No going back for the Roma

From the Institute For Race Relations

A review of the Migrant Roma in the UK research report.

The title, Migrant Roma in the UK: population size and experiences of local authorities and partners, may make this report by three University of Salford academics sound dry, but this is both a necessary report and a prescient political intervention. In 2011, the EU asked all member states to draw up National Roma Integration Strategies, and it would not be unreasonable to presume from this that the responsibility for collecting data on migrant Roma from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) lies with David Cameron’s government. But while Eric Pickles’ Department for Communities and Local Government has been asleep on the job (it barely even acknowledges the presence of migrant Roma in the UK), into the breach has stepped the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (JRCT). JRCT provided funds for Philip Brown and his team to carry out a scoping exercise and a survey of statutory and non-statutory agencies. What we now have – and not before time – is a no-nonsense report which provides hard data on the size of the new settled Roma migrant communities; an indication of the major gaps in statutory (and non-statutory) provision; and a sense of what needs to be done to challenge the Roma’s current invisibility in terms of government policy.

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