis on the English language that perhaps would not go down well in every part of Wales and there was an aversion there to translation, which is very much part of our bilingual ethos in Wales. I think that any bilingual culture offers a basis and a platform for diversity that of itself must be healthy and I would again refer you to the fact that this conforms to a global pattern in the sense that if you look at the population of New York, for example, almost half of the population of New York will not speak English at home, it is part of our modern world. We do need to remind colleagues who form such policies that there is a Welsh Language Act in existence, that people feel sensitive about their status and their rights to speak that language and that being bilingual is not in any sense corrosive of oneness and unity but it actually contributes to it. I would refer of course to the events of last week with Thomas Cook where there was a considerable outcry in Welsh-speaking communities at what appeared to be a prohibition on speaking Welsh within a given environment, and people do rightly feel a sense of angst and concern when those sorts of policies flow. I do think it is important that we remind the breadth of the UK that Wales has an official bilingual policy.

Q950 Hywel Williams: Lastly, you also say in your memorandum that "Wales ... now has a self sustaining refugee community network that increasingly perceives itself to be Welsh within the emerging devolved context". I am reminded of Gwynfor Evans' statement that anybody can be Welsh as long as they are prepared to take the consequences.

Reverend Edwards: Yes.

Q951 Hywel Williams: What more can you tell us about this and how does the CRE interact with the community network that you refer to?

Reverend Edwards: we work with them on a daily basis and refer to them in terms of the gleaning of information and also contributing to what they wish to do in terms of policy, and it is part of our Croeso project as well which I would want to profile. The lesson that we have learnt is that whilst you have got a considerable number of very, very able people from diverse backgrounds on your doorstep, you are actually obliged to enable them to do what they wish to do rather than to seek more patronising models of assistance that reflect probably our priorities for them. Now we have in Refugee Voice Wales 36 refugee community organisations, which is reflective of a vibrancy within that community. They estimate that they serve something in the region of 5,000 to 6,000 people. One of the signs of the creativeness of that dynamic is that when people do go through that process and find a place of work they move on very quickly and become very much part of Welsh society. We have a mantra in the refugee world that the best way to integrate people is to include them, and that is the lesson that we have learned through that particular dynamic.

Q952 Albert Owen: Good morning; I am just going to move on to social inclusion and community cohesion. You have already alluded to the fact that we have this history of welcoming people, but you also say in your memorandum that we "cannot rest on a sense of welcoming that is more romantic than real". What do you as an organisation do to ensure that that is real and is not just a romantic notion of our past?

Reverend Edwards: We have applied a robustness of process to our work that places a significant emphasis on monitoring and enabling public bodies in Wales to monitor their race equality schemes and also, enmeshed with that when policy has been formed, to encourage public bodies to have impact assessment. If I may refer to Chris, Chris is more experienced in the technicalities of that work.

Mr Myant: Under the Race Relations Act public bodies have certain duties; the challenge for the Commission across Britain as a whole is that the number of public bodies is vast and, without an inspection system that would be overly burdensome, it is practically impossible for the Commission in England to look at individual public bodies. In Wales you have got 22 local authorities, a limited number of health bodies, a significant smaller number of secondary schools, a limited number of universities, one Assembly Government, so it is possible for our team to look in detail at what each individual body is doing, challenge it, be upfront, honest and straightforward about its weaknesses but then also offer a helping hand of advice and assistance to get them to change, and that is what we were doing in Aberaeron yesterday with a group of local authority chief executives. We have a series of programmes of work at the moment which will deliver a range of detailed reports on all the public bodies that we have the power and responsibility to regulate - it comes to something like 100 across Wales - which we will provide to the incoming single Equality Commission in October as a baseline for it to develop work and practice, particularly on what these organisations are doing to deal with good relations, either within their workforce or within the community because the good relations responsibility is something which is very clear, even if a public body might turn around to us and say we only have a tiny number of black members of the public; the issue of good relations in the community between English and Welsh speakers, between incoming Polish migrant workers, between long-established black communities and other members of the community is very clearly a major priority. Our target is to achieve a position whereby in the late spring of next year, when the cycle of regulatory work comes to a new point, when new schemes have to be issued and adopted, we can have effective, good race relations programmes of work under way across Wales. Whether we achieve that we will have to see and what quality and how much purchase they will have in the local community we will also have to see, but it seems to us a very important target because that will also be the next round of local elections in Wales where candidates will be standing and wishing to do the very opposite, that is stir up animosity, anxiety, prejudice and so on. We need to make sure that the public is offered the opportunity for a proper debate around real facts rather than around phantoms and spectres.

Q953 Albert Owen: That is a very detailed answer; thank you for that. You mentioned about various local authorities probably not giving the same priority to this issue and that they usually react to an issue rather than have plans for it. How do you work with them to ensure that when the chief executive of North West Wales says to you "We do not have a problem, in North East Wales the problem is bigger so why not concentrate your efforts there"? How would you deal with those chief executives?

Mr Myant: That is not easy because of course what you need to be able to do is to sit down with the chief executive or with the councillors, with the leading staff in the organisation, and help them understand why equality issues, diversity in the community, are important to them, and this was precisely the conversation that we were having yesterday. The chief executive of a major local authority in Wales: "Why is this an issue for us because we have few migrant workers, they only stay for a few months and then they go and only nought point so and so per cent of our population is Black or Asian". I said to him, "Well, of course, in your community I have head teachers coming to us who say that 'Race is not an issue for us' and I say 'Okay, your school is all white and Welsh-speaking. Take your children in a coach and put them in the centre of Birmingham and ask them to walk around Birmingham speaking Welsh to each other and see what the local community says back to them. Bring them back home and then ask them whether living in a diverse world where we have differences that we need to share and understand with each other actually is not a problem for your youngsters. They are either potential victims or they are people who can help resolve problems or they are perpetrators of problems, all of us have a role to play'." I was very pleased to see that the chief executive said, "Yes, good point, I had not thought of that; that is precisely the sort of priority that we should have in our race equality scheme from next spring onwards." You do not get the chance in the bigger picture across Britain as a whole to have these kinds of detailed discussions with the people who actually have their hands on the levers of power. What is interesting about Wales is that you can do that, and that is why we find that our work can have somewhat greater purchase.

Q954 Albert Owen: If I can move on again to your note where you mention about the IPPR study in 2005 which found that "Cardiff had the most positive attitude towards asylum seekers of all the cities in the UK it questioned". Do you think that is the case and what are the reasons behind it?

Reverend Edwards: Historically in that instance it represented a high water mark in the activities of a refugee media group that was based in Cardiff, and there had been quite a deliberate, systematic and very professional effort to feed positive stories to the Welsh press and media about refugees and asylum seekers so that people became individuals with names rather than entities. That was in stark contrast to what the group could not achieve up front, to put it bluntly, with some of the London-based press and media who would frequently come in with gross misrepresentation, not only of the newer community but of the newcomers as well. It does not help when national papers lead, for example, when there is a possibility of having an asylum centre in Sully that Sully is described as "a remote Welsh village". It shows you a degree of incompetence about the nature of Wales that is quite astounding.

Q955 Albert Owen: Are you saying that the Welsh media in your opinion is more sensitive to these issues than the English media?

Reverend Edwards: Yes, and attached to that there is a certain civic dynamic in Wales and an intimacy of contact that enables that approach to develop.

Q956 Albert Owen: That is probably just the cities, the large cities. Cardiff had a Somali population for many years and there has been integration there for many years, is that confined to the city of Cardiff and may I be so bold as somebody from the North West as to say that the media is perhaps Cardiff-centric as well and it is probably different in the regions of Wales?

Mr Myant: We are not saying that everything is perfect in this garden. There are huge problems in Wales of integration, of inequality and so on, but there are certain parts of public life and public attitudes which are better and give us an opportunity to get changes in practice. Already in one of the questions the point was made that it is possible to have good ideas but are they actually applied and being put into practice. There is no doubt that the media that I read in Cardiff is better from a race equality and welcoming point of view, different kinds of images appearing, people just being naturally and ordinarily presented in the media better than you would get in London, but as you rightly say that is not a media that is read by everybody and it is a media that is Cardiff-based. Some of the other local papers across Wales are also good, some of them are not so good.

Q957 Albert Owen: Of course Welsh people in Cardiff read English newspapers and the red-tops et cetera.

Mr Myant: Yes.

Q958 Albert Owen: Do they react differently, do you think?

Reverend Edwards: If I may say so the crucial difference here has been the role, I would say, of BBC Wales and also ITV because those stories can be covered very differently and those would have a national dimension rather than just a Cardiff base. It was very, very interesting to observe how a Croatian asylum seeker who was about to be deported all of a sudden became "our asylum seeker" within the community, and that began to develop very quickly.

Q959 Mrs James: I have quite a significant refugee and asylum seeker community in my constituency; the problem in my constituency is that people are not watching BBC Wales, they are not reading the Western Mail, they are in actually one of the areas with the highest dependency on Sky and satellite TV. How do you think we can influence things with maybe the major tabloids?

Reverend Edwards: Dare I say that this would be a role for Members of Parliament in particular who have a broader brief than Assembly members and to have a positive profile for what is going on that is good within constituencies. On a local level word of mouth is very effective in terms of creating a sense of community and strategy but it operates on the whole within an environment that is quite aggressive nationally towards migrant populations. When politicians speak a degree of truth that is well-informed and balanced, that can have a very powerful, corrective effect.

Q960 Mrs James: You have already mentioned, and your memorandum highlights, the difference between policies aimed at the "integration" of migrants and those aimed at the "inclusion" of migrants in the community. Can you tell us a little bit more about this and possibly expand on it; do the two approaches act in parallel?

Reverend Edwards: They can. The words "integration" and "inclusion" can mean different things to different people and in the document that we had last week from the Integration Commission there were breadths of definitions there. The core issue is having policies that are targeted towards enabling communities to deliver from their talent and skill base and that is a key element to inclusion, rather than having an emphasis on models that are perceived by some of the client groups in particular, and the newer people within our midst, as being assimilationist. That can be quite frightening for people in the sense that you find yourself in a different place, wanting to contribute who you are to it rather than being asked to be somebody else. Policy can actually affect that quite dramatically.

Q961 Mrs James: One of the things that is of particular concern if you are dealing with vulnerable communities is making sure that those communities where people are settled actually feel included as well.

Reverend Edwards: Yes, that is true. One of the things that some of the voluntary groups will do, fore example, which is not in any way demeaning of the integrationist agenda - the first the DPIA will do with young people from 14 to 25 in the scheme, for example, is to give them intensive ESOL training which is indicative of enabling people to be part of the communities and to express that. Particularly on the refugee scene and the asylum scene there is a particular phenomenon of the condition that very often young people have to be the mouthpiece for the whole family, which is actually disabling of a generation and reverses family models. Policy can be directed quite effectively at that process of enabling.

Q962 Mrs James: What about the wider community? My concern is that many of the mothers, for example, do not actually get those opportunities and they are not given the social opportunities to get out of the household et cetera and learn English and be part of the community. How do you encourage particularly isolated members within asylum communities?

Reverend Edwards: In the urban areas there are quite innovative schemes that enable, for example, the Somali Women's Group to acquire English language skills and other skills. That is supported quite heavily by the Assembly and also by voluntary agencies who can deliver that. I would have a great concern for people who find themselves outside of that Cardiff basin or the urban areas because it is actually exceedingly difficult for them to gain the support that they may need. One of the aspects of the modern migration of people - not asylum seekers or refugees but economic migrants - is that they are actually found in every part of Wales. There are large pockets where people find themselves, in deep rural areas, perhaps without the access to services and training, those enabling policies that actually enable them to do what they would want to do.

Q963 Mr Crabb: Your written submission to the Committee noted that amongst some young Welsh workers there is "a strong perception that recent immigration has lowered wages and made some jobs more difficult to acquire". Do you think there is any link at all between recent immigration and the phenomenon that we have seen in Wales in the last five years whereby the proportion of young people aged 16 and up to 20, not in fulltime education, employment or training bizarrely has been increasing, even though unemployment is coming down? Do you see any link between that phenomenon and inward migration of foreign workers?

Reverend Edwards: Yes, to a degree, and Chris can answer this question as well. What I would observe and a more strategic element is that if you look at countries that have experienced large-scale migration - and an interesting example here would be Israel, for example, during the Nineties - 710,000 people came into Israel over that decade. Their initial experience was that it lowered wages by 5% and what they also found was that interest rates initially rose. What they found was that there was a clashing point at that key niche area where the migrants were competing with what appeared to be the host community, and that has been repeated elsewhere. There is, I think, an issue of concern there, but what we are beginning to find already, again taking models from other parts of the globe, is that migrants will very, very quickly move on, particularly if they have a different skill base, and we are already finding that people who were here last year are finding different jobs just because they are that sort of people. Chris has a view as well over that particular issue, which is a difficulty.

Mr Myant: We have a role to play as a Commission in ensuring that migration is not something that leads to the deliberate lowering of terms and conditions of existing staff and were an employer to get rid of existing staff and replace them with migrant workers that could be an offence under the Race Relations Act; it would be unlawful racial discrimination. We have worked with a range of regulatory bodies across Wales to look and see whether this is something that is in fact taking place. Employers that we have discussed with assure us that the jobs that they fill with workers who come in from abroad are jobs that were empty, that were available to local job seekers and that they are not bringing people in from outside in order to replace. However, I think there is emerging evidence that you can see from some of the data from the labour force survey and earnings figures that there is a tendency at the lower end of the job market for wage rates to possibly settle on the minimum wage, and this poses all of us with a particular challenge for how we enable those caught in the benefits trap and so on to see that work is actually of value to them. This is a challenge for social policy, it is a challenge to the employers and it is a challenge to the young people themselves, and we have a danger in some of the communities in Wales where you have a developing syndrome of a sense of failure in the community and a lack of desire on the part of young people to take up the challenge that is available through education and so on. There are some developing innovative schemes by some of the local further education colleges and so on to try to assist young people to see that they can develop the skills, but we are still left with a problem that mobile labour that can come in for a short period of time can be prepared to do work that can be particularly unpleasant, at low levels of wages which are not good enough to attract or enable young people in the local community to come in. We need to be wary of this and make sure that this development is as limited as possible and give ourselves the opportunity to handle the consequences of it quickly before it gets very much more significantly embedded.

Q964 Mr Crabb: That is exactly my concern. Many of us recognise the enormous economic benefits of inward migration and any sensible person who looks at the way a modern, well-functioning market economy should perform in a globalised world knows that there will be a significant chunk of inward migration in the workforce, but my concern is that because there is this readily available pool of labour, very willing to take on low-paying jobs, it has effectively let government and business leaders in this country off the hook in terms of looking for solutions for that hard to reach group that we have in our own society who are not going to work, and that group is increasing.

Mr Myant: There is an element of truth there and one of the arguments that anybody coming from a Commission like ours would have said to you some years ago is that an expanding labour market where employers are under pressure to find the next good employee is a very good tool to use to get employers to deliver equality of opportunity practices, do positive action training and so on. Where employers can simply pick up the phone and get onto an agency that can provide them with skilled workers who are more flexible in the sense that they can be got rid of as quick as the demand has finished, there is a danger that employers will not look at that as an option. This poses us with a particularly strong challenge in some communities in Wales, particularly in some of the Heads of the Valleys communities and it is something that we need to work with, but we should not delude ourselves into thinking that it was a challenge that we were on top of beforehand. It is a challenge that is highlighted now and it is something that colleges, communities, employers, government services and so on need to have very much at the forefront of their mind because these were often young people that we were not adequately meeting the needs of beforehand. For us from a race equality point of view it is particularly important, not because necessarily these are young people coming from ethnic minority backgrounds - though in Cardiff some of them will - it is a particular challenge because we are dealing with white working class communities that feel alienated from the social process and these are the people who could turn to extreme ideas, and we need to make sure that their problems are addressed and that they feel included just as much as the incomers do.

Reverend Edwards: One of the things that will be interesting to observe over the next four years as the newer wave of migrants come in and settle into the business economy is to what extent they actually become job-makers. There is an honourable tradition, a global one, that migrants when they do actually move are very apt at creating jobs. The one issue that I smile at as a Welsh speaker - I use the Welsh language version of Google that was actually created by an economic migrant who went to Silicon Valley in California. That is no exception, it is quite the rule amongst migrant populations that they become job-makers.

Q965 Mr Jones: Good morning. What routes does the Commission use to access the new communities in Wales?

Reverend Edwards: We are already well embedded with the refugee community and we do try and maintain regular contact with the Race Equality Councils. We also, through the Croeso scheme, have been very, very effective in using schools and listening through that process, and we do try and keep regular community contact. Chris will have more detail in answer to that situation.

Mr Myant: This is one of the big challenges for us and for everybody in a sense. People can come in, sometimes stay for quite long periods of time, have jobs but live parallel lives to others in the community and the question is how do we get those parallel lives to actually meet, talk and so on. We have been working through this Croeso project that the Welsh Assembly Government has funded with us to look for innovative solutions, not those that cost a lot of money. A member of the Committee referred a little earlier on to the issue of resources; resources are always a problem but much more important than resources is how we make use of what is going on in one area but is not necessarily being used as well as it can be, how we can get things to bounce off each other. We are working with one of the local Race Equality Council, Valleys Race Equality Council, in particular to set up innovative ways of bringing people out of their different shells and getting migrant workers embedded in the local community to actually meet and talk to that local community and vice versa. It is not easy because one of the major characteristics of migrant workers in that part of Wales is that they are on short call, complex rota systems which mean that they can tell you we will meet you tomorrow night and then the phone goes and they are off in the meat factory, or they are off down in the steelworks or wherever else it may be that the agency is directing them to. What we are looking for are ways in which, without adding significantly to the number of organisations we have currently got on the ground or the amount of money that needs to be spent, nonetheless we can open doors and create avenues. We have come across a really fantastic network, Friends and Neighbours, in Cardiff where one ESOL teacher who retired wanted to carry on meeting her students, her students said they wanted to carry on meeting her and she has created a network where people come together and meet across a myriad of dividing lines and she now has 500 people coming together regularly, talking, sharing problems, sharing interests, sharing excitement and one just thinks from the top can we create those kind of things from below in every community. That is the challenge for us.

Q966 Mr Jones: It is a big challenge, because one of the problems of the migrant workers particularly - you mentioned one of the issues - is the fact that they are hot-bedding and they do not have a lot of spare time, which means that they are readily exploitable, they do not know their rights, particularly with regard to the minimum wage and access to the police, for example, if they have got a problem with exploitation and the threats which we have heard about in North East Wales. I just wondered, do you have any knowledge yourselves of those kinds of problems and what are you going to do about them if you have had that problem?

Mr Myant: One of the things that local authorities, for instance, would be expected to assist with is to enable a community of, say, local Polish people or Filipino nurses to have the facility where they can come together and meet and form a network and form a basis from which they can reach out to others. In Carmarthenshire, for instance, at the moment there is a very live programme of work under way, led by the County Council, to assist exactly those kinds of networks to develop. There is a problem always in agencies trying to do this work for a community, and it is best rooted when it comes from the community itself and then the public body can provide the facilities, the meeting place, the administrative assistance and so on, things that do not cost too much money, but where a small investment of resource can completely transform the ability of a local network to actually work. We can see this happening in some parts of Wales and we want to make sure that it is a priority across the whole.

Q967 Mr Jones: You mentioned Cardiff, are there any examples of best practice throughout Wales that you have heard of?

Mr Myant: Carmarthenshire is doing some very interesting things which is its own initiative; in Merthyr the initiative was led by the local Race Equality Council. We put quite a bit of money into that initiative and they formed a forum with all the relevant different agencies, and they are doing a range of things to enable to involvement of people whether they are nurses from the Philippines in the local hospital, whether they are Polish workers on night shift work in the local meat factory and so on.

Q968 Mark Williams: Turning back to the economic benefits of migration, your memorandum notes that "anecdotal evidence suggests that Wales ... has encountered some economic benefits from the latest wave of migration". I know that today the TUC has had things to say at a UK-wide level, but what is the extent of the economic benefits that you have acknowledged?

Reverend Edwards: We have taken soundings from a number of leading businessmen within Wales and there is a developing pattern of recognition that key niches within the Welsh economy are being filled, particularly, if I may say so, in manufacturing. What we are finding is that there is a very different model of employment for migrant workers in Wales to, say, the rest of the UK. Fruit-picking is not a great factor for us in Wales, as you can imagine. Chris would probably wish to add to that.

Mr Myant: We have discussed this at quite some length with leaders of the business community and we have said to the business community "You have a responsibility to help your local communities into which you are bringing this labour understand what the benefits of this are and understand how to grapple with the movement of people." A number of businesses have been very clear to us that if it was not for their ability to draw on this pool of migrant labour, they would not be able to sustain their businesses in Wales, and either they would move elsewhere or the businesses would simply close. We cannot second-guess the businesses and of course sometimes there are lots of sub-texts and other arguments.

Q969 Mark Williams: How widespread a dialogue are you having with businesses on that basis, is it in the areas of concentration that we know about or more widely?

Mr Myant: We have a regular process of meeting with the Business Forum in Wales which brings together the small business networks, the CBI, business in the community and so on. We do not, because of the nature of our work, manage to have a detailed interaction with every individual business in a particular area, but in talking to the CBI, the Federation of Small Businesses and so on their argument is very strongly that where their members are heavily reliant on migrant labour it is because that is the only way of sustaining their business, and often that means that other employment is generated in the local community which otherwise would go if it was not for the mix of employees that they are able to get.

Mark Williams: That is certainly the message that we picked up from talking to some businesses in Wrexham. I would beg to differ slightly in that there might not be fruit-picking but there is certainly the agricultural sector in the west of Wales where there is a very high and growing Polish input, and a very worthy one too.

Q970 Mrs James: I wanted to turn to population and population movement. In your paper you identify three discernible trends to recent demographic change. Of these, which is the one that you think is the most significant and what are the policy implications of each of the three?

Reverend Edwards: The word significant" is crucial. The main numeric flow, as I say, is between England and Wales and that raises huge questions about the capacity to create jobs in certain parts of Wales, namely the old Objective One areas, and it is quite challenging. Internal migration I would say is also a big issue, but the one that has the highest profile is the issue of external migration. Certainly the most significant one to the Welsh economy is the flow between Wales and England in terms of economic development and cultural identity. Tat one is the most significant.

Mr Myant: We often forget how many people live in Wales but work in England and how many people live in England and work in Wales.; there is huge movement across that border. In my own office there are people who do not live in Wales but work in the office.

Q971 Mrs James: Do you think these are helpful when we are planning policy changes or public services et cetera?

Reverend Edwards: Whether they are helpful or not, they are the reality and we have got to learn to live with them.

Q972 Mrs James: So we should be building them.

Reverend Edwards: Yes.

Q973 Mrs James: Any suggestions or any places that we could improve that?

Reverend Edwards: From our point of view, because we have obviously got a Parliamentary commitment to furthering good relations, litmus testing people's identity or their geography is not always helpful, but I do think the issue of developing robust economies in certain parts of Wales is a priority. There are difficulties and the whole investment in North East Wales in BAE Systems and so on may well have benefited Cheshire enormously, but that is part of the United Kingdom set-up, is it not?

Q974 Mrs James: In your memorandum you state that every part of Wales has faced the privileges and challenges of the latest wave of migration into Wales, i.e. from the accession states. What are these privileges and challenges, I am quite interested to hear more?

Reverend Edwards: I think they are anecdotal, are they not? The Assembly published statistics last week based on National Insurance figures and also registration. The numbers in terms of the UK are fairly small, about 5000 in total, it is hardly shaking stuff in a sense, but there will be high concentrations in Wrexham, Newport, Cardiff, Swansea and West Wales and where there are large clusters there are challenges there of including people in those communities, adapting, enabling them. As I said earlier, the big challenge for us is to enable those communities where there are strong clusters to function, but the greater challenge is when people are in deep rural Wales, for example, is isolation. What I am already finding is that even in places like Trawsfynydd, where I come from, people already receive people with a degree of warmth and new migrants are received. It is interesting to observe, on the Lleyn Peninsula, for example, with a Polish camp in places like Llanbedrog, people have rekindled their sense of generosity towards that particular community, and Wales can be generous. The policy issues for us would be enabling people to gain access to health provision and to help the children in particular, because that would be a big concern in the Wrexham area, enabling people to pick up English with a degree of ease. The Assembly has published, as you probably know, a pack for migrant workers, but as Chris was implying earlier on it is one thing to produce a piece of literature, it is another thing altogether to make it live in communities. That is the bridging position that we would want to possibly facilitate, to enable, for example in Wrexham, possibly the Catholic church to be active in enabling the Polish community there to have access to services and to know what is accessible to them. Access to service is a key issue.

Q975 Mrs James: Do you see the trade unions having a role in this, because they have been doing a lot of work?

Reverend Edwards: Yes, TUC Wales have been very active, particularly through one of the workers, Derek, who has been very pro-active indeed in the whole equality strand. It is the healthiest facet of Welsh political life, if I may say so, that the trade unions are now working with other civic agencies and voluntary groups, as well as the statutory bodies, to see where trade unionism is actually delivering in terms of equality policy.

Q976 Nia Griffith: Obviously now with the advent in October of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights you are going through a transition phase; perhaps you could tell us a little bit how smoothly that is going, and also what is going to happen to all your initiatives once the new body is in place?

Reverend Edwards: As a statutory body we are actually obligated and feel that we do support that process because Parliament has actually dictated that that is what is going to happen, and we are working creatively with CEHR through a transition process to enable that to happen. The big challenge of course is first of all structural, when you bring three large statutory bodies to an end and form one; as you can imagine there are huge issues of staffing, TUPE arrangements and so on that are quite a challenge. The big challenge for us - the biggest challenge possibly - is to ensure not only from the race side of things but from the disability strand and also the equality strand that that shared corporate memory and that skill base that the statutory bodies have gleaned over the past 30 years is actually transferred positively to a new structural environment. That will be the challenge for the future so that the communities that we serve feel confidence within the new structure.

Mr Myant: There are inevitably some issues because those of us who have transfer of undertakings into the body do not yet know what jobs we will have, we are not quite certain where our offices will be, but there is still four months to go and a lot can be done in four months. One of the things that I detect is a great deal of enthusiasm in all the staff, for this will bring together equality strands that enable us to deal with individuals in the round and not just with little bits - salami slices of people - and that will be very good. There will be some difficult things to get right in four months but we are pretty confident we can do it all. October 1, bring it on.

Q977 Nia Griffith: Following up on that, do you have any particular priorities over the next few months then?

Mr Myant: The two focuses for us are the point we were talking about earlier on, that is making sure that public bodies across Wales deliver the work they should. It is all very well us talking about good practice ideas, the real trick is to make sure that everybody knows how to and wants to deliver that, and that means local authorities and so on. The second thing that we want to make sure about is we think we have got a very innovative area of work in the Croeso project that we run, that for instance is delivering training against prejudice to every school council in every secondary school across Wales. If we manage to sustain this project for the next couple of years we will have got something going across our school enrolment, 11 to 16 or maybe 11 to 19, that you will not see anywhere else in Britain. The CEHR is very keen on taking this up, the Assembly wants to continue to fund it and we think it will give us a tool that can make sure that certainly among young people we have got an active process of discussion going on within the school environment to welcome difference, challenge prejudice and so on.

Reverend Edwards: The other area that we are considering with considerable intensity and depth at the moment, partly because of what happened in Wales recently with Thomas Cook, is to explore where the Welsh language community rests within the equality panorama. That is a question that we are reflecting upon and possibly considering whether the linguistic dimension of Wales needs somehow or other to be included within equality legislation; that would be protective of the Welsh-speaking community but also protective of the majority within Wales who do not. I think that is a skill base that we have in terms of defining parameters of reasonableness and proportionality, but that is an issue that we will be reflecting on during the next two or three weeks.

Q978 Albert Owen: You mentioned about the economic benefits that you consulted with the business world about et cetera, but do you not accept that one of the greatest benefits that many migrants have brought into Wales over many generations is in cultural and sporting activities? How do you assess this and how does it fit into the work generally? For example, you talked about creative industries and in the media there are lots of people that I know of who have come into this country and gone into the media, fast-tracked in there, made the extra effort and they are seen as some sort of icons and are able to help with social cohesion.

Reverend Edwards: I take great joy in the fact that Wales has been particularly embracing of communities, and the classic example would be in the 1890s with the Italian community coming into Wales. We all know how precious the Italian community is to us in that part of the world, and I rejoice like everybody else when Robert Sidoli scores for Wales, it is just fantastic. It is part of who we are and I know that we can actually turn human beings into icons and possibly we should not do that, but on the whole it is reflective of not only who they are but who we are and that is a positive element that we want to support.

Q979 Albert Owen: The point I raise is that the economic is easy to quantify but the social and cultural is very important as well.

Reverend Edwards: There is about to be a document published by the University of Wales, Aberystwyth - Chris has it with him this morning.

Mr Myant: It is this one here, launched on Friday.

Q980 Chairman: For the record could you read the title?

Mr Myant: It is Immigrants in Wales during the 20^th Century by Robin Evans, published by Aberystwyth, by the University, Continuing Education Department there. What it does is it brings together - even my grandfather who turned up in Cardiff in 1915 as a wounded Belgian soldier, I discover for the first time anywhere in the literary record that my particular origins are in there. There is quite a lot going to be going on, both through the national museums and gallery which are going to be doing a big exhibition around European migration into Wales showing what the individuals coming in have done to create the Wales we have got today. This kind of work is going into schools, showing the same sort of thing - you could not quantify this in money. You could get a little bit mystical about it, but there is no doubt that this is what makes this very diverse country that has an incredibly strong sense of its own identity, but a sense of identity which contains within it the differences between English speakers, welsh speakers and so on; so diversity and a strong sense of identity manage to go together. That is quite valuable and that is something that you could not put cash on, but it is something that means, if we play our cards right, we can get these communities to work very well. In many parts of Wales we have not played our cards right, so we have a lot of work to do to make sure that we do turn that round, but there are significant possibilities.

Reverend Edwards: If I may say so, our aspiration is that we should actually drive Wales as much as we can towards its aspirations rather than its fears, and those icons are valuable in that process of aspiration.

Q981 Mrs James: Just to go back a little bit, sorry, because that was a very positive note to end on, so I am sorry about this. You note that accurate figures of the overall numbers of migrants are not available. What difficulties are there in establishing these figures?

Mr Myant: There are all kinds of technical issues here. We do not have a registration system in the United Kingdom that means that we have everybody's heads counted all the time, so when somebody comes in here they can in a sense disappear. At the same time we have some data sets that give us some idea of who is here, but most of these data sets are things like the worker registration scheme, which you do not have to leave when you go. You know who may have come in, you know who has registered but you do not know who has then gone, you do not know who has then stopped work. You know who has got a National Insurance number, but again they could be people who have then left the country and might come back again later on, they could be people who have stayed in the country and are not working. You have data from schools as to who the children are who have come in; you may have data from churches as to who has joined their congregation; you may have data from other areas like the benefits system and so on, and it is a way of putting all these together that gives us different snapshots, none of them entirely accurate, and unless we want to have some kind of identity system where we all have a card with an ethnic identity put on it, which is regularly being counted, it will never happen. We do not know for instance exactly how many people from England come to work in Wales. We are not interested in knowing that, we do not see that as a problem, but we do think there is a problem about how many Polish or Lithuanian people come in, so we want to know that. Employers could help us perhaps more than they currently do and some public bodies could help us more, but whatever route we take there will always be some people who are not being counted in that system.

Reverend Edwards: There is also a reflection here on who we are interested in counting. If you look at migration rates into the UK in 2002, top of the league were Americans and Australians, but they hardly register in public debate. That is an issue that we would be reflective of. In terms of actually giving an answer to your question in terms of the philosophy of the situation, what I would say is that it is perhaps more important not to count people but to actually celebrate what they do, and one of the sadnesses we have, particularly in the refugee world, is that once people become successful and actually when they are integrated well into a community, that is where they fall off the statistical radar. Perhaps one of the methodologies for the future that we ought to deploy is when people do actually do well we record it and we celebrate it.

Q982 Chairman: This has been a very productive and positive session; could I end it on this note? As we have heard from the questions, all of us have some examples of good practice in our constituencies, and I would like to place on record the work of Neath and Port Talbot education authorities in supporting particularly Filipino children, and the positive impact those children of schools like Traethmelyn and St Joseph's Catholic School; also the South Wales Police in its support of the local immigrant population, particularly Bangladeshi children, and the setting up of the Port Talbot Tigers Football Club. I remind them that the oldest sporting multi-racial club in Wales is the Cardiff International Athletic Club, the CIACs, two of whose great sons, Joe Erskine and Billy Boston, graced sporting occasions across the world. Would you welcome examples like that from members of this Committee so that you can perhaps disseminate some of these examples of good practice that you may not know?

Reverend Edwards: Yes.

Chairman: Thank you very much; we will have a break of two minutes now.

Memorandum submitted by North Wales Police

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Chief Superintendent Steven Curtis, North Wales Police and Chief Superintendent Phill Thomson, North Wales Police, gave evidence.

Q983 Chairman: Could I welcome you to the Welsh Affairs Committee. For the record, could you introduce yourselves, please?

Chief Superintendent Curtis: Thank you, Chairman. I am Chief Superintendent Steven Curtis from North Wales Police.

Chief Superintendent Thomson: Thank you, Chairman. I am Chief Superintendent Phill Thomson, I am the Divisional Commander for North East Wales, which is the counties of Wrexham and Flintshire.

Q984 Chairman: Could I begin by thanking you for your very helpful memorandum which we found of great assistance to us in preparing for this session. You say in your memorandum that "pro-active and professional management is vital to maintain an accurate picture of life within our communities". In broad terms, could you describe these new communities in North Wales?

Chief Superintendent Curtis: Yes. Firstly I would describe the inward migration as significant and were I sitting before you four years ago this week I would be answering rather different questions than you are asking me now, because I was the divisional commander in Wrexham at the time of the riots that arrived there six weeks ago. I, amongst many other people, including Phill who succeeded me, am well-seized of the need to maintain contact with our communities. First of all I would like to describe North Wales and in fact Wales as a very attractive community to our migrant populations. We have a very low crime rate with high detection; hate crime thankfully is limited, although it does exist, but detection for such crimes is high, and something along the lines of two-thirds of all crimes are detected. That makes it a very attractive proposition for migrants to come here. In terms of maintaining contact and maintaining the links with our migrant communities, I believe that to be absolute essential. The work that the police undertook with the local authorities and others following the Wrexham riots four years ago was a template for the rest of Wales and I think the chief executives in the other authorities were well-seized of that and, through their network, they have thankfully seized the task of negotiating, welcoming and discussing with our migrant communities how they wish to settle in Wales.

Q985 Mr Crabb: You acknowledge that you do not have a definitive figure for the numbers of migrants in North Wales, although you estimate it to be around 15,000. Could you describe some of the difficulties in coming up with any kind of accurate figure and actually how you derive that 15,000 figure?

Chief Superintendent Curtis: The previous evidence that was given actually summarised it very well in regard to the NENOs (?) and the registration scheme. Part of the issue is that Wales is seeing the ripple effect or the sound wave effect which has hit the rest of the UK a lot earlier and is now in Wales, and not just North East Wales it is across Wales and inevitably will continue to spread. We just do not know how many people come in who live in England, who travel into Wales, we do not know how many people are registered elsewhere but actually work in Wales; we do not know the extent of the black economy, although we suspect that that is very limited. Yesterday, preparing to come here to speak to you, to understand exactly what was going on up to the minute, Phill was kind enough to bring in one of his officers who deals specifically with this and, in casual conversation, he mentioned to us that he probably, on a daily basis, finds five new addresses where there are in the main Polish families or polish individuals, whom he links up with and passes on their details to local officers et cetera. If you extrapolate five households per day over the course of a year, that is a significant number. We also have the scenario in North East Wales, which is a particularly attractive place to live, of people who initially may come from a small town in Silesia in the case of the Polish community, go to London, get off the coach at Victoria Coach Station and then decide after a couple of weeks or a couple of months that this really is not the place for them, they are not used to the place of city living - which of us are, it is an acquired taste - then word of mouth gets around. The North East Wales area is widely known within the Polish community, through no small extent actually through Wrexham Council who actually advertise economically and have very strong links with Silesia, so people actually do move to that area. Of course, you have this sort of gravity effect and once people start getting together then people are drawn to that area, so we do get movement from England as well as direct migration from Poland and other areas. It is therefore very, very difficult to keep a handle on that; fortunately, we do not live in a police state where people are required to put down where they live or where they reside et cetera, and there are therefore very incomplete pictures. For example, it is our view that in the Polish community up until recently they had not been accessing public housing and council houses, they have more often than not been going into private residential accommodation, sharing the accommodation, and again it is very difficult to understand first of all where there is a residence where there are migrant workers but, following on from that, how many are actually there. The next time an officer visits there to go and discuss an issue with them, sometimes he or she is reporting that there are different faces there, people have moved on, people have developed and people have got better jobs even. It is a very difficult issue. The other thing of course is that as the pattern of migration changes, first of all we had in the main young single people coming in from perhaps Poland or Portugal, who very quickly get established and want to bring their wives, their sweethearts or in some cases their parents as well as children or even grandparents into the community. Again, that is a situation where because of the lack of control that we have on immigration, which is quite right, the numbers of people coming in and where they settle is very open to debate.

Q986 Mr Crabb: If the 15,000 figure is inevitably pretty rough and ready, how sure can you be of the statement that also appears in your written memorandum that in terms of their proportionate size within the local population they are not responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime?

Chief Superintendent Curtis: The migrant communities - and Phill can no doubt talk about Wrexham and Flintshire in some detail - are exactly like the current and existing indigenous population. There will undoubtedly be some criminals amongst them, they will fall foul of the law, but that is in no way disproportionate. We do not find, looking through our records, that migrant workers, immigrants or asylum seekers are committing disproportionate amounts of crime, neither do we believe are disproportionate amounts of crime being committed against them. For example, one figure that I was able to find was that on the nominal record of our RMS custody system, which is the system which holds the names of people who are arrested and are held in custody, for the year 2002/2003, for example, there was one Polish person who was arrested and held in custody - it may have been on more than one occasion, but one individual was held in custody. For 2006/07 that figure was 106. On the face of it that may seem a significant increase, but four years ago the number of Polish people living in Wrexham, North East Wales or the whole of North Wales would be much reduced to what it is now, so we do not believe that they are committing disproportionate amounts of crime, nor is crime being committed against them.

Chief Superintendent Thomson: You are quite right and I take your point that if you do not know exactly how many people are there it is difficult to aggregate, but of course migrant workers and other minorities as victims are monitored very closely and I would concur with what Mr Curtis said, they are not disproportionately victims and they are not disproportionately offenders, apart from one area which is drink-driving where there is a definite trend that can be seen in that particularly Polish migrants are more likely to offend in that particular area. That may be a cultural thing and it is certainly an educational thing that I am working on as well.

Q987 Mr Crabb: From which countries are the largest groups of migrants currently arriving in North Wales?

Chief Superintendent Curtis: Certainly by far and away the largest group is the Polish community. In the Wrexham area, we were speaking again with the community officer who deals with migrants and particularly the community of Polish workers and he was saying that it is probably up to 90% in North East Wales. As I say, Wrexham Council has strong links with the Polish communities over there, there is high unemployment in parts of Poland and of course there is low unemployment in North East Wales, but there are a significant number of jobs available in the minimum wage industries and the food processing, food packing, food preparation and to some extent in the agricultural industry, and there are a significant number there. There are also already existing significant numbers of Portuguese people, but that seems to have dropped off recently and they tend to have been here for a more significant number of years and we do not seem to be seeing at the moment the same influx of people in that area. There are also Latvians and Lithuanians and a whole host of other nations, and in fact Phill was speaking yesterday with regards to some of the issues around the number of times different languages are required to be accessed in different areas of policing.

Chief Superintendent Thomson: It is obviously one of our challenges and I guess we will come onto the challenges on operational policing brought about by the situation, but certainly the number of languages has increased drastically over the last four years. A local headmaster was telling me recently that she caters for 26 different languages in her school, and of course that is replicated throughout the public services and the police are no different.

Q988 Mr Crabb: Your memorandum says that "the majority of migration within north Wales is economic migration" and you also refer to "large temporary overseas student populations". Are there any other types of migration that you have seen?

Chief Superintendent Curtis: There is certainly migration which I would define probably as people who are looking to settle and gain economic benefit, and certainly we have a significant number of people who are moving through North Wales from Holyhead ports who are accessing the UK via Eire and people who are actually going through and out there. The number of people who are perhaps being detained at Holyhead port has risen and the wide range of countries that are accessing North Wales has gone up considerable. You mentioned other than the student population, but that is significant actually and does have a bearing on operational policing which we will no doubt talk about later in terms of the quantity of students, for example in Wrexham, through the aggressive marketing by NEWI and Bangor University and their success in attracting students and bringing people to Wales, which is increasingly being seen as a good place to come to receive an education. For example, for NEWI this year there are people coming from the Indian sub-continent, from the Ukraine, from China, from every country and every continent on the face of the globe. That would not have been happening five or ten years ago.

Q989 Albert Owen: We heard in a previous session of the pressures that local authorities have in terms of additional resources, and in your memorandum you close with the observation that in "2001/02, Eastern Division of North Wales Police ... spent £5,300 ... on interpreters' fees" which by 2005/06 had increased to £80,300. What are the resource implications for your division and is money being taken from other areas?

Chief Superintendent Thomson: I will take that one. Of course, translation costs are a very obvious resource with the increase in people from elsewhere and speaking different languages and there are of course other resource implications for me as a divisional commander. If I focus on my division, because that is what the paper does, apart from the translation costs I have dedicated staff, community beat managers, one of whom is Polish-speaking and I am very fortunate in that he is a linguist and I was able to invest in some training for him, both in this country and in Poland and he is now fluent in Polish, which has been a great advantage to me in dealing with the significant number of Polish migrant workers. I also have another officer who is dedicated to the same issue and covers Flintshire, so that is a resource implication. There is also a resource implication again linked to language around the education of my response officers; as we all know the very first response from the police to any incident can be crucial and the ability to have some knowledge of the language that people are speaking and who you are talking to is a great one, and so I have spent some resource in giving very basic Polish phrases to response officers. Again, at the front counters of my police stations in terms of migrant workers - I am particularly talking about Polish migrant workers because that is 90% of the people involved - we run a triage system where people who come to the police station who cannot speak English but speak Polish can identify what their issue is through Polish-language cards et cetera and then we obviously grade the response to that. Again, if it is an urgent response we give that, if it is an urgent response that requires a Polish speaker we can either access that through Language Line, which is where the cost comes in, or through my dedicated officer. There is also an intelligence cost to me; we have already spoken ourselves about and heard in previous evidence that we know not from where these people come. We may know they come from Poland, but we do not know their background and to have a population of 15,000 people in your city or county, not knowing where they come from or knowing anything about them does present an intelligence gap for me and I have had to put some resources into that to try and get a picture. The operational policing can therefore be affected.

Q990 Albert Owen: I want to stick with the translation, but I do welcome what you said about the police having to learn different languages and dealing with different communities in the north east of Wales. Going back to translation, the community secretary here in the House of Commons has made a statement of the fact that integration is made more difficult if police and organisations are just providing translation equipment rather than getting them to learn the native language of the area. How would you comment on that?

Chief Superintendent Thomson: I would have to say that that sounds pretty ideal world but without being flippant, because I am not, if somebody is saying that they have been raped you cannot say "Go away and learn English". By the same token, if you arrest somebody you cannot say "Go away and learn English", we are guided by the law and you cannot treat victims like that, to be fair, you have to provide some translation service. We need to understand what the problem is and we need to understand quickly, and the only way we can do that is through a translation service.

Q991 Albert Owen: But you do appreciate that integration is important and in the schools and in areas like that, learning the language is important. Can I come back to the hard sort of cash situation you find yourselves in and I am someone - I know you are aware of this - dealing with North Wales Police about population swell due to tourism in the summer, and there should be in my opinion, and we have argued it with the Home Office, additional resources following that. Has a similar bid been made by yourselves because of this issue that you have and the extra pressure of migrants coming into the area? Has a bid been made to the Home Office to deal with that and are extra resources available?

Chief Superintendent Thomson: We work in North Wales, as you know, in three divisions which are devolved and the finances are devolved. I have certainly made a bid to my chief Constable around the issues of migrant workers, as we have heard before; there are probably more migrant workers coming to Wrexham than anywhere else in Wales. Whether the Force has made that bid to the Home Office I am not aware.

Q992 Albert Owen: Again, going to your figures, an increase from £5,000 to £80,000 over that period is significant, and that could mean two or three front line officers have had to be withdrawn because of the extra translation equipment required. That is what I am saying, you are not aware that the North Wales Force has made a bid to the Home Office for additional resources?

Chief Superintendent Thomson: No, I am not, and you are quite right, there is only one pot of money and that has to come from somewhere.

Q993 Hywel Williams: You say in your submission that "fluency, particularly in English, is a key determinant of social inclusion and integration within the wider community" and I certainly agree with you on that. Does the level of fluency vary between the communities and also what are the other "key determinants" apart from language?

Chief Superintendent Curtis: Fluency is quite a deep area because of course we are in a fully bilingual country by law, by statute, and hopefully by desire. North Wales Police has, thankfully, taken that up and tried to take some steps in that direction ahead of many other organisations. There is a bigger challenge than that now because of course we have not just one other language coming in but many other languages, and trying to get people to learn initially maybe English, or maybe if they go to the west of Wales, Welsh, but of course it is very difficult to persuade people maybe to learn welsh, particularly if they have already been to London beforehand and have had an experience there. It is extremely important because, speaking yesterday again to the chap that runs the Polish community, the police officer who actually has become near fluent in Polish himself over the past three or four years and has done a tremendous job, his view is that probably less than 4% or 5% of people show any willingness to learn the English language, and that is a great detriment to the community trying to drive themselves forward and they do then become dependent on some key players in their own community and also key players in the police, the council and other things, and that cannot be good. Trying to encourage people of course to take English is another issue. Where lessons have been arranged initially there has been a big take-up, but of course as was mentioned before as soon as that telephone goes and there is work available, people get up and they go and there is a balance to be struck there. In respect of some of the other issues you asked about, one of the other key determinants is actually creating within the community that desire to integrate and it also goes back to what was referred to earlier on about Ruth Kelly in terms of not making it too easy for communities, there is a balance to be struck to get people to adopt and adapt to integrate fully. There is a challenge there and certainly from the police we tend to be a more urgent service, we tend to have to respond in real time and therefore it is more difficult for us to do that. Again, our views and our people are telling us that yes, that lack of integration is largely down to language and it is because the local authorities and other people right across North Wales are actually providing a very good service, far better for example than they get down the road in Cheshire, far better than they get down the road in Telford, Shropshire. There is an issue there about trying to persuade people to integrate. Probably the police is not the best organisation to do that, because of course again if we talk about the Polish community we are talking about a community which, until very recently, had very little trust and in fact has very little trust in the police in their own country because they fear state repression. "Trust me, I am a policeman" is not exactly the sort of first approach that we can take. The other thing is that we have to try and encourage a greater integration within the communities. For example, the Portuguese community and the Polish community would probably have very little contact, and again it is trying to break down those barriers so that we are not dealing with things in isolation, we are trying to deal with issues across the board.

Q994 Nia Griffith: In my own area in Llanelli we have found that a lot of the Polish workers are working very long hours and the only time that they can focus on some English lessons is on a Sunday. Do you think there is a duty on the employers, who are making a lot of money out of Polish workers, to actually provide on-site English for the workers, say first thing in the morning when they turn up in the factory? Might that be a way forward to giving them the opportunity, because it really is an issue for many of them that they come home absolutely exhausted and you cannot really begin to have a lesson on a weekday then.

Chief Superintendent Curtis: I would wholeheartedly agree with that. The one lesson I have learnt in my policing career in my life to date is that where you have communication you have fewer problems, you can talk and you can relate to things and there is advancement. I think employers certainly, if they have any desire to keep their workers and actually retain them and develop them, they certainly need to do that. This raises an issue about the types of employment that people are in, whether it be low paid, whether it is transient or whether it is employment today and not tomorrow. That is part of the problem and part of the employment is seasonal at best, perhaps on a day to day basis. Part of the problems that have been raised about agencies and about groups who work with migrant communities, most of the complaints around that are not about people stealing passports or about holding back monies et cetera, when you get right down to it and you actually do get that communication going it is about the lack of regular work and it is about I am willing to work and the work just is not available. Certainly, industry as well as local authorities, the police and other public organisations have a duty and a moral responsibility, I believe personally, to actually work with these people and to integrate them into the communities.

Chief Superintendent Thomson: If I could just add to that, anecdotally my officers on the ground tell me that you can come to Wrexham, for example, speak in Polish and not have to speak English; you do not have to because everything is there for you - your community is there, organisations like the police, for example, for reasons we have said will provide translation services, so there has to be a desire from the community to learn English and a reason to learn English, which is what Mr Curtis was saying.

Q995 Hywel Williams: Anecdotally, I have a Polish retirement home in my constituency and the language there seems to be Welsh and Polish and occasionally English. In terms of the housing question which you referred to earlier on in your evidence, you say in your submission that the majority of workers are housed close to the main employment areas in local rented accommodation arranged by the employment agency. What are the implications for social inclusion of this and for the integration of migrant communities?

Chief Superintendent Curtis: We are all aware that for people to actually be able to claim benefit and get council housing you have to have virtually been in full employment for a year, so with people arriving there is an inexorable time lag before people can actually access and more fully integrate with communities. The idea of hot-bedding and people being packed into places is becoming less prevalent perhaps than it was, but it is an issue that does need to be watched and one of the reason about the officer in the Eastern Division with the Polish communities is actually going and speaking to people at these addresses to find out what is going on and actually what is happening within these addresses, otherwise there is a danger that certain people have more power, perhaps, over the lives of these people than is necessary. There have been within Phill's area a particular company which was not operating to the highest of standards, but they have through one means or another decided to leave the area, fortunately, and as a result things have improved dramatically.

Q996 Hywel Williams: I have had in the last few months people hot-bedding, as it is called, in my own constituency, Caernarfon, and also some very, very good practice among other employers, so standards vary greatly.

Chief Superintendent Curtis: Chairman, if I might just add one other thing, there are other developments which will inevitably occur and in Caer Parc we were told yesterday about some members of the Polish community who have bought surplus council housing and are converting it into flats for their own communities. Again, this shows the level of enterprise within the community and also the developments which will inevitably take place. That again will bring its own challenges because then we will have additional communities within other communities and we have to communicate with them to explain what is happening et cetera because there may be a perception, for example, that people are being given preferential treatment in being allocated these brand new council flats, when indeed they are not council flats, they are actually private accommodation which people are then renting. That then knocks onto the police activity, the council activity, the local community beat managers and other organisations, the voluntary organisations, to actually be in the community and explain what is happening and how this has developed.

Q997 Mr Jones: Which sectors are the main employers of migrant workers in North Wales and do you know where most of the migrant workers are? You did mention that you were aware that they are buying flats in Caer Parc, for example, but are you aware of where they tend to be?

Chief Superintendent Thomson: The biggest employers of migrant workers, certainly in North East Wales, is the food industry. Further along the coast of North Wales towards Llandudno and further afield is probably the hotel and catering industry. Certainly, North East Wales is the food industry which is mainly based on the large Wrexham industrial estate or the coastal industrial estates of Flintshire. Most of the migrant workers employed there will live close to industrial estates in Wrexham and Flintshire, either in the high town area of Wrexham, for example, Caer Parc, or in Flint and Deeside, close to the areas they work.

Q998 Mr Jones: In your report, which was produced in January, it says you have not evidence of any exploitation of migrant labour by employment agencies, and I would have said that in January as well. As you know, Mr Thomson, I had some anecdotal evidence that there was significant exploitation taking place, probably around about April, and I probably told you a couple of weeks later. Has anything come out of that?

Chief Superintendent Thomson: Yes, of course, and I refer back to the ability I have as police commander to get into the Polish community through a Polish-speaking officer, and that is the route I have taken into that particular community and the problems you raised with me. I would not particularly want to go any further than that at the moment, it does show the value of the links we have through the language with that community.

Q999 Mr Jones: That is very encouraging because of course, as we have mentioned, when we have met there is this problem of communication from their point of view, that they do not know their rights, they do not come to you if they are being exploited. Also you mentioned a certain agency that you were having problems with, but I will not further it if it is going to impinge on your operations.

Chief Superintendent Thomson: In a wider context rather than touching on the specific case, if I may, this is an extremely important part of what the police service in Wales and North Wales and North East Wales are trying to do in building up confidence in a population who are not used to our culture and who are not used to our style of policing, as I have stated before - they come from a very, very different background. We can only do that by being victim-focused with them, we can only do that by being robust in our investigation and so we can show them that something does happen in the United Kingdom and in Wales and in North East Wales you report something to the police. It is about building that confidence.

Mr Jones: Thank you.

Q1000 Mrs James: I would like to turn to operational policing. What challenges do you find in operational policing, particularly when you are dealing with the new communities and what particular projects has the Force initiated or been involved in?

Chief Superintendent Thomson: Obviously, one of the biggest challenges we face, and we have spoken about it several times this morning, is language, and that is definitely an issue for us, both in terms of resources and practicality as well. The 10,000 to 15,000 people who speak Polish and not English are obviously going to cause operational difficulties which we have worked around, and I have explained how we have worked around that. The culture is different too; policing in the UK is very different to policing in Poland and Lithuania and everywhere else, as I have already explained, and certainly I have a strategy and the Force has a strategy of informing the migrant and the incoming community of the policing style. You can do that, you can tell somebody what the policing style is, but they will only believe you when they actually see the policing style: "When I went to the police station they did take me seriously", "When I was subject of a hate drive, they did take it seriously and it was seen through, you can trust these people". That is going to take an awful long time to build up, but we are getting there. I mentioned before that there is definitely an intelligence gap for me as an operational police commander. We know not from where these people come, we do not know their background, we know very little about them, we do not even know who is here, so you can imagine all the operational difficulties that brings with it. Of course, in specific cases when people come to our attention then there are things we can do through the European Union, with the Polish police et cetera, but that is pretty limited to be fair. The other thing that is increasingly an issue for us is the transient nature of the migrant population. As we said, they may have landed in Victoria Station in London and then moved to North Wales and made many contacts along the way. We do not know who is coming in and we do not know who is going out across the police borders if you like, and that does bring issues with it. One of the issues, for example, is the smuggling of cigarettes which is cross-border, we all know that is happening. That is part of the transient nature of the migrant worker population. Then of course resources, as we have spoken about, is a real issue for us. Generally, in my opinion, you may accept that Wales was not perhaps ready for the numbers of migrant workers and we need to get our heads around that as well.

Chief Superintendent Curtis: Just a couple of other issues at a broader level; one is that we are not just talking about migrant workers here, we are talking about the indigenous incomers who have been here for some time now. For example, in the so-called war on terror we have had to work very hard throughout Wales and throughout the UK to try and engage with our Muslim communities and I know that the chief super and myself at various times have spent a lot of time engaging with that community to reassure them, to gain that trust and confidence which is so important to actually gain and therefore the intelligence and the information about what is going on. That is really important and we have got to be very aware at a strategic level of the subtle changes that are taking place within our communities. It is not about people just moving in, doing the work and then moving out, the population is changing perceptibly but subtly. The other thing, just going back to the location of people and the way that impacts on operational policing, whilst we have a clear, large and identifiable populations within North East Wales in the Llandudno area, in places like north Nevern and other areas like that we have a cluster of 14 Polish persons working in a laundry. That is a significant policing issue potentially, if not in terms of them committing problems or being victims of problems, but actually helping them integrate into the community. They deserve the assistance of the police and other organisations every bit as much as anybody working in a larger population centre. In fact, they are more vulnerable because of course there is a feeling of safety in numbers in places like Wrexham or Deeside whereas you do not actually get that in north Nevern necessarily.

Q1001 Mrs James: Building on that, how do you interact with these communities, what are your key points of interaction with them, apart from obviously the rule of law and order, where you are having to work with communities.

Chief Superintendent Curtis: North Wales Police have got a very strong policy on community policing and community engagement and we see this as absolutely key, not just for our migrant workers but also our local populations, and it is about understanding the needs of our communities and about engaging with all sectors of the community, whether it be the so-called hard to reach groups, the large groupings or whoever it may be. It is really about keeping staff and personnel in one particular area and getting them to actually touch the communities there to make sure that they understand what is going on there, and there is a clear policy which is being delivered by the divisional commanders in terms of engaging with those communities and understanding what is going on at any given time. Again, I refer back to an experience just four years ago where I suspect that the police, social services and dare I say the politicians, we were not quite aware of what was going on in our communities and the flashpoint in Wrexham was a race area which subsequently very quickly became a matter of criminality. The flashpoint for it was a racial thing which could have ended even more badly than it did, but actually was turned to advantage by the local authorities and we learned some valuable lessons there. We are well-seized of the need to keep our eyes on the ball and work within the local communities, almost on a one-to-one basis.

Q1002 Nia Griffith: You have mentioned the drink-driving problem and you also mention in your memorandum alcohol-related problems. Would you say that there are significant differences in those problems in certain migrant communities from our indigenous communities, or would you say there are similar types of problems?

Chief Superintendent Thomson: There are similar types of problems. I would not like to say that our indigenous population does not have problems with alcohol as well because we all know it does, but there is a cultural difference around certainly the level of drinking and the reason for it between the indigenous population and those from Eastern Europe, particularly Poland, where vodka is very popular and part of their culture far more than it is here. It is problems around that particular issue that are important.

Q1003 Nia Griffith: Can you tell us a little bit about the monitoring you have got and these weekly tension indicators? What exactly do you do and what do you do then with the findings?

Chief Superintendent Thomson: As you, because we have mentioned it a couple of times already, four years ago we had serious public disturbances in my division and a lot of lessons were learnt as a result of that, both by the police and other agencies including the council. I have a weekly tension indicator report which pulls together on a weekly basis policing intelligence, community intelligence, crime pattern analysis, particularly around and involving minority groups, geographic hotspots as well and it includes national tension indicators and national issues, some of which emanate from this police. All those are put together for some analysis around what issues are affecting my communities, both the host community and the incoming community. For example, in the last week there has been some tension around a belief that migrant workers are getting access to local authority homes when in fact they are not, what they are actually doing is buying properties that used to be local authority homes, but that perception can get round very quickly. What that enables me to do is to do something pro-active, perhaps with the chief executive of the council, perhaps with the council leader, to bust that myth if you like.

Chief Superintendent Curtis: If I might add as well, just across North Wales and across Wales and England and Wales, of course we look at the national picture in terms of any possible activity by extremist groups or extremist political groups who may wish to seek to take advantage of any local headlines which may be in the local media, to try and seize on that. There potentially is the possibility of them coming in and stirring the pot there, so we are very seized about that as well and locally, again, that would form part of the chief super's brief as well as the national brief.

Q1004 Chairman: Can I end by asking you a question about the quality of the working relationships that you have with local authorities and with other bodies. Do you link into particular networks in relation to this work; for example, do you have a relationship with the CRE?

Chief Superintendent Thomson: Yes, we do, certainly locally and across North Wales our relationships with the local authorities are very good. If I can speak about my area, both Wrexham and Flintshire, I have a personal one-to-one relationship with the chief executive, which is extremely important, where both of us feel we can pick up the phone and talk about issues. Again, that relationship was borne out of the historic disturbances if you like because obviously neither organisation, nor any other organisation, wishes to see that happen again, and one of the lessons learnt from that was that we need to have a very close working relationship. Certainly in Wrexham they take the integration and the cohesion of the society very, very seriously and have quite a robust cohesion strategy and are always looking towards the issue. That is very good. The crime and disorder partnerships in both counties are very strong and are very strong around hate crime and violence towards ethnic minorities. Yes, we do link into the CRE in North Wales and anybody else who can help us with the issues, so the links are very strong, borne out of experience and borne out of earlier lessons.

Q1005 Chairman: Given the particular role that, say, the Catholic Church has in relation to the Polish community and the Transport & General Workers Union especially, as a union that takes a particular interest in migrant workers, do you have particular relationships with them?

Chief Superintendent Thomson: Locally, yes, I do with the Transport & General Workers Union, particularly in Flintshire. They are talking to us on various issues, one of which was referred to by Mr Jones before, so there is a link there. As far as the churches in the North East of Wales are concerned and elsewhere in North Wales, yes, there is very strong participation by all faiths in fairness. Roman Catholicism is becoming more of an issue because most of our migrant workers are of that faith, but across the faiths there are very good relationships.

Chairman: Thank you very much for your very helpful evidence today.