The former integration tsar, Dame Louise Casey, has attacked the government for doing “absolutely nothing” about community cohesion a year after she published a study on ministers’ failure to tackle the problem.

Her criticism comes just two days after the government’s social mobility commissioner, Alan Milburn, resigned in protest at Theresa May’s failure in her own pledge to build a fairer Britain.

Speaking before a scheduled appearance before a House of Lords committee, Casey echoed Milburn’s charge that the government was too focused on Brexit negotiations to tackle domestic problems.



“Rhetoric about social mobility can’t crumble to dust,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. She added: “I feel very, very strongly that Brexit is as much about what is happening domestically in the United Kingdom as it is about what is happening in terms of negotiations.”

Casey’s year-long study branded ministerial attempts to boost integration of ethnic minorities as amounting to little more than “saris, samosas and steel drums for the already well-intentioned”.

It recommended a new strategy to help bridge divides with an “integration oath” to encourage immigrants to embrace British values, a greater focus on promoting the English language, and securing “women’s emancipation in communities where they are being held back by regressive cultural practices”.

Casey said no progress had been made on any of these recommendations. “I think absolutely nothing has happened since I published that report a year ago,” she said.

She acknowledged that the ministers were planning an integration strategy in the new year. But she added: “My sadness is a year is an awful long time in the lives of people growing up in this country.”

She specifically highlighted the failure of the government to implement David Cameron’s pledge, made almost two years ago, to offer more English-language training to communities that need it most.

Casey listed known problems that ministers had failed to address. She said: “We know that we have particular people within our country that are struggling more than others. So white British kids on free school meals we know are really struggling to achieve five or more GCSEs. We know that Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage women are 60% likely to be economically inactive. We know that the men in that community are twice as likely to speak English. We know that young black men growing up in this country are looking at an unemployment rate of 35% rather than 19%. It is time surely as we face such big decisions that we do something about that.”



She also brushed off criticism that her report overemphasised the need for Muslims to integrate into society and underplayed what people from eastern European countries could do. The Guardian pointed out that her report mentioned Muslims mentioned 249 times, but Poles only 14 times.

Casey said: “The truth is a very difficult thing for some people. Sometimes it doesn’t always make you popular when you are not very right on. A bust-up with the Guardian isn’t necessarily something that I’m going to worry about when I’m telling the truth.”



She added: “The fact of the matter is that 57.2% of women from Bangladeshi and Pakistani heritage background, as opposed to 38.5% of other ethnic minority women, are economically inactive. As I said a year ago, it is often men in those communities that are standing in the way of women when it comes to their equality and integration. And if they weren’t women from those backgrounds, but somebody like me, we’d be creating holy hell about it and we’re not.”