Come to Slough
Everybody else is here already
“The people here are wonderful,” says Jenny Sturgeon, a white Englishwoman who has lived in Slough for 30 years. “And the ethnic mix is wonderful. It’s how the country should be. People care for each other regardless of ethnicity.”
The town of Slough, which lies outside the M25 near Heathrow, has the greatest ethnic mix outside London. By comparison, even Leicester and Coventry seem blandly uniform. And if you look for it, you can readily find evidence of the harmonious race relations Sturgeon describes.
Take Malinka, a Polish deli near the library. The large majority of shoppers are Polish but non-Poles aren’t put off coming inside. One who enters to buy sausages while I’m there is Stephen Cordeiro, a Portuguese-Asian who was born in Kenya. And I notice that in the deli’s window, among the job ads in Polish for nannies, waiting staff and handymen, there’s a card written in English, offering the services of an “African hair stylist”.
So it seems that Slough’s various ethnic minorities really do mix, if only to carry out commercial transactions.
Indeed, surveys carried out by the council show that a quarter of the town’s businesses with more than ten employees use the new migrant workforce because – businesses reported – they bring higher productivity and a better work ethic than indigenous workers.
But it would be false to suggest there are no tensions. One Polish woman, Aneta Kania, says she had never seen such diversity till she came to Slough. “I was very shocked by the mix. At first I thought it was a bit scary.”
Another Polish woman, an economist by training, told me darkly that she had recently been working in retail “for an Indian” but had stopped doing so “because they don’t respect you”.
And a Sikh with strong Indian accent lent credence to what that Polish woman said when he told me that “there are too many immigrants in Slough”. Polish drivers with no car insurance jump red lights, he muttered, as if that happened all the time. And this week he’s been bothered by Bulgarians ringing his doorbell to beg for money.
Ted Cantle, who conducted the official inquiry into the cause of riots in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham in 2001, believes that migration to the UK can bring real benefits, as evidenced in places like Slough. “But building cohesive communities to harness the benefits long term takes resources. It is important that councils like Slough are funded correctly for their population size and complexity to make sure they continue community cohesion work. Community tensions are sometimes caused by the perception of competition between groups over resources and councils have to be able to demonstrate that this is not the case.”
Perhaps with that in mind, Slough this week formally protested to the Treasury that it has been severely under-funded because government statistics underestimate the numbers of immigrants coming to the town.
Along with three other councils, all in London, Slough complained that a new “improved” system being used by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) does not reflect the true numbers. Richard Stokes, the leader of the borough council, described official migration statistics as “not fit for purpose”.
He said: “Estimates have failed to keep pace with what is happening on the ground and public services are suffering as a consequence. The migrants that come to Slough are hard-working and bring great benefit to the local economy but the council remains severely under-funded because of these poor statistics.”
Strategic director Andrew Blake-Herbert said the council faces a shortfall of some £15m. It has managed not to cut crucial services but can’t make necessary improvements in areas such as children’s services and recycling.
According to the ONS, Slough experienced the ninth fastest population increase of any local authority in the country between 1991 and 2001. But since then, the ONS contends, the town’s population has declined by 3.3 per cent, to a total of 117,600.
Slough’s own data suggests the total is nearer to 130,000.
To support that figure, the council puts forward an impressive array of evidence. It points to substantial increases in new housing, the rapid rise in house prices, the increasing numbers of households from which the council collects council tax, the high fertility rate among women in Slough (66 births per thousand women, compared with 54 in the country as a whole) and even a substantial increase in the amount of sewage flowing out of town.
Visiting Slough myself this week, I found plenty more evidence of my own that the migrant population is getting bigger. I talked to officials, business figures, and residents from across the entire community – pale skinned and dark, European, African and Asian.
To start, I visited the busy road near Slough’s massive trading estate – the largest in Europe – where coaches from Poland stop illegally to disgorge new arrivals. And I talked to a resident who watches that happen twice a day, sometimes more.
Tadeusz Chruscik is Polish but he’s been living here since 1942, having served in the Polish Air Force. (Some 130,000 Poles settled in Britain during and after the war.) He says he’s met some people who get off the coach without the slightest idea where to go, having got on in the first place only after having too much to drink.
Others come under false pretences. Thames Valley Police is investigating claims that Poles, among others, have been lured to Slough with the promise of jobs and accommodation – only to be abandoned without either after paying as much as £500 in “arrangement fees”.
The sheer numbers arriving here simply can’t be housed properly. The council is paid by central government to ensure that three-storey houses are not overcrowded but lacks the funds to check buildings with only two storeys. As a result, many migrants endure dangerously crowded conditions.
Colin Rodgers, manager of estate agent B Simmons & Son, told me he’s been inside such properties himself. “I’ve seen places where there are three beds in the lounge and three in the dining room. You’re trying to win instructions from a client so there’s not a lot you can say. I’ve also heard stories, from quite believable sources, about people using those beds in shifts.”
Property, it hardly needs adding, has become unaffordable to many people. Baber Zafar is 21 and has lived in Slough all his life. In the town square, Zafar told me the incoming population has put so much pressure on house prices that he’s seriously thinking of moving to Spain.
By a grim irony, the rising property market recently resulted in the closure of Slough’s Immigration Counselling Centre. It has now moved into Southall, in West London, explains one of the counsellors, Qazi Anisuddin, because rising rents in Slough made the old premises unaffordable.
At the same time, the Citizens Advice Bureau has scaled down its operations in Slough – even the telephone helpline is open for just eight hours a week. As a result, many immigrants in Slough lack valuable help.
Of course, the Borough Council does what it can. In fact, it does more than most. In the last 18 months it has placed some 900 children in schools who arrived in Slough from overseas. In other towns, they might have had to wait weeks or months to be placed, but Slough established a special assessment centre to speed up the process. But it’s slow work: the centre can only take eight children a week.
Last year two primary schools accepted 50 Polish children and 60 Somalis, respectively, in just one term.
Not everyone welcomes the flood of pupils for whom spoken English is not easy. One Polish mother, Aneta Kania, sends her daughter to St Anthony’s Roman Catholic school but says there are so many other Polish children there that seven-year-old Paulina is making slow progress in English.
(Aneta has poor English herself. Though trained as a nurse, she’s obliged to work as a cleaner until her language skills have improved. What with bringing up a child on her own, and her job, she finds it hard to fit in the lessons.)
Another of the pioneering services set up by Slough council is devoted to dealing with Roma migrants who have been arriving by the hundreds since Romania joined the EU in January.
Eighty-eight unaccompanied Romanian Roma children have asked for support from the town’s children’s services. Six have babies of their own, and seven are pregnant. Eight have been implicated in criminal activity such as theft, mugging or begging.
“We have a legal responsibility to look after them if they have no parents. Our responsibility is to make sure that they don’t end up like Victoria Climbie, says Janet Tomlinson, who heads that department.
To deal with these Roma children, Slough has set up a specialist team, at a cost of £150,000 since January, and established a working relationship with the Romanian consulate. “If they had come from France,” Tomlinson explains, “the communication channels already exist. That is not the case with the new accession countries. We’ve had to set up the system ourselves. And it’s only worked because the consulate happens to have been helpful.”
Slough’s MP is Fiona Mactaggart. A minister in the Home Office, she says the flawed ONS calculations “will not do”. And the ONS itself recognises the shortcomings of its stats. Karen Dunnell, the National Statistician, wrote in May 2006: “There is now a broad recognition that available estimates of migrant numbers are inadequate for managing the economy, policies and services.”
Tony Travers, of the London School of Economics, points out that town halls are trapped with all the costs, but none of the tax benefits of migration. Slough generates around £90m in business rates, which are collected centrally by the Treasury. But the town gets back only £40m in grants from the government. “We need either vastly better data or – the better option – we need to allow councils to capture tax derived from local growth.”
Meanwhile, the residents of Slough seem to have had enough. Jenny Sturgeon, the cheerful librarian who describes the town’s ethnic mix as “wonderful”, We get a huge number of people coming in, from all ethnic groups. A shortage of money can lead to tensions. The government has a lot to answer for.
Even the Poles don’t relish the arrival of yet more Poles. Aneta Kania, the nurse who came to Slough just 18 months ago, says she dreads June, July and August because that’s when Polish students come here for summer jobs. “There are too many people in Slough already.”
21 May 07