BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION RADIO 4

TRANSCRIPT OF “FILE ON 4” – “CAN RECOVER?”

CURRENT AFFAIRS GROUP

TRANSMISSION: Tuesday 20th October 2015 2000 – 2040 REPEAT: Sunday 25th October 2015 1700 - 1740

REPORTER: Manveen Rana PRODUCER: Sally Chesworth EDITOR: David Ross

PROGRAMME NUMBER: PMR542/15VQ5734 - 1 -

THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

“FILE ON 4”

Transmission: Tuesday 20th October 2015 Repeat: Sunday 25th October 2015

Producer: Sally Chesworth Reporter: Manveen Rana Editor: David Ross

ACTUALITY OF BRASS BAND

RANA: On an early autumn evening, Rotherham celebrates the industry that defines it.

MAN: It’s quite apt to be stood here in the Minster Gardens next to the floodlit Minster here of Rotherham to turn on the lights of the heart of steel. I can’t think of any persons more fitting to do this than two of Rotherham’s own – Paul and Barry Chuckle.

APPLAUSE

MAN AND CROWD: Three, two, one – yay!

RANA: The shimmering two metre tall, metal structure is a defiant monument to the steel industry that’s been its heart.

PAUL CHUCKLE: Fantastic piece of work.

BARRY CHUCKLE: It is. - 2 -

PAUL CHUCKLE: Rotherham is a fabulous place.

BARRY CHUCKLE: It is.

PAUL CHUCKLE: Don’t let them knock us, whatever happens. I don’t mean knockers, you know what I mean?

BARRY CHUCKLE: You don’t mean that, no.

PAUL CHUCKLE: I didn’t mean that, no.

RANA: Behind the laughter, Rotherham is reeling. The very industry being celebrated is on the verge of extinction, with 550 steel jobs set to go in Rotherham alone. It is the latest blow to the town, following the revelations about child sex abuse that shocked the world. Last year, I was here reporting as the scandal broke. I’ve come back to find out how the town is coping with the fallout and to ask, can Rotherham recover?

SIGNATURE TUNE

ACTUALITY AT PRESS CONFERENCE

JAY: It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse the child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, they were trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, they were abducted, beaten and intimidated, children being doused with petrol ….

RANA: Last year, the Jay Report lifted the lid on the horrifying scale of abuse that had been allowed to take place in Rotherham.

JAY: Our conservative estimate is that at least 1,400 individual children in Rotherham were victims of sexual exploitation over the sixteen years.

- 3 -

RANA: But the enormity of the impact on the community and the victims themselves is still just emerging. Some of the girls who were abused have now become mothers, but their involvement in grooming has brought them under scrutiny from the authorities and many fear that social services will take their children away.

LIZZIE: Now they’re just using my past against me.

RANA: In what way?

LIZZIE: In every way they can. They’re all constantly bringing it up. They need to like just let me get on with my life instead of keep bringing my past up all the time.

RANA: Twenty year old Lizzie, as we’ve agreed to call her, is reserved and guarded. She was groomed for years by a group of abusers. Although she’s one of the few victims whose case has already led to convictions, she was so vulnerable by then that she soon stumbled into a violent relationship. She’s put that behind her and her parents are now helping her to raise her baby, but she fears that Social Services are so obsessed with her past that it is undermining her ability as a mother.

LIZZIE: Maybe if they gave me the help I need then it’ll obviously make me better and I’ll be able to care for her and look after her like a proper parent should.

RANA: And do you worry that they’ll take the baby away?

LIZZIE: Yeah.

RANA: How important has it been to you, personally, having the baby?

LIZZIE: Very important. She’s like the one that’s keeping me going and keeping me strong. I think if it weren’t for her, then I’d have probably give up by now, but I’ve not. I’ve carried on fighting. - 4 -

RANA: Do you think a lot of abuse victims really worry that they’ll have, their babies, they’ll have the thing that keeps them going taken away if they report it?

LIZZIE: Yeah, yeah. I think that’s why a lot of girls are not coming forward.

RANA: Do you know of any?

LIZZIE: I know a few.

RANA: Lizzie’s family isn’t the only one feeling like they’re now under scrutiny.

SUE: From what I’m going through and what’s still happening, I’d advise no, don’t get involved with them.

RANA: Sue, we’ve changed her name and her voice, has two daughters who were groomed by a gang. She did everything she could to stop the abuse and to alert the authorities to it. But now she also says she wishes she had never gone to Social Services.

SUE: One of my daughters that were involved, she’s just given birth and that baby were born premature and it’s in special care. Basically they got in touch with her, four days after she’s given birth, by emergency caesarean. Putting concerns over the baby’s safety, regarding her other sister, what’s in a violent relationship. They’re saying the baby’s unsafe, even though my daughter doesn’t have anything to do with her sister’s boyfriend. They’re fetching it up, saying Rotherham’s a small town. I think they’re coming at the wrong time. The baby’s in special care and she’ll be in there for quite a while.

RANA: And how did your daughter react?

- 5 -

SUE: She was absolutely devastated and heartbroken. Nobody could believe what they’re doing. They’re penalising her for what happened as a child to our family.

RANA: You felt the authorities failed your daughter when the abuse was actually happening. Do you feel like they’re failing them now?

SUE: Yes, I still think there’s failings now. We’re all trying to fetch Rotherham forward, but the mistakes are still creeping in and the failings are still happening. There’s a long way for them to go before they get things right.

ACTUALITY AT COMMUNITY CENTRE

WOMAN: Morning everybody! Coming in today we’ve got some Halloween themed glasses to do and we’ve got some new glitters, we’ve got some neons to make them extra bright …

RANA: Sue and Lizzie are regulars at Swinton Lock, which offers art therapy sessions and a place for victims and their families to seek advice and to offer each other support.

WOMAN: Smudge it all round and make it go out far.

RANA: The centre is run by Jayne Senior, who’s just won a Woman of the Year award for forcing what was happening in Rotherham onto the national agenda. She’s now the town’s expert on CSE – or Child Sexual Exploitation – and has come to be one of the most trusted points of contact for many of the victims.

SENIOR: We have people that say to us regular that they don’t want to come forward to the police because they may have their children removed. We’ve somehow got to change those attitudes. If I was a victim of abuse, I wouldn’t think that my children would get removed just because I came forward and gave a statement to the police. That fear has been there through both the Casey and the report, but there is still cases of people that have been involved with Social Services because they’ve become part of - 6 -

SENIOR cont: the system by saying I am a victim of CSE. And we’ve got two cases that have become active this week where we’ve had to get some legal advice because they are worried that if they come forward as a victim of this crime, that assessments on their children could end up going in a different direction. That is about training and recognising that CSE is not a label. So if we have a victim of CSE who’s got their own children and is having difficulties, them difficulties, we need to look more holistically rather than just presume because they are a victim of CSE they are going to struggle to parent.

RANA: Jayne, and the centre at Swinton Lock, have been struggling to cope with the number of victims who have turned to them. Many of the girls and their families aren’t getting support from anywhere else, but the centre is running out of the funds to be able to help. The local MP, , says she’s disgusted by how little support they’ve received, and she worries that the council still isn’t doing enough for the victims of CSE.

CHAMPION: I want to say we could never have a scandal of that level. I can’t say that at the moment. I haven’t got enough faith in the system that that couldn’t happen again. I say that because I still have new cases that come to me, not at the first point of reporting, but they’ve tried to report it to the council, they’ve tried to get support for the ongoing victims and that’s been very slow in coming. So the fact that someone has to come to an MP to try and motivate council workers to do their job, that to me says it’s a council that’s still failing.

RANA: Louise Casey’s report into Rotherham Council’s handling of CSE was so damning that the Government decided the Council was not fit for purpose. Five commissioners have been appointed to oversee the way the Council is run, and Chris Read has taken over as the new leader of Rotherham Council.

READ: The concern always for our social workers must be the safety of the child first and foremost. Sometimes that will put any family that’s had difficulties into a difficult position, where children might be taken away. That’s a situation no family wants to get into.

- 7 -

RANA: But are you sure you’ve sort of recognised even the scale of the challenge? For example, we’ve spoken to a lot of young women who have been victims, who are now very worried that because they’ve alerted Social Services to what was happening to them, they’re in danger of having their babies taken away from them, for example.

READ: I mean, I think it’s a work in progress in terms of our dealings with Child Sexual Exploitation. I hope that people do have the confidence to come forward. I hope that we’re dealing with them better. That’s certainly the information that I am getting from our staff. If people out there are having a different experience then I need to know about that. I want us to get into a position with the Safeguarding Children’s Board where we are better able to quality assure that work as well.

RANA: South Yorkshire Police is another institution struggling to win back the community’s trust. The Jay and Casey reports heavily criticised them for allowing the abuse to continue, despite having been alerted to it by parents and victims. More than sixty current officers are still under investigation by the IPCC.

KATE: The police, I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them. They just don’t want to do their jobs.

RANA: Kate – that’s not her real name - is also a mother, whose daughter’s case of multiple abuse shocked the nation when it appeared in both the Jay and Casey reports. She’s had more recent experience with the police, which makes her believe they’re still failing the victims of CSE.

KATE: Somebody tried to groom my younger daughter. Facebook messaged her, but he kept changing his name, so he had so many different profiles, but she blocked every one. She reported it, that was in November last year. He were arrested 48 hour after, then we never heard nowt after that. He’s then gone on to actually have sexual contact with other young girls, I think thirty girls that he’s either groomed or tried to groom. If they’d have listened to my daughter and sorted him then, he wouldn’t have been able to. But again, they’ve left it and they’ve come out, I’d say it were about six week ago and - 8 -

KATE cont: asked for me daughter to do a video statement, which they should have got in November and they didn’t get.

RANA: By then this man had already abused somebody else?

KATE: Yeah, he’d raped a young girl.

RANA: In the time when they weren’t investigating him, he managed to rape another young girl?

KATE: Yeah. They just didn’t investigate.

RANA: Instead, it was Kate who found herself under investigation, as Social Services launched a full assessment of the family. South Yorkshire Police’s handling of grooming cases will be examined by the Drew Review, which was launched by the local Police and Crime Commissioner last month. Chief Superintendent Jason Harwin, who is in charge of policing Rotherham, concedes that there’s still work to be done. Do you think the people of Rotherham can trust the police force yet?

HARWIN: We need the public to trust us. We’re here to keep them safe.

RANA: But do you think they do?

HARWIN: I think it’s mixed at the moment. I think the trust will come back by seeing action, and Action Plus is about making sure we’re bringing those who are responsible to justice. We are changing. Things are getting better, but this is a journey that we know is not going to be resolved overnight. This is about making sure again within the police service, not just in Rotherham, we have a better understanding of the horrific events that took place on young people. To make sure that we learn very quickly, to make sure we do everything to prevent them being a victim in the first place, but importantly, if they are a victim, they’ve got the relevant support that gives them the confidence to report what’s happened. To give us the evidence that we need to bring people to justice. - 9 -

RANA: We have come across a number of parents and victims who feel that actually investigations haven’t begun, haven’t been started when they’ve approached the police. For example, we came across one mother who told us that her young daughter had been approached online, so she came to the police immediately, back in November – so that’s after the Jay Report – and yet nothing was done about it. But in the meantime, the man who had approached her daughter has gone on to rape somebody else, rape another child, which does make you wonder what might have happened if her complaint had been taken more seriously.

HARWIN: Firstly, I’m not aware of the individual, so again if you’ve got information there that can actually help us to identify that individual with their consent, clearly I’m keen to understand why we didn’t do the things that we should have done in the first place.

RANA: But you can believe that an incident like that might have taken place?

HARWIN: Well, what I’d say is I’d hope it didn’t, but clearly if you’re saying you’ve spoken to somebody, I can’t say that’s not the case until I’ve got details. I accept that people may feel they don’t want to contact me because of what’s happened in the past. However, clearly I’m keen to make sure, if that’s happened, that we make sure that the next person that phones it doesn’t happen to.

ACTUALITY OF MARCH

RANA: But there’s another challenge facing South Yorkshire Police. Since news of the grooming scandal in Rotherham first broke, groups including the EDL and Britain First have organised fourteen marches and numerous events in the area, highlighting the race of the abusers; most are known to have been men from the Pakistani community.

EXTRACT FROM SPEECH

- 10 -

FRANSEN: It is not racist to love and protect and support your children and keep them from Muslim people.

RANA: Jayda Fransen, the Deputy Leader of Britain First.

FRANSEN: Everyone assembles and greets each together. We all take up flags that we can hold. We march through the town to a rally point, where we have some speeches, and then we march back. It’s always very peaceful. We’re very disciplined and very serious. We take this issue in particular very seriously.

ACTUALITY AT MARCH

MAN: [SHOUTING] You’re scum, the lot of you. Scum, scum …

RANA: But in recent months, the marches have been accompanied by counter-demonstrations organised by Unite against Fascism and members of the local Muslim community.

HUSSEIN: People are kind of made to be prisoners in their own home. And I think the Muslim community and the Pakistani community is absolutely sick of it, absolutely sick of it. Before the last demonstration, things were really at a boiling point.

RANA: Waqas Hussein is one of the founders of British Muslim Youth, a group which began in Rotherham. He says his friends and family avoid the centre of town on days when marches take place and have become increasingly afraid of venturing out alone as racial tensions in the community run high.

HUSSEIN: The police are always armed to the hilt with batons and shields and it’s not something that you’re used to seeing from the police. And then when you’ve got groups shouting racist obscenities, it just kind of makes the atmosphere very volatile. And even, you know, peaceful law-abiding citizen when you’re in that situation, if you’re being provoked, there’s only so much you can take and it only takes a moment of madness for you to do something stupid, to then regret it for the rest of your life. And during - 11 -

HUSSEIN cont: the last demonstration I was at the very front and on three or four occasions it was very very close to tipping over.

RANA: There’s a growing number of voices across Rotherham calling for the marches to be banned. Among them is the mayor, Maggie Clark.

CLARK: If I could have one wish, it would be that the Home Secretary would ban the marches. I’m a democrat, I believe in people having the freedom to speak and freedom to air their views. But I also want people in Rotherham to be able to earn a living and to be able to walk freely through the streets and not be afraid. We’ve got to stop these marches. It’s draining funds, its draining resources and it’s draining the life out of some of the businesses.

RANA: The marches have cost South Yorkshire police more than £4 million, which comes at a time when they’ve already lost 600 staff in the last five years through cuts, and they’re funding investigations into the new allegations of grooming coming to them, and they’ve already received 250 in the last year. Chief Superintendent Jason Harwin believes the Government should step in.

HARWIN: The issue for South Yorkshire Police now is that some of the protests are repetitive, particularly in Rotherham. Some of the message is the same message and we would argue legitimacy is no longer right because actually we can show things have changed. But also the fact is that the feedback on community cohesion, the impact on the economy within local business is significant. Whilst not taking people’s freedom of expression away, what we’re saying is there’s got to be a level where ultimately that we can work with the organisers to try and minimise the impact that it’s had on communities. But if not, if a certain threshold where we believe there could be disorder, where there’s a massive impact on community cohesion, there’s got to be powers there where we can actually look to ban not just a march, which we can now, but the wider assembly as well at the same time, and that’s a conversation we’re having in the Home Office and other partners at the moment.

RANA: Are you getting worried by the counter demonstrations too? - 12 -

RANA cont: Does it look like being, is there an increase in just race related violence whenever these things happen?

HARWIN: The fact is we’ve got groups there that ultimately are trying to abuse each other, whichever group they came from – that does not help community cohesion, it doesn’t help people’s feeling of safety and, just as importantly, it doesn’t help the police service, where we have to address those issues and while we’re addressing those issues we can’t deal with other things.

RANA: But the Deputy leader of Britain First, Jayda Fransen, says they have no intention of stopping the marches.

FRANSEN: Hundreds and hundreds of locals get in touch and say, ‘When are you coming back? Can you help us? Can you give us a voice? Our children have had their innocence taken away by these monsters.’

RANA: We’ve spoken to a sizeable portion of the community who say it’s really disrupting the community there now. The mayor, Maggie Clark, says if she could have one wish it would be to stop the marches. We’ve spoken to …

FRANSEN: That’s not very democratic …

RANA: We’ve spoken to people who say that they feel like prisoners in their own home, because they feel like they can’t go out whenever one of these marches is happening. It’s shut down businesses in the centre of town.

FRANSEN: If you resent the financial implications and the loss of income, I would urge you to just consider, this is our children. If you care about British children, then you wouldn’t complain about a loss of income. You’d take to the streets and do something. If this doesn’t end, we will just keep going and going and going.

RANA: The police say they can’t manage the strain of having to deal with the marches that are happening so regularly at the moment. Do you not think - 13 -

RANA cont: that that money would be better spent actually helping the victims, investigating the cases that are taking place now and stop people from being abused?

FRANSEN: It’s ludicrous. Men fought, bled and died for us to live in a democracy, and this is being eroded, just like our culture is being eroded, just like our children aren’t safe anymore. If one child benefits from this, then I will sleep well at night. One child.

ACTUALITY IN ROTHERHAM

RANA: It’s not just the marches that are a problem; community cohesion in Rotherham seems to have taken a battering. I’m on my way now to see Yasmin Ishaq, a local volunteer who grew up in the town.

ISHAQ: I have never known race relations to be this terrible. People are fearful. Following their disruptive marches, we have increased tension within the community. We have had young children that have reported how their friendships have been affected at school. So, for instance, my son, his friend informed him that his father doesn’t want that brown boy to be playing with him or come round to his house or they can’t go to the movies and how his friend was forced to go on the march with his father.

RANA: You are sort of quite visibly dressed as a Muslim woman. Walking along the streets in Rotherham, what is that like now?

ISHAQ: You brace yourself for the next person who is going to hurl abuse at you.

RANA: Is it really that common?

ISHAQ: It is that common. A young mother, she had three children with her, was leaving the local park and as she reached the entrance gate a group of white people, she said they were middle aged, three men and a woman, came up to her. They were actually verbally throwing the abuse from across the road, they crossed over. She said, - 14 -

ISHAQ cont: I tried to walk faster but she had the baby in the buggy and the other two children were sort of clinging on to her and she said I couldn’t move fast enough. They circled her, came close up to her. One grabbed her by the shoulder. She wears the niqab, the face veil, so he grabbed that. The woman, she spat in her face and they started pushing her around. The babies were crying, children were understandably very very scared. She has just been so traumatised by this, that she will not leave the house now, not unless her husband is with her.

RANA: There’s been one attack in particular which has stunned the town.

ACTUALITY AT STADIUM

MAN: Everyone make a line.

RANA: Everyone in Rotherham talks about Mushin Ahmed, the 81 year old who died after being beaten on his way to morning prayers. Hundreds of people have gathered here at Herringthorpe Stadium to pay their respects to him. There is a line of men praying in front of the hearse, and a sizeable group from outside the Muslim community. The mood is sombre rather than angry. A stark reminder of just how serious the situation has now become.

ACTUALITY IN CAR

HUSSEIN: Mushin Ahmed’s death really took the community by surprise. Verbal abuse is one thing, but an alleged murder is completely off the scale.

RANA: Waqas Hussein says the death of Mr Ahmed crystalised many of the community’s fears.

HUSSEIN: There’s a limit that people will put up with. We’re proud British citizens, we live here, we were born and brought up here, you know. Our parents and grandparents came here as immigrants to help build this country. A lot of the - 15 -

HUSSEIN cont: older Asian men in this country worked in the steelworks in Rotherham, and for an 81 year old man to be killed really took the community by surprise. There was a lot of anger.

RANA: Sarah Champion, the local MP, says she’s alarmed by the deteriorating situation.

CHAMPION: Rotherham has had a pounding that I wouldn’t wish upon any town in the country. It’s a very tough and demoralizing environment to be trying to survive in. We’ve had hate crimes – vicious hate crimes. I just find it deeply, deeply saddening and very frustrating and I don’t actually know how we can hold the community together. We’re in a very difficult and a very dark place at the moment.

ACTUALITY IN CAR

ALI: Now here there used to be shops, but they’ve been knocked down. This used to be bank, shut down. This used to be KFC, it’s shut down.

RANA: It seems to be a whole row of boarded up shops here.

ALI: And up this road here, this one is closed, that one’s closed, that one burnt down and closed. All this row is closed down. You’ve got bingo and another one closed and burnt down.

RANA: The dark events that took place in Rotherham have cast a gloomy shadow over the local economy too. Taxi drivers in particular say they are bearing the brunt of the fallout from the scandal. They’ve even had to face a spate of violent attacks in the last few weeks.

ALI: At first when the Jay Report came out, it was really difficult because everybody, even sometimes you would be parked up in town waiting for a fare and somebody would walk past and look at the driver or look at the taxi and say, ‘Oh, I’m not getting in with that paedophile, Paki bastard. They are all the same.’ Just basically racial, and then they add the paedophile at the bottom to end up with and that goes down right - 16 -

ALI cont: well. And that’s embarrassing and painful, because it is the job you have done for a long time with the pride, you know, a great deal of pride, providing an excellent service and when somebody makes a comment like that to you, you think, God, you know, well, you know, what do you do? You feel like going home, you feel like packing it up. But then when you get home obviously then you have got to come back out to work, haven’t you?

RANA: So how much do you think business has been affected?

ALI: A lot. I mean, me personally, I am down by at least 40%. I’ve come out here and one night during the week I sat here for three hours and I didn’t get a job and I went home empty. That’s how depressing it is to work here late on.

RANA: And that’s just got worse in the last year?

ALI: Yes, just last year.

RANA: There are some new businesses that have opened in the area, but they’re also feeling the impact of what’s now happening in Rotherham.

ACTUALITY IN BRIDAL SHOP

WOMAN: Ooh, absolutely gorgeous ….that’s nice.

WOMAN 2: That one’s pretty. I like that.

WOMAN: It’s got that vintage look that I’m after.

RANA: Wed to Be is a bridal paradise, stocking rails and rails of every conceivable style of wedding dress. It’s a large, national business investing in Rotherham, in spite of the town’s reputation.

ARMITAGE: Initially it was, like, Rotherham? Would you really want to go there? Have you seen it in the press? And then the figures actually made really - 17 -

ARMITAGE cont: commercial sense to say let’s do a crack at this and let’s try. I mean, because it has been hit so hard economically in the past, politically, currently, all the rates are really low so it is an amazing opportunity for businesses to cash in and maximise profit margins.

RANA: Caroline Armitage is the manager of the enormous new store in the centre of the town, which opened last month with plans for a great fanfare.

ARMITAGE: So for the month before we were getting everybody involved - premium brands, perfume brands, local celebrities, pageant girls – they were going to come down and do blogs. We had wedding singers involved, everything. Everything you would want for your wedding day, we had planned. It was going to be a real party. So you can imagine, there’d sort of be 320 brides to be, not including entourages, because entourages you can sort of get up to ten people. You can imagine all the family coming as well.

RANA: Having planned a grand opening, which would have brought hundreds of people to Rotherham and generated business for the local community, the shop was forced to close on its first day in business, as a march had been planned which would have passed their front door.

ARMITAGE: It is a personal heartbreak because you do put a lot of effort into it, really a lot of effort. I mean, we were speaking to everybody, local businesses, promising local businesses that they would be seen by four hundred people, so the trickledown effect of just under four hundred people coming didn’t just ruin my day and my company’s day, it ruined quite a lot of people’s day.

RANA: When the shop reopened, less than half of the brides who had booked appointments came back, losing the store thousands of pounds of business. A small boutique gift shop opposite Wed To Be has already been forced to shut down, due in part to the fall in takings caused by the marches. Andrew Deniff is the head of the Barnsley and Rotherham Chamber of Commerce. He says the grooming scandal, and all that has followed, has had a huge impact.

- 18 -

DENNIFF: I think the real damage that’s been caused to Rotherham has been around the town and indeed the region’s reputation. You know, a lot of people I’ve spoken to and some people who’ve been around a bit and are fairly senior people in the town were almost embarrassed, in conversations they were having to acknowledge they were even from Rotherham. But certainly in terms of managing the fallout, it’s been a huge task and it’s created a lot of problems around the reputation that the town quite rightly over many many years has earned as being a good place to come and do business. One of the big challenges that we’ve had as a chamber and possibly within the local authority as well is that in terms of potential inward investment into the town, if companies and if businesses are looking to bring their business to Rotherham and they have a choice of other options, it may have been likely that over the past twelve months they may have taken another option to Rotherham. Although, having said that, you never really know whether they’ve made that decision for purely business reasons.

RANA: It’s been a difficult year, but people are bracing themselves for things to get worse. Tata Steel is one of the biggest employers in Rotherham. It forms the spine of local industry. But it’s now announced that more than 550 jobs in the town are under threat. With unemployment already above the national average in Rotherham, the future for those facing redundancy looks bleak.

ACTUALITY IN HOUSE

LISA: Are you really hungry?

ISABELLA: Yes, really hungry.

LISA: How hungry is hungry?

ISABELLA: Really hungry.

LISA: Really really really really hungry?

ISABELLA: Yes.

- 19 -

LISA: Okay. Shall we not give Daddy any then?

ISABELLA: No.

LISA: No, he’s not worked today has he, he’s not earned it.

RANA: Its dinner time at the Williamson household, and Isabella is helping her mother, Lisa, prepare.

LISA: Have you washed your hands? Have you?

CHRIS: You haven’t.

ISABELLA: I have, Mummy.

LISA: Good girl. Go and check that we’ve all got a knife and a fork.

RANA: Lisa’s husband, Chris, has been a steel worker in Rotherham for twenty years, like his father and grandfather before him. He’d always thought it would be a job for life, but now his job at Tata Steel hangs in the balance. There have already been 1,700 job losses in the last seven years, and morale was already low, when rumours started to circulate about the latest announcement.

CHRIS: We all got called in to tell us what their proposal were. They kept reiterating that it is a proposal, so everybody’s got prayer mat out. But initially there were anger here, a lot of bitterness. I mean, obviously I’ve calmed down a bit since then, but I daren’t say what I was thinking when they announced it. They’re worlds apart, what’s happening at our works and the and what have you, but you can feel the morale of the town is like on a rock bottom.

LISA: You know, we’ve got a young family. Not long since moved up the housing ladder into this house. You always think that your job’s going to be there, don’t you? That’s my biggest worry, the security for our family. - 20 -

CHRIS: Fact of the matter is the steel industry all UK-wide is nigh on its knees, like. It’s looked after my family and you think if that goes in Rotherham, what’s going to be left?

LISA: It’s very hard to imagine such a massive part, you know, a major artery of Rotherham, to its beating heart. That’s a big thing, it pumps in so much, it’s a ripple effect. That’s the stone that’s been dropped in and it’s far-reaching to places that you wouldn’t even think of. Like very small businesses that rely on men going in at 4.30 in the morning, going in for their milk and their bread or their pack-up, you know, or coming off a nightshift. I think there’s loads of little places like that. They’ll shut down. With high unemployment you get higher crime rate and I don’t really want to bring my girls up in that kind of a place.

RANA: Lisa works part time so that she can spend a day at home with the couple’s daughters, Bethan and Isabella, aged one and three, but that will become an unaffordable luxury if Chris loses his job. He’s busy exploring his options, but the prospects don’t inspire much confidence.

CHRIS: Basically it’s shops and call centres at the minute. It’s not great.

LISA: Not very good, really. There’s a lot of retraining. What would he actually train as, because our children are at school now and they’re going to be trained for jobs that don’t even exist yet. So how is a 40 year old man supposed to compete when we don’t even know in ten years’ time what jobs are going to be out there? What could he go out there and do? What is there on offer that would give us the same kind of stability that that does? I don’t know.

ACTUALITY WITH STUART SANSOME

SANSOME: The one at the top, close to my heart, this one here, this is the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation. This is the union that I joined in the 1970s. It’s actually a gallery of union banners from parts of the UK …

- 21 -

RANA: Stuart Sansome is a local councillor and the proud trade union rep for Tata Steel. He is still hopeful that a case can be made to keep some of the jobs, but he fears that the town may now be on a downward spiral.

SANSOME: My great, great fear is that if the steel industry is not retained within Rotherham, then the perception that people might have of Rotherham being a town that they don’t want to visit actually becomes a reality, because where people will find employment and the kind of lifestyles that they hope to aspire to have, I have no idea. I do not see, unless somebody can wave a magic wand, I think Rotherham could become a very, very desperate place, a place that I would never want it to be.

RANA: Tata Steel, which has also announced 1,200 job cuts in other parts of the country, says it will work with the trade unions to minimise the need for compulsory redundancies, but says it has been forced to fundamentally restructure its business, as it is no longer competitive in the UK due to high energy costs.

ACTUALITY ON MARKET

TRADER: Come on now, your cooked chickens are £3 each, take two for a fiver.

RANA: There are cut price deals galore in the streets of Rotherham, but still not many customers. News of steel industry cuts from across the country make the idea of a reprieve for Rotherham seem much less likely. The future for many of the locals here seems uncertain. But back at the council, Chris Read is determined that the decline of the steel industry won’t put an end to the town’s economic prospects.

READ: Oh, I’m very confident that Rotherham can recover. The job losses at Tata, if they do go ahead, are deeply regrettable. My father used to work at Tata. All my life I’ve been aware of the decline of heavy industry. So the trade unions are working with Tata and with our support to try and do everything they can to keep those people in work, but at the same time alongside that we have a contingency plan for trying to reskill people and keep people in work elsewhere if needs be, and then we need to be working up a plan for the economy in the future in Rotherham, that we get our economy back on the - 22 -

READ cont: right footing. So we’ve got Boeing and Rolls Royce up at the Advanced Manufacturing Park on the border with Sheffield. That’s going to be a big part of our plans for the future. There are challenges we face with Tata, but actually, perhaps for the first time in my lifetime, I can see how we might be able to move that forward on the economy.

RANA: He even hopes that Rotherham might have a future as part of the Northern Powerhouse.

READ: At the moment, the Northern Powerhouse is little more than a phrase on George Osborne’s lips, but it’s also an opportunity for places like Rotherham. So we signed the second proposed devolution deal in the country in the last few weeks. We did that, not because I and my other Labour leaders in South Yorkshire are big fans of this Government, but because we have to take those opportunities that are open to us. So we’re doing that, we’re taking that forward and we need to look at how can we pull in those jobs, how can we pull in that investment and do that in an open-minded way.

RANA: But the local MP, Sarah Champion, is less optimistic. She thinks the Tata job losses will be such a huge blow to the town, that she’s not sure if Rotherham can recover.

CHAMPION: It’s taking away the hope from the town and that’s a very, very cruel blow. In the short term, if we lose those jobs we lose the skills and so then we lose our future and a town that’s lost its future - it doesn’t bear thinking about really. To go back in history, Rotherham was massively hit when the steel and the mines were under big attack and that nearly broke our spirit, but it didn’t. We held on, and this feels like sort of round two, to be quite honest, and I don’t know how we’ll recover from this one. And unfortunately there’s so much focus of this Government on London that they don’t seem to realise that somewhere, 200 miles up the road could do with a bit of a leg up at the moment.

RANA: Any signs of a Northern Powerhouse here still seem a long way off. In the meantime, the council itself has financial woes to deal with. They will soon have to start diverting money from services to invest more in dealing with Child Sexual - 23 -

RANA cont: Exploitation. With further big cuts looming and the local economy teetering on the brink, it’s hard to see how the funds will be available for victims to get the help they need.

SENIOR: We’ve just got to keep getting ourselves up, dusting ourselves down. It’s not easy for me getting up every day and dealing with all of this, but you have to keep going, you know. And I keep going for those that need me, helping them mend, because I might have dark days, but can you imagine how dark their days are?

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