PARLIAMENT.TV Dame Louise Casey told MPs she did not see integration as a 'two-way street'

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Dame Louise Casey, who last month released a hard-hitting report into segregation and immigration in the UK, dismissed as a “soundbite” the view integration should be seen as an equal effort between new arrivals and existing communities. Giving evidence on her report to the House of Commons’ Communities and Local Government Select Committee, Dame Louise was asked whether she considered integration a “two-way process” or whether “some groups need to make more effort than others”. The Government official replied: “No, I don't think it's a two-way street. I think that's a soundbite that people like to say.” “If we stick with the road analogy, I think integration is more like you've got a bloody big motorway and you've got a slip road of people coming in from the outside. “What you need to do is people in the middle, in the motorway, need to accommodate and be gentle and kind to the people coming in from the outside lane. “But we're all in the same direction and we're all heading in the same direction.” She added: “To some degree it's a two-way street but to some degree it is not. “There is more give on one side and more take on the other and I think that's where we have successively made a mistake, which is we've not been honest about that. “I understand what people are saying when they say integration is a two-way street, of course it is, but only to some degree.”

Asked by Labour MP Rushanara Ali whether she believed the majority in a community did not need to “adjust very much”, Dame Louise replied: “I think the people in the middle, the people in the motorway, of course they have to adjust a little bit. But the general thing moves in the same direction.” Dame Louise also said that migrants should be taught the importance of queuing in modern-day Britain. She said that many MPs had failed to understand how migrants needed to learn the "basics" of British life, including when to be "nice". Dame Louise said: "I thought it was interesting that they said that nobody had talked to them about our way of life here, about when to put rubbish out. "Nobody told them to queue, nobody told them to be nice, all those sorts of things. "We hadn't been on it and I think as part of the package that would be no bad thing. "What is clear is we is that we ought to be more on integration, we should have been and we need to be." The Casey Review, jointly commissioned by former prime minister David Cameron and then home secretary Theresa May, scrutinised the impact of the ‘unprecedented pace and scale of population change’ in Britain. The report made a series of recommendations over improving integration in schools, with Dame Louise having taken evidence from teachers and pupils. Dame Louise told Tory MP Julian Knight the so-called Trojan Horse affair, involving an alleged takeover of schools by conservative Islamists in Birmingham, was not a one-off. She said: “We didn't find it very difficult to find things like segregation of girls, some of these what I would describe anti-equal opportunities or anti-liberal values”, adding: “Yes, it's happening elsewhere.” Dame Louise insisted “some of the dynamics” of the Trojan Horse scandal were “in play in other parts of the country”. She said: “I don't really have any view on which religion it is that's promoting those sorts of views, but it's not ok. “The same way it's not ok for Catholic schools to be homophobic and anti-gay marriage. “I have a problem with the expression of 'religious conservatism' because I think often it can be anti-equalities.”

No, I don't think it's a two-way street. I think that's a soundbite that people like to say Dame Louise Casey

Dame Louise said groups should not be able to “condemn others for living differently”. Admitting fears of “being branded a racist” hindered efforts to improve integration and tackle segregation, Dame Louise claimed there is a “very genuine fear” that Britain has “two extremists alive in our communities”. She said: “We do have the extreme right-wing, which is milking all of this for it’s worth. One looks across Europe… it's not pretty, frankly, some of it. “And we have our own extreme right-wing in our own country which we're all utterly appalled by. “But we also have Islamist extremism at play and I have felt at points it has been easier to talk about one than it is to talk about the other. “That does a disservice to thousands of people that are caught up in actually being on the receiving end of not having a start in life that they should have living in the UK.”