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Terrorism and Community Relations

: I shall come to openness and transparency shortly, and I hope that my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen accepts my comments about the Cabinet Office paper. On my right hon. Friend's request for details about the commission on integration, I am informed that we do not have a record of an inquiry having been made. However, I certainly undertake to give him more details and papers. I have no intention of that being done at the Home Office without the Committee having access and am entirely happy to provide those papers. My right hon. Friend talked about the commission, and I shall give further details. The Home Secretary has said that we will set up that commission, and we are working on its terms of reference, ideas for which we have sent out to the community for consultation because we want to make sure that it looks at the correct things. The ideas for the initial terms of reference are how to engender an increased sense of Britishness that is inclusive of all communities, how to push further to tackle the inequalities that can trap people into segregated lives, how to create a shared sense of cultural norms and behaviour, particularly in relation to different faiths and cultural identities, and how to encourage and incentivise communities that choose to live segregated lives to engage more broadly. That very point was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Mrs. Cryer). What incentives and encouragements can we put into the system to change things in a realistic and practical way that will make a difference on the ground? The important thing is that the commission will look across all faiths and none, rather than simply at the Muslim community. It will be helpful to have the engagement of Hindus and Sikhs and the Christian Churches. The meetings held by the Home Secretary on the issues have engaged all faiths, and I have had a real sense of people learning from each other. Some religions have gone through some of the same difficulties and come out with helpful compromises and positions. There is a keenness among the faiths to share those ideas and the journeys that they have made together. I hope that the commission will echo the meetings that the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale, East (Paul Goggins) and I held with communities during the summer. I hope that the commission will go out to where people are and not expect people to come to London to give evidence. It is important to reach those people who do not traditionally get a say; we shall get the commission to engage particularly with young people and women and meet people who are active in all parts of the country—the north-west, the north-east, Yorkshire and the midlands—rather than be London-centric, which is sometimes inevitable, given how government works. Perhaps because I am from the north, I am determined that the commission should reach all parts of the country. We hope that the first meeting will be in December. It will be time-limited and will probably report back next summer. We shall then have practical issues on which to go forward. My right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen also asked about stop-and-search powers and whether there was confusion in the community. I was grateful for the Committee's conclusion that the section 44 powers are not being used in an unfair way. However, when the powers are exercised, do people know whether it is a section 44 stop or a stop under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act codes? Is there enough information out there? The stop-and-search action team has an independent community panel, which includes representatives from a range of faith backgrounds, including Islam. A lot of work is being done to prepare some detailed guidance on how the powers should be used. We expect to have that before the end of the year. Work is also being done on how we communicate with the public about the way in which the powers are exercised, so that they know their rights. The Met has done some research, and found that people in the Muslim community are not sure about which powers are being exercised in which ways. The Committee has highlighted a real issue, and we will address it. The issue of schools and citizenship education has been raised. That is an area in which we can do much more. The evidence on citizenship education is that where teachers have a degree of expertise and confidence, it is of a much higher quality. The same applies to sex education. When teachers feel that a subject is not just an add-on to their mainstream work, they are much more confident in exploring difficult, controversial and contentious issues. Citizenship education has only been running for a couple of years, but we have a joint working party with the Department for Education and Skills on how we can give teachers the confidence to open up the debate on topics such as politics and religion. All of us sometimes have difficulty discussing those issues, never mind young people who hold extremely strong views.