CONSERVATIVE
New Forest East

MHCLG – SOCIAL COHESION ACTION PLAN & WILLINGNESS TO INTEGRATE - 09 March 2026

MHCLG – SOCIAL COHESION ACTION PLAN & WILLINGNESS TO INTEGRATE - 09 March 2026

Sir Julian Lewis: Like a number of other right hon. and hon. Members, I come from an immigrant family and grew up in a household where a foreign language was primarily spoken by my grandparents, my father was bilingual and I was monolingual with the language of the country that my family had come into. The key to it all working is a willingness to integrate. Can the Secretary of State confirm that there are measures in this overall plan, which seems to have much to commend it, that are designed to prevent separatism and ghettoisation in society? Where that exists, a community becomes impossible to navigate in the way that we would all want it to be navigated.

[The Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Steve Reed): There is an awful lot in the report, and I cannot go through all of it because I will further annoy Madam Deputy Speaker by using up too much time, but if I might point to one area, we are allocating £500,000 to link together schools from different communities so that children growing up, perhaps with their friends from the same community, can get to know and better understand children from other backgrounds as well, and to understand that they live in and are part of a thriving, diverse community.]