The conversation about how we welcome newcomers currently feels impossibly pessimistic. Although the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, regretted his comments that the UK risks becoming ‘an island of strangers’, this didn’t stop them from becoming emblematic of a fear that our social fabric is under severe strain. Recent reports on community cohesion have emphasised the ‘shattered’ nature of British society, highlighting a pervasive gloominess among the public, while the unrest in the summer of 2024 and more recently in Northern Ireland and Essex stressed a sharp edge of violence.
There is, of course, no room for complacency. The unrest demonstrated the risks inherent in a breakdown of social cohesion, the fear that this can provoke within communities and the need for swift action to tackle lawlessness, to identify areas struggling with these tensions and to work to prevent them. However, there is a danger of taking this (undoubtedly shocking) violence as indicative of the nature of community relations across the wider public, which in fact is not always supported by data.
Instead, are there rather reasons to be optimistic about how welcoming and cohesive our cities are? Recent research by the think tank British Future, while leading on the challenges for cohesion, set out some surprisingly hopeful data. 84 per cent of people feel a strong sense of belonging to Britain and nearly 70 per cent agree that their local area is a place where people from different backgrounds get on well together, with only 9 per cent disagreeing. Similarly, research looking at overall levels of public happiness has not shown a particular recent collapse, and by and large, the UK ranks well internationally in this respect. The vibes may be bad, but people perceive a breakdown of cohesion much more than they necessarily directly experience it in their own communities.
Why are we then so pessimistic about welcoming? Certainly, we might attribute this to media coverage or to politicians who wish to take advantage of the gloom. One marker of cohesion which has certainly declined is our trust in institutions and politics. It is also true – particularly in more deprived areas – that many people feel a strong sense of loss and decline, in particular as a consequence of a long-term lack of investment in public services and the public realm.
However, when thinking specifically about cohesion, there are additional factors at play. Cohesion is unloved by both the right and the left. On the right, there is a persistent fear of change within communities and the worry that communities cannot be resilient enough to cope with the arrival of newcomers. On the left, there is a similar fear – not of the newcomers themselves, but rather that as communities we face impossible challenges to welcoming, that racism and systemic inequalities, which are undoubtedly real, present an unscalable barrier.
As a consequence, integration, welcoming work and community cohesion (overlapping but separate terms in academic research, which are often used interchangeably in the policy arena) often lack a champion. In the UK, this is a low-salience policy area (especially in comparison to high-profile debates on migration), often with little energy and resource devoted to it.
So why am I optimistic for the future of welcoming in UK cities? It may not feel like it, but most people in most UK cities get on pretty well together most of the time, and this is not a bad place to start. Where there are (real and undeniable) challenges, there are solutions, and it is at the local level where cities are grasping the need to work proactively to foster welcoming.
Since 2017, I have worked with 12 UK cities, all working towards making their city welcoming of newcomers, appreciating the benefits that such an approach can bring to all residents. In spite of few financial resources and hardly any capacity, none of these cities has chosen the path of benign neglect, inertia or pessimism – instead employing the grace and persistence to figure out what can be done. This is not about debating migration policies over which the city usually has little control, but instead understanding the arrival of newcomers as a normal part of city life and developing the services to support it. Crucially, it means investing in the public realm, in aligning community development work with work to support newcomers and in creating public spaces which feel loved and inclusive. This is not an approach which assumes cities can write a blank cheque, but instead asks how cities can move from reactive, crisis-driven (and, as a consequence, often pessimistic) views of welcoming, which see the newcomer only as a drain on resources, to a proactive one that puts welcoming at the centre of public service planning, including in relation to inclusive economic growth – to which newcomers are often central.
Pessimism in welcoming often comes from seeing the barriers and challenges to integration in the short term, while over the medium to long term the UK has a strong record in welcoming – as can be seen by longer-term measures such as growing diversity within UK public life, closing the gap in educational outcomes, and significant shifts in social attitudes including in our ideas of national identity. An optimistic view of welcoming means holding onto this long-term progress and recognising that we cannot be complacent about it or give in to the inertia of pessimism. We can learn a lot from how cities welcome newcomers, but we can also learn how to look at our cities through the eyes of the newcomer – being clear-eyed in seeing the systemic inequalities that we must strive to eliminate, but also recognising the good things that draw newcomers to our cities in the first place.
Jacqueline Broadhead is Director of the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, at the University of Oxford.
Welcoming Cities by Jacqueline Broadhead is available on Bristol University Press for £29.99 here.
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