And we chose to focus on this issue, because of the grave concerns many of us have about the deep political divisions that seem to have emerged between different generations in this country.

We saw these divisions very clearly in the 2016 Brexit referendum and then again in the 2017 General Election. Indeed, according to Ipsos Social Research Institute, the voting patterns in the 2017 General Election showed the greatest divisions between age groups they have ever recorded.

Alongside this, we also had a feeling that, although the idea of social integration seems more important now than it has ever been – and I believe it will become even more prominent as we think about the future direction of our society – the specific question of intergenerational connection is one that hasn’t yet received the attention it deserves.

In the course of this inquiry we are aiming to change that and what we have found so far has fully underlined the importance of doing so. 

Because the evidence that we have seen has provided us both with real cause for concern as to the current state of affairs, but also with some really inspiring examples of what we might be able to do to change things. H

Our concern over the extent of age-based divisions has been further underlined by evidence which suggests that the young and old are not only displaying polarised outlooks, but are increasingly in danger of living quite separate lives, with little regular interaction with one another.

Take these statistics for instance: 

· For the typical child in our largest cities, just 5% of people in their immediate neighbourhood are over 65. In 1991 this was 15%. 

· Between 1981 and 2011, three-quarters of the increase in 45-64 year olds and over-65s across the country took place in villages, and small and medium sized towns. By contrast, 80% of the growth in 25-44 year olds occurred in large towns and core cities. 

What we appear to be seeing is that, not only has the extended family become increasingly geographically separated since the mid-twentieth century, but that the impact of this on intergenerational connection appears to have been exacerbated in recent decades by increasing residential segregation of young and old.

However, we have also found real inspiration through hearing from a whole range of civil society organisations who are fighting back against the age divide and finding new and innovative ways of bringing different ages together to form meaningful and lasting connections. 

Groups, some of whom are with us today. Like Good Gym, who are active in Bath and whose founder Ivor Gormley is with us. Good Gym encourages younger people to combine getting fit with connecting with older people in their communities, for instance by running to the home of an older citizen who will act as a buddy and coach. 

Or take the Cares Family, who we visited in Manchester, who create community networks of young professionals and older neighbours to come together to socialise and support one another. 

We have seen numerous examples of pioneers like these who are pointing the way to how we create a better future in which people of all ages live much more inter-connected lives, lives in which we get to draw on, understand and learn from the experiences of all generations. 

And in the current context in which we find ourselves, I don’t think we can any longer afford to see this as a ‘nice to have’. The growing generation gap we have seen is one of a number of divides which are threatening to fundamentally undermine the health and cohesiveness of our society.

Polling we have undertaken for the launch of this report, confirm this:

· Most British people agree that Brexit has further widened the age gap between older people and younger people. Only 11% disagree. 

· Most people in Britain believe that older people got a better deal when they were young than today’s young generation. 

· Yet, most older people unfortunately view younger British people as less hardworking than older generations were and more inclined to moan. 

While civil society may be leading the way, rising to a challenge of this magnitude will also require political leadership, at both national and local level. 

But crucially it seems clear that it will also require new types of leadership, and new ways of thinking that will push all of us outside of our comfort zone and our typical ways of thinking. Because this is not just about spending more money (although that may well be necessary), or about public solutions versus private solutions. 

As I think this report shows, tackling the age divide requires, as much as anything, fundamentally new ways of thinking about how we deliver services and for whom; new ways of thinking about public spaces and private spaces and how both can build or prevent meaningful connections between people. And it will require present and future technologies that aid the building of these connections, rather than expanding the divides. 

That is a massive challenge for all of us. One that we are just beginning to answer today, but one this report makes a significant step towards. 

And I’m going to handover now to Wera Hobhouse, a familiar face for many of you I’m sure, and someone who had been an important supporter and contributor to this report and the work of the All-Party Group on Social Integration, to talk in more detail about some of the key ideas in this report and what these mean to her.

Context for the APPG

We launched this APPG, a cross party group of MPs, in March 2016, which is less than three years ago, but in political terms feels like a different era of calm and stability compared to the chaos you see now. The impetus behind this was a real and growing concern about the ways in which our society seemed to be fragmenting along various lines and the damaging effect this is having on us all. 

And what is happening is not just some vague feeling but very real.  There is a significant body of evidence that too often, people from different cultural, socio-economic and age groups may be living side-by-side, but they aren’t actually mixing with one another, or leading lives that are really interconnected. 

Three years on, concerns about social division have only risen. In many ways, the question of social integration, or lack of it, sits at the heart of many of the most prominent social, political and economic concerns of our time. But it often sits there unnoticed. Somehow we perceive it and feel it, but too often it is left unarticulated and unexamined. I think that is changing in light of the debate on Brexit – the Prime Minister and I had an exchange about social cohesion in the House of Commons following her EU statement on Monday and it came up in my meeting with David Liddington, her de-facto deputy, in the cross party talks I took part in this week as well.

Our first inquiry looked at the integration of immigrants and our report called for a much more proactive approach to the integration of new immigrants, and much clearer routes to citizenship and English language provision. We will be looking at the forthcoming Immigration Bill to see to what extent these principles are, or can be, embeded into that Bill through amendments.

Intergenerational connection inquiry

Our second and current inquiry has picked up the question of intergenerational connection. This is a question that hasn’t always received much attention, but the voting patterns we saw in the 2016 Brexit referendum and 2017 General Election, brought into very sharp relief the extent of the political divides that have opened up between young and old in this country. The Ipsos Social Research Institute has said that the 2017 General Election saw the greatest political division between age groups they have ever measured.

Furthermore, polling published on behalf of the APPG by The Challenge and YouGov in December 2017 suggested that more than one in four Leave voters of retirement age believed lower wages for the next generation was a price worth paying for exiting the EU, while one in four Remain voters aged 18-34 would have accepted pension reductions for older people if it meant Brexit was stopped. 

That is pretty dispiriting, but I think just goes to show that this is something we cannot afford to shy away from. Because disagreement over Brexit has served to shine a light on the issue of generational division in this country, but Brexit is not the cause of that division.  This is something the Prime Minister would do well to reflect on. 

In some ways, what has been most shocking to see in the course of this inquiry has been the evidence of the extent to which young and old are in danger of physically living completely separate lives. Take these statistics for instance:

• For the typical child in our largest cities, just 5% of people in their immediate neighbourhood are over 65. In 1991 this was 15%.
• During the 24 years between 1991 and 2014, the median age of rural areas rose nearly twice as quickly as the median age in urban areas. 
• Between 1981 and 2011, three-quarters of the increase in 45-64 year olds and over-65s across the country took place in villages, communities, and small and medium sized towns. By contrast, 80% of the growth in 25-44 year olds occurred in large towns and core cities.

So, it is not just that different generations appear to have increasingly polarised outlooks; but there appears to be an increasing tendency for them to live quite separate lives, with little regular interaction with one another.  So it is unsurprising they have such different outlooks. 

Clearly we have a decision to make: do we simply accept these divisions as a regrettable fact of modern life, or do we attempt to do something about them. I believe not only that we must attempt to tackle these divisions, but that we cannot afford not to. 

Examples of good practice

In seeking to find solutions, we are not starting from scratch. Our inquiry has heard evidence from and paid visits to a whole range of organisations who are attempting to build bridges between the generations within their communities. 

From organisations like the Cares Family, who we visited in Manchester, who create community networks of young professionals and older neighbours to come together to socialise and support one another, to Apple and Honey Nightingale, who we visited in South London, which in 2017 opened the first nursery to be based at a care home in the UK. We have seen numerous examples of pioneers like these who are pointing the way to a better, more integrated future. You can read more about all of them when we launch our interim report is the coming weeks. 

But all of these organisations could do with much more support than they are getting. And the principles they are putting into practice deserve to be taken up much more widely than they currently are. 

Recommendations 

So, our upcoming  interim report will set out the foundations of a policy framework which we believe might help achieve this.  We had hoped to launch the report this month but that has been knocked sideways with the ongoing Brexit drama in Westminster.  However, I want to give you a bit of preview today of what some of those recommendations will look like. 

1. Local government is hamstrung by a lack of resources at the moment, but notwithstanding the financial constraints, it could play a vital role simply by viewing its policies and programmes through a more inter-generational lens than local authorities currently do. 
2. In our public services, and in our nursery and care provision, the principle of co-location of facilities for different age groups should become a watchword and the norm.
3. We must be explicit in our housing and planning policies about the need to nurture intergenerational connection, and look to foster public and private spaces in which all generations mix. 
4. And we must look more closely at what role technology, and digital technologies in particular, can play in building intergenerational connections rather than becoming spheres of increasing segmentation and division.

Political implications 

So, these are some of the ideas and types of recommendations we will be putting forward. 

However, if we are going to make a serious attempt to build and improve intergenerational connections, there we need to be clear there will be some difficult decisions to make. And those decisions will pose challenges to those of all political viewpoints. 

If we agree that increasing dislocation between generations is something we need to address, then a laissez-faire approach will certainly not suffice. The right balance of sticks and carrots will be necessary and central government will need to take the lead in this. To give one example, fostering greater intergenerational connections through hospitals and care homes, will only happen in a systematic way if driven by the Department for Health and Social Care.

Yet, intergenerational connections cannot be formed by governments. They are formed in local communities, through clubs, activities and local services, in neighbourhoods designed for all ages. As such, communities will normally be best placed to know what might work for them and to develop their own initiatives, and we should enable local councils and others to empower them to do this. 

At the same time, we must recognise that supporting and enabling these initiatives will be difficult without any extra money to do so. And we have seen in the course of this inquiry that the closure of shared spaces, like community centres and libraries, and the reduction in local transport services – things that have clearly resulted from the austerity policies of recent years – have served to reduce opportunities for different generations to connect.

But we need to beware of thinking that the ending of austerity would be a silver bullet which fixes all of this. It won’t. Rebuilding our intergenerational bonds will require, not just investment, but whole new ways of working and thinking, and in some cases fundamental reform. 

These are the challenges we face. But face them we must. Now more than ever we need to act to rebuild bridges between the generations, if we are to have any change of bringing our country back together again.

Thank you.

This week, the Government announced the launch of its first ever loneliness strategy to help tackle what it’s calling one of the greatest public health challenges of our lifetime. In it the prime minister pledged that by 2023 all GPs in England will be able to refer patients experiencing loneliness to take part in social activities, along with £1.8million funding to support more community spaces.

As the chair of the cross-party group set up to improve social integration in the UK, I’ll always welcome more funding for projects that help bring people together. However, like the initiative asking postmen to check in on isolated older people, many of the strategy’s proposals focus on our ageing population.

Over the past year the social integration group has been exploring how we can build stronger connections between different generations to help create more close-knit communities. Through meeting people in my own constituency and on visits up and down the country, I’ve heard from both older and younger people about their experiences of loneliness.

I have to admit I wasn’t initially expecting this. Like many of us, I could be guilty of assuming that with young people sharing more and more of their lives on social media they must have more friends and busier social lives than ever before.

I now know this assumption is inaccurate. Earlier in the year the Mental Health Foundation said that while teens may have thousands of friends online, social media could actually be heightening social isolation.

Recent research from the BBC also found that young people are now just as lonely as older people, if not more so. It seems that despite being the most digitally connected generation young people are feeling increasingly disconnected from the real world around them.

So while the strategy highlights that loneliness can affect people of any age and background, it doesn’t go far enough in addressing the rising loneliness amongst all generations.

For too long we’ve separated the young and old, but now is the time look at loneliness through an intergenerational lens. Rather than having different funding pots to combat loneliness amongst younger and older people separately, we should be looking for solutions that span generations. We should be encouraging our local authorities to develop initiatives which bring different generations together for face-to-face interactions. Councils should also be uniting to share knowledge and resources to help build stronger links between the young and old across wider community boundaries.

Through my visits I’ve seen first-hand the impact organisations which support different generations to spend quality time together can have on the whole community. On one such visit with The Cares Family, which creates networks of young professionals and older neighbours in some of our biggest cities, I saw how it’s helping to combat loneliness and isolation for people of all ages. I also spent time with GoodGym, a community of runners who pair exercise with helping out their older neighbours. Whilst the benefits for older people were no surprise, I was struck by how much of a positive difference it’s also having on the lives of the young people donating their time.

It’s clear to me that as a country we need to do more to create better opportunities for the young and old to meet and mix with one another. By supporting and encouraging people of all ages to form meaningful connections and friendships we can help to reduce social isolation, and hopefully the effects of loneliness on our mental health and wellbeing, in a way that works for everybody.

Not only was age a huge determinant of how people voted in the 2016 referendum but there was a correlation with age and your propensity to vote Labour or Conservative in last year’s general election.

Research conducted by YouGov and charity The Challenge on behalf of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Integration (APPG), which I chair, shows that more than one in four Leave voters of retirement age believe that lower wages for the next generation would be a price worth paying for Brexit. Conversely more than one in four Remain backers aged 18 to 34 would be willing to see pensions for older people reduced if it meant Brexit was stopped.

Worse still, almost three-quarters of young Remain voters believe older people are prejudiced and a similar percentage of older Leave voters think young people are entitled and unwilling to work hard.

In 2017, age overtook income as an indicator of voting intention for the first time in modern political history. If you’re aged anything up to your mid-40s, the odds are that you didn’t vote Conservative. However, from your mid-40s, the older you are, the less likely you are to vote Labour.

More generally, political arguments pinning the blame for society’s ills on one generation or another are featuring more and more in debate, where we seem to be viewing people of other generations not as partners but as a hindrance to solving the challenges we face.

This is just a snapshot but we clearly have a problem.

So, why the division? The relationship between different age groups in our country has changed fundamentally in a number of ways during the lifetime of my parents’ “baby boomer” generation – those born from the early 1940s up to the mid-1960s. These changes have, in turn, led to significant consequences for our politics, collective wellbeing and the future of our country.

People from different generations are less likely to live in the same place now compared to years gone by. Research by the Intergenerational Foundation shows that children now have a mere five per cent chance of having someone aged over 65 living in their area compared to a 15 per cent chance in 1991, while the level of segregation between retirees and young adults has roughly doubled during the same period.

I visited Manchester Metropolitan University’s school of architecture last week, where they are conducting studies into where and how different generations live. Their students told me how they came to realise that in their own lives, save for contact with their grandparents, they have very little interaction with older folk.

I see this myself all the time. For example, when I’ve attended church in rural Gloucestershire – where we have family – I was struck that there are no people below the age of 50 to be seen, whereas the churches in my urban constituency have much younger congregations.

Our increasingly dysfunctional economy is fuelling this demographic polarisation, with age segregation being driven in part by rising housing costs and supply, as younger people have made rental properties in the middle of town and city centres their homes, rather than migrating to the suburbs as their parents and grandparents did. Young adults also leave rural areas and towns for cities in search of jobs and opportunities. They have needed to do so as our economy has become more and more imbalanced.

This, in turn, has led to a loss of emotional as well as physical points of contact across the generations. As so many of us have moved away from the areas where we grew up in search of jobs, our sense of attachment to our hometowns has waned. As the industries around which whole towns and neighbourhoods were once organised have collapsed, the strong social ties which previously bound the young and old within tight-knit communities have been eroded. And, even when we do live in the same area as a substantial number of people from different age groups, we tend not to meet and mix socially but live separate lives.

It is true that these increasing age divides are in part the byproduct of changing norms and values. It’s only natural that each generation should view the world slightly differently – that is always the case. But people in modern Britain are masters of their own destiny like never before and as a result of scientific and social progress, we are living longer, having children later in life and forming families of all shapes and sizes. These trends are redefining the ways in which different generations relate to one another and see things.

Why does this all matter? Studies show that meeting and mixing with people of different age groups makes us less susceptible to ageist attitudes, more trusting of others and more optimistic for the future. The net effect of the increasing age divide is to make people more prone to anxiety, isolation and loneliness, putting strain on our health and social care services. This crisis of social solidarity is often most keenly felt by older people who are less able to manage daily life away from strong networks of support.

As our lives have grown more and more separate, baby boomers, Generation X (those born from the early 1960s up to the early 1980s, of which I am one) and millennials have come to understand the perspectives of one another less and less.

So, how do we craft a programme that heals these divisions? To start with, it’s worth recognising that common ground between the generations is not actually in short supply. Despite our increasing tendency to juxtapose the views and interests of different generations against one another, older and younger voters agree much more than they disagree on most of the big issues facing our country, including welfare, taxation and investment in public services.

Last year, while the APPG was conducting its inquiry into the integration of immigrants, I spent some time in Boston in Lincolnshire, the local authority area which voted to leave the EU by the greatest margin. In Boston, I met with a group of older residents as well as a number of local teenagers and young adults and encountered the radically different views which the young and old hold on immigration, multiculturalism and Europe firsthand. I did not, however, come across a great number of stereotypically narrow-minded, ageing racists or many stereotypically zealous “Remainiac” young people. We are more nuanced than our political debate often recognises.

Any meaningful attempt to bridge the generational schism must include measures aimed at rejuvenating those parts of the UK left behind by de-industrialisation and globalisation. These require proper regional industrial strategies drawn up locally by politicians, businesses, civic society groups and other players working together – they are best placed to determine what it is about their region’s unique mixture of geography, history and demography that can make their area a world beater in the global market place. This will lead to more job opportunities in the area and more of an incentive for their younger generations to stay put than to uproot.

Measures should be implemented that bring the generations together. In Manchester, mayor Andy Burnham and others have established Age Friendly Manchester, a partnership that works across public, private and community sectors to improve the quality of life of older people and to put in place activities and programmes to unite the generations. I visited one such project co-run by Manchester Cares in Levenshulme where younger and older neighbours are given a chance to learn from one another, to laugh, to tell stories and to build the types of friendships and social networks that really matter in life.  These kinds of activities need to be rolled out on a local level across the whole country.

Shared Lives Plus is a UK network for homeshares and shared lives, where young people or adults needing support are matched with Shared Lives carers who either visit regularly or move in with them permanently. There are other, similar schemes where university students move in with older people on reduced or no rent in return for helping to care for that older person and keep them company. We need more of this.

My colleague, Jo Cox, who was killed two years ago this month, famously said in her maiden speech to parliament that “we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us”. She was a passionate advocate of staying in the EU but she was also an advocate of working together, even – especially – when we disagree. What better way to honour her legacy and to sensibly navigate Brexit, than to remember her words in our interactions with other generations? It is, quite plainly, in all of our interests.

In spite of this Labour MPs were whipped by our leadership to abstain on this issue, whereas the government whipped their MPs to vote against. Seventy-six Labour MPs (more than half of our backbenchers) defied the whip – myself included – to vote for the UK to stay in the EEA. We were joined by the Conservatives Anna Soubry, Dominic Grieve and Ken Clarke, with another 11 Tory MPs signalling their support for the EEA by abstaining on the issue instead of following the whip’s instructions to vote against.

However, 15 Labour MPs actually voted against the UK remaining in the EEA. This is a small minority – less than 6 per cent of our MPs – but their views cannot and should not be dismissed.

A few commentators suggested the division on the Labour side fell along geographical lines, with London MPs in favour of staying in the EEA and non-London MPs against. But this is not supported by the numbers. Fifty-three of the 76 Labour MPs voting for the EEA actually represent seats outside of London, and a majority of those 76 represent seats in Leave-voting regions.

A number of objections are raised against the EEA in Commons debates by MPs in both main parties. Some say that if we stay in the EEA, we will somehow have blocked “the will of the people” – even though nothing like that was put on the Brexit referendum ballot paper. It seems that some commentators are determined to tell us all Brexit voters specifically wanted to come out of the single market and the customs union. In reality, we have absolutely no idea where they stand on these issues apart from the fact that they did think leaving the institution of the EU was a good idea – and that could have been for a number of very different reasons.

Yet none of the objections I’ve heard have gone to the heart of where most concern lies about the EEA: immigration and the continuation of some form of free movement, a requirement of participating in the EEA.

I am the son of an immigrant and represent a constituency where the majority of families are of immigrant stock. But many of the communities Labour represents are the opposite, which is why more than half the seats we hold voted to leave the EU. That doesn’t mean that people are xenophobic or racist, but there is concern about the levels of immigration to certain places and, as I’ve said before, we cannot duck or ignore it. Honesty is required: views are just as strong, if not stronger, in relation to non-EU immigration as they are in relation to EU immigration.

There are parallels between the discontent in some traditional Labour-voting areas about EU immigration and the same discontent regarding Commonwealth countries in the 1960s. There was, after all, a form of free movement from the Commonwealth until 1971 – my own father took advantage of that.

I have never denied that immigration can pose both economic and cultural challenges to communities, but it need not be this way if we deal with it in the right way. A reform package of policies to better manage migration from the EU could include things like action to prevent the undercutting of wages by immigrants, removing newcomers after nine months if they fail to find a job, and putting in place a bigger infrastructure fund to help mitigate the impact of migration on local communities.

I would add that we need to do far more to help integrate immigrants into local communities, as the All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Integration, which I chair, argues in our report Integration not demonisation. My father was so successful in this regard that he married an English woman and had mixed heritage children.

We can do all of these things now while we are still in the EEA because of our EU membership.

But what are the real underlying causes of concern about immigration? Not enough decent, affordable housing. A shortage of school places. An NHS in crisis. Not enough well-paid and decent jobs. These problems will not disappear or be mitigated if we leave the EEA. They will get worse because there will be less revenue going to the Exchequer to pay for these things.

The underlying problems we have are no more the fault of European immigrants now than they were the fault of Commonwealth citizens back in the 1960s. And make no mistake: people were saying exactly the same things in traditional Labour-voting areas about the Windrush generation, South Asian immigration and the likes of my father being the cause of those problems way back then. Ending Commonwealth free movement then and ending EU free movement now did not and will not solve these problems, and deep down we know it.

In the Commons debate on the 1971 Immigration Act which restricted Commonwealth immigration, Labour’s then shadow home secretary Jim Callaghan said, “Decent housing, decent schooling, good amenities in the areas where they are most needed… in my view, this is the way, rather than by a bill like this in which we should deal with the problem of the immigrant, if indeed it is a problem of the immigrant.”

That is why Labour governments, including that of Callaghan when he became prime minister, have always principally addressed these problems by properly funding the NHS, by building more affordable homes, investing in our schools, introducing a minimum wage and so on.

By acquiescing in the fiction that immigrants are ultimately the problem and that these underlying issues will be resolved if EU free movement ends, all we do is put British jobs at risk – which would be rather odd for a party that claims to represent the interests of “labour”.

But it is possible to do something. Remember the London 2012 Olympic Games? That Olympic ideal showed a way that Britain could be more than the sum of its parts, a country where we embrace our differences and build a modern and inclusive island identity. A country that is strengthened by its unity in diversity, not a country where we walk on by on the other side of the road.

In my role as the Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Social Integration I have visited communities up and down the country to try and understand how we can empower communities and neighbours to come together. All too often I have seen immigrants who want to participate in their new country, treated as a problem. Alongside this, I have seen the legitimate concerns that some feel about changes to communities and pressures on public services being dismissed as racist.

It is clear to me that if we want a ‘United Kingdom’ to not just be a name, but a way life, we need to end our laissez faire approach to social integration. This means taking action to help us to come together. This should start with a new right that everyone – whatever their ethnicity or gender – has the opportunity to learn and speak English. A shared language is the key to full participation in our society and economy, but also vital in opening up avenues to opportunity and public services. This will allow them to enrich our economy, and build meaningful relationships with their neighbours.

A common and shared language is a building block for community. When I visited Boston, Lincolnshire, as part of a visit with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Social Integration, one woman told me that she really wanted to get to know her new neighbour from Eastern Europe. But she had to wait for her neighbour’s children to come home from school to translate because her neighbour could not speak English. We need to tear down such barriers to building community and relationship.

Ultimately, these relationships are what will bring us together as a country. We should start building them early. Sadly, too many schools are segregated by social class and ethnic background, depriving people of the opportunity to fully understand the country in which they live.

National Citizen Service (NCS) has become a vital institution in over-coming this by ensuring that young people have the chance to share a meaningful experience with a diverse group at ages 16 and 17. The concept of NCS is a relatively simple one: it brings together young people from different backgrounds in small groups, to reflect the social makeup of their local communities. The four week programme includes outdoor team-building exercises, a residential for participants to learn ‘life skills’ and a community-based social action project to give something back to where they live. For many this will be the first time they encounter experiences like this, with people different to them.

An independent report released on Thursday, by Oxford University and the University of Manchester, shows that NCS is playing a critical role creating more cohesive communities. The report shows NCS is having the biggest impact on improving cohesion in the communities which need it the most – while helping to close the integration gap nationally. For example, those from the most segregated communities prior to participating became almost a fifth more likely to report positive social contact with other ethnic groups ‘quite often’ or ‘very often’ after completing the programme.

NCS is currently reaching approximately 100,000 16 and 17 year olds each year, around one-in-six of the cohort. Given the national challenge we face, we should be brave enough to expand NCS so it becomes a rite of passage for all our young people. This would be one positive step towards making sure that our country chooses a future that is united and open to all. That’s the country that my father chose to come to from Nigeria in the 1960s, and it’s the country that I want for my daughter.

It has been a topsy-turvy political year, typified by the highs and lows of the general election and the unfolding disaster that is the government’s approach to its Brexit negotiations. However, there has been one constant during this period: the sense that we are becoming increasingly divided as a nation, and that we must take action to increase levels of social integration in communities up and down our country.

I believe that it’s crucial that the government should take a strategic and proactive approach to fostering integration and cohesion in our country. For months, there have been mutterings that the government is set to publish a national Integration Strategy. However, the longer there is no movement, the more I worry that this work is being slowly edged towards the long grass. This sentiment was recently echoed by Dame Louise herself, who commented at a conference last month that she believed the work “has been tucked away in the all-too-difficult filing cabinet”. I don’t agree with absolutely everything in her report, but I do believe its publication was timely and valuable.
Home Office statistics published in October back this up. They reveal that there has been a 29 per cent increase in recorded hate crimes, the biggest percentage increase since reporting began in 2011/2012. We are a country increasingly ill at ease with ourselves. The reason this work is seen as all-too-difficult is because it requires us asking challenging questions about who we wish to be as a country. Pre-existing and emerging societal cleavages – whether of geography, culture, ethnicity, religion, income or education level – have been brought into sharp focus by recent political turbulence. We need a concerted effort from our political leaders to build bridges across these divides; to restitch our fraying social fabric.

As chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Social Integration, I have spent much of the last year hosting parliamentary evidence sessions and meeting with citizens to discuss these issues. Throughout the course of this process, we came to a number of conclusions, some of which overlap with those reached by Louise Casey.

For example, English language provision should be a right for all. In her report, Louise Casey emphasised the importance of a shared language for the promotion of integration – and the APPG, in our Integration not Demonisation report, laid out how this could work in practice through the introduction of a national strategy for English language learning. The government, local authorities, colleges and businesses must work together in order to ensure that all our citizens, both long-standing and newly-arrived, have the right to learn English and in turn access all the opportunities our society has to offer. This will mean more investment but, as Dame Louise noted, we must act too to challenge the cultural barriers which prevent women within Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities from accessing English classes.

The Casey Review identified the need for localised plans for areas in which, for example, incidences of hate crime are particularly high or knowledge of the English language is especially low. This locally-led system, underpinned by a policy framework and standards set out in Whitehall, is the right approach. This was borne out during visits I made with the APPG to communities in both Halifax in West Yorkshire and Boston in Lincolnshire – areas which have very different, but equally acute, integration needs, flowing from their distinct historical and demographic characteristics. Local authorities should be empowered to shape integration interventions to reflect their unique local circumstances, and supported through the introduction of an Integration Impact Fund.

Dame Louise was also right to recognise the power of meaningful contact between people of different backgrounds, and the importance of social mixing initiatives which aim to facilitate these interactions. Her report highlighted the way in which effective social mixing can reduce prejudice, and increase trust and understanding between people from different backgrounds. She highlighted schools and youth social action initiatives, such as National Citizen Service, as key spaces for young people to come into contact with those different from them. The government must bring forward plans to promote social mixing within and between schools, and to support youth charities to better facilitate interaction between people with different experiences of life.

I am certain there really is a copy of Louise Casey’s report containing these ideas, and many more besides, sat in a government filing cabinet somewhere. For it to be left there is simply not good enough. David Cameron announced the Review way back in July 2015 – almost two and a half years ago. There is growing political will across political parties for policy measures to heal our increasingly divided nation, and growing impatience at the lack of movement.
The government must recognise this and realise, whilst they may feel progressively more hamstrung by internal Brexit division, that these two questions are not distinct from one another. Leavers and Remainers alike were unlikely to know many people, if any, who voted the other way in the referendum. This reality must be at the forefront of the government’s mind as it moves in to 2018. There is much work to be done at home alongside the negotiations taking place in Brussels. The government’s response to Louise Casey and a concerted effort to tackle social division and polarisation must be at the forefront of its domestic agenda.

In short, our society is becoming more polarised. Our diversity of backgrounds, outlooks and ideas is what makes the United Kingdom so special, but our levels of interaction with those from different backgrounds is not keeping pace with change. Research by the social integration charity The Challenge has found that Britons take up far fewer opportunities than are available to mix with people we consider different from ourselves – especially across ethnic and generational divides. This matters.

A lack of social integration – defined as the extent to which people come into contact with and trust others from different backgrounds – undermines the health and strength of our country and communities. Moreover, it has been suggested that a lack of integration, as people retreat into bubbles of ‘people like them’, leads to increasing political polarisation. This, in turn, results in a lack of empathy for differing political views. This risks damaging our democracy – feeding prejudice, breeding anxiety and creating the conditions for a politics of recrimination and blame.

Policies aimed at boosting social integration are the first defence against some of the challenges I outline above. It has been suggested that, as part of their response to Louise Casey’s review into integration and opportunity, the government plans to publish a National Integration Strategy. This is a positive step. For too long there has been little coordinated government action aimed at boosting levels of integration. However, this strategy must speak to all sections of society.

Theresa May and her ministers have demonstrated an inclination to conflate integration with counter-radicalisation and portray this as an issue primarily concerning certain minority groups. I would argue that this approach is counter-productive, as these groups may take a step back in response to the feeling that they are being unfairly targeted.

Social integration must be a two-way street, and we must recognise that we could all benefit from greater levels of mixing. A joined-up national approach with this belief at its core is the right way forward. Central to this approach should be the creation of new institutions and movements that allow us to mix with those from different backgrounds to our own. One such emerging institution is the National Citizen Service.

NCS was designed specifically so as to bring people from different backgrounds together, and I would argue that we might draw on this success story in shaping future policies. Since it was established in 2011, over 400,000 young people – and many more in the communities in which they volunteer – have taken part in the programme.

Alongside an NCS that continues to go from strength to strength, new institutions which bring people together on an equal-footing, in positive environments must form part of our policy response to the challenges presented by demographic and social trends.

The all-party parliamentary group on social integration, which I chair will, through its next inquiry, investigate intergenerational divides and how policymakers might respond to this rising challenge.

As well as establishing new institutions, we might reform existing public services to more effectively foster social integration. People from all manner of backgrounds regularly engage with the NHS – it is the national institution of which Britons are most proud. For example, many GP surgeries act as community hubs, but this often happens in an ad hoc way. We must consider how we might make use of these spaces in a more targeted manner to bring people together in a positive, meaningful way.

In order to push back against the sense that there is more which divides us than that which binds us together, as a nation we must assume a proactive and strategic approach to social integration. This effort must begin with national intent and will only flourish with local leadership, but must ultimately involve all of us meeting, mixing and connecting with people from different backgrounds and walks of life. By working together to build a more cohesive, integrated and trusting nation we really do have far more in common than that which divides us.