'Community cohesion'

This week the UK government is continuing to mull a new study, released on February 4, that addresses the problem of building a common identity among members of different ethnic and religious groups.

After the northern UK city of Bradford was wracked by riots in summer 2001, the government started taking the temperature of neighbourhood relations across the country by asking citizens a simple question:

"To what extent do you agree or disagree that this local area is a place where people from different backgrounds get on well together?"

Collated together from annual Citizenship Surveys, the number of people answering in the affirmative is taken as a key indicator of ‘community cohesion’, and used by the Department of Communities and Local Government as a guiding star in its work.

Inchoate notions like ‘trust’ and ‘community’ are linked to perennial election topics like crime and social values. The recent wave of terrorism introduced these concepts into the national security equation, and sent government researchers in pursuit of ways to turn intangible qualities of neighbourhood life into concrete blueprints for a response.

Now, a pair of researchers have analysed this headline indicator against a number of factors for the country’s towns and cities. Their findings show that ‘cohesion’ scores vary according to individual attitudes -- such as whether people feel at risk of crime, or believe they have a say in local decisions -- and to the idiosyncratic characteristics of particular neighbourhoods.

In some respects, their data is politically inert:

• It finds that poverty is a strong predictor of lower neighbourliness.

• It also shows that crime systematically erodes ‘community cohesion’, in all neighbourhood types.

But while poverty and crime are bread-and-butter consensus issues, the evidence can be spun both ways on the fraught matter of inter-faith and race relations.

On the one hand, areas with a moderate racial mix are on average more trusting than towns and villages with a homogenous white population. People in racially diverse neighbourhoods report having more friends from across ethnic boundaries, apparently fostering a relative openness to those of other cultures.

On the other, scores are systematically lower where a white majority lives alongside a sizeable black or Asian community.  Some 81% of those surveyed nationwide said that people from different backgrounds get on well in their area.  But mixed black and white, or Asian and white areas show lower scores -- suggesting the polarising conditions which let Bradford-style animosities fester.

The government’s community cohesion mantra points to a number of ways to build more links between individuals who live nearby -- such as state-sponsored volunteering schemes.  But it can also put officials in a quandary, such as when local police forces consider tougher ways to confront violent extremism, but fear damaging relations with Muslim groups.