Introduction

This chapter reviews the available approaches to understanding and interpreting local population change, in the context of government policy for community cohesion and this book's emphasis on social cohesion. There is some agreement among academics and government that the ethnicity of residential patterns and friendship networks should not be given prominence when identifying targets for social policy. But indicators of population change are nonetheless essential contextual information for social programmes. Furthermore, claims that residential segregation is dangerous and friendship networks are polarised are still so commonplace that they require addressing in the first part of this chapter. The second part reviews existing advice on local demographic monitoring and provides further practical guidance to assist policy makers to develop the necessary contextual information for the evaluation of local initiatives.

Claims

Since 2001, Britain's ethnic geography has been seen as threateningly polarised. The contexts in which the policies of community cohesion developed early in the 2000s have been rehearsed already in this book. ‘Parallel lives’, ‘communities living in fear’ and ‘the challenge of diversity’ were threads that ran riot through local policy. Largely as a response to the disturbances in the Asian areas of northern towns of England in 2001, to the radical Islamist terrorist attacks on the United States (US) in the same year and to the United Kingdom (UK) military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, common thoughts about what makes a viable, safe community have been racialised, internationalised and Islamified.

By 2004, the government's review of its community cohesion programmes chaired by Ted Cantle decried official statistics for not providing the means to measure local residential segregation, which needed to be ‘broken down’ (Cantle, 2004). A year later, the chair of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) responded to the London terrorist bombings in a speech entitled ‘Sleepwalking to segregation’ (Phillips, 2005). He identified the emergence of ‘fully fledged ghettos’, residential segregation and narrow ethnic friendship networks as encouragements to terrorism. Others made a further link from ethnicity and segregation to immigration, insisting that levels of immigration were too high to allow successful integration, including the high-profile examples of the academic Mike Poulsen (2005), the political campaign MigrationWatch UK (2006) and the government minister Phil Woolas (quoted in The Times, 2006).