Councils urged to encourage integration

The communities secretary has called on councils to translate less documents from English, in order to encourage integration.

Hazel Blears said on Sunday that learning English must be "an absolute top priority" for migrants to the UK.

And she argued that some local authorities were making it too easy for them not to by providing information in a variety of foreign languages.

"If you want to get on, if you want to get a job, if you want to look after your family, the ability to speak the language is fundamental," she told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show.

"We're saying to local authorities in particular - don't go translating all the documents that you used to in the past.

"Think very carefully about how you can bring people together."

Blears said that, while exceptions must be made, the change of tact would benefit integration, as well as reducing costs for town halls.

"Some local authorities were translating annual reports - probably most English people don't read a local authority's annual report," she said.

"If you've got emergency instructions for how to get to the accident and emergency department in the hospital, if you have a terrible accident, then you may well need to translate that.

"But the advice is 'think twice' and maybe you can do things in a pictorial way that has the English translation underneath.

"So actually, in the process of giving people information, you're helping them to learn English as well."

The comments came after a report found last week that Britain had become a "soft touch" for terrorists because of rising multiculturalism.

And speaking on the same programme Conservative shadow security minister Baroness Neville-Jones backed its findings.

"On the whole, we've been taking separate groups and treating them rather separately, and giving them special status and instead of saying that, all of us have got to be part of the same single framework of law and habit and getting at some of the separatism that's been going on," she said.

Blears agreed that while multiculturalism means people should "celebrate the diversity of this country... that shouldn't mean people leading separate lives, and that's where I think the danger is".