Looking back to the summer of 2024 with Vicki Miller of CCHA
Looking back to the summer of 2024
It’s hard to believe that just a few months ago we were seeing daily news reports on hate related riots happening across the UK, thinking back to August, like everyone across the UK all of us at CCHA were shocked to hear of the tragic incident in Southport and the attack on children at a holiday dance camp.
As a landlord within a City that is proud of its heritage, we work within diverse parts of Cardiff such as Butetown (one of the most diverse places in Wales). We have been working on our staff makeup to reflect that of the communities in which we serve. We have made some good progress; our team is currently 21% from an ethnically diverse background and we are proud that we can offer a service to customers in community languages to those residents that need it.
We strongly believe that diversity is our strength and makes us a better organisation, landlord and employer. We have invested in projects that help us to meet this goal such as Pathway to Board to increase diversity in Boards across Wales in partnership with other local Housing Associations and Get into Housing which offers paid placements to ethnically diverse candidates looking to work in Housing, again with the Housing Association partners that contribute financially and with amazing placements for the candidates.
So, when did we first realise we needed to do something about what we were seeing as riots started across the UK?
It’s fair to say that there were conversations within the workplace about what was going on. We were shocked and appalled at the violence and hate that we were seeing online and on the news. Thankfully some of our people opened up and told their manager quite early on, how fearful they were about the online hate they were seeing. This concern was escalated to our Director of People & Places, Liz Evans.
The next morning the concern was discussed with our Senior Leadership team, who all agreed we needed to do something. But what could we do? It was great to see open and honest conversations between our leadership team about the impact the attack had on them individually and the concern about the impact on those that were Muslim and some reflection from members about if the message would seem right coming from them, as White individuals. We all agreed though that it was not a time for us to be a bystander and we should stand up and show support for our Muslim colleagues and communities.
So what did we do?
We first sent an email to all our people from our leadership team- letting them know we were here to support them and explaining what was available if they needed anything. Our Heads of Service made sure that they reached out and spoke to our colleagues who were ethnically diverse and understood how they were feeling. This helped us to understand what support we could offer that may be useful. I found it really upsetting listening to people that I care about telling me how hurt they were that they were not really welcome in the UK even though they had been born here or that they were keeping their teenage kids at home instead of letting them go out to the parks with their friends or on day trips. I also held a session with our Neighbourhood Managers about what they could do if our tenants reported hate crime to them. It was sad to hear that due to the prevalence of racism being seen online and reported in the press the team discussed how they felt less confident to challenge these views for a fear of repurcussions.
It was important for us to make sure that we shared accurate information with our people about what was going on locally. I was fortunate to be able to speak with Nick Olsen who is the Regional Community Cohesion Coordinator for Cardiff Council, working with South Wales Police and partners to understand what is happening locally in relation to extremism and how we can bring communities together. Nick invited me to join a regular meeting of local partners that met to discuss hate crime, extremism and cohesion. From this group I was able to make sure that if there were any risks we could let our people know, but that we could also challenge some of the fake reports of riots that were rumored to be taking place.
Overseen by Liz Evans, we quickly formed a group of staff to oversee our response, this covered areas such as :
-Support for staff -what support was available?
– Risk assessment of our Community Centres
– A communications plan
– Support for communities
– Update on local intelligence
– Plan for action in case of unrest in our communities (of things within our control)
What were we able to offer for our people at CCHA?
We let our people know that we would take an individualised approach to support, including:
- Encouraging colleagues to speak with their line manager or the People team if they were concerned for their safety, experiencing racism, or struggling with their mental health
- Offering flexibility around childcare during the summer holidays
- Reminding colleagues to wear their people safe device, or providing one to anyone who didn’t currently have a people safe device
- Signposting to support available through our Employee Assistance Scheme
- Reminding colleagues that they could speak with our mental health and wellbeing champions internally
- Signposting to the staff abuse policy
- Signposting to counselling and coaching support available through Race Council Cymru
- Doing a risk assessment and safety plan for safe working if colleagues felt unsafe or we become aware of risks in the community
We encouraged all our people to call out any racist abuse that they saw or heard and report any concerning behaviour to a line manager or the neighbourhood safety team.
What about our tenants and communities?
It was key to us at CCHA, that we were there to support our tenants and communities who may be affected by the racist and Islamophobic attacks.
- We shared a message on social media, our digiboards and communal noticeboards encouraging tenants to report any incidents to the police.
- We also made it clear that we would not tolerate incidents of hate or racism, and we would work with the police to act against any CCHA tenants who were found guilty of participating in any hate related activity.
- We spoke to community groups (e.g. Tiger Bay Boxing Club, Love Yourself group, pantry’s, mosques etc) about how they felt we could support and how best to communicate to reach our tenants
- Through word of mouth – we asked if our people who were visiting a tenant or family who may be Muslim to ask if they were ok and let them know that CCHA were here to support.
- We checked any community activities and events that were planned were safe to continue
Our CEO Brian Pickett led our fortnightly team meeting on 8th August to speak out about the hate we saw across the UK and to make sure our people knew the support that was available. We used this as an opportunity to remind our teams what hate crime was and what we could do as an organisation about hate crime.
Communication was key
Keeping in touch during this time was key. We are fortunate at CCHA to have a great communications team to support us. They were instrumental in helping us to get the right messages out by facilitating internal discussions between frontline teams, and staff from diverse backgrounds. It was crucial that we listened to our colleagues who were being impacted and involved them in crafting our statements. Communications experience could not replace lived experience in this situation. We made sure that we shared our message with our partners to try and ensure some consistency for any ‘Get into Housing’ placements who were being hosted at other organisations at the time.
The change in feeling
Thankfully seemingly as quickly as they had started the riots stopped, as more and more anti racist protestors stood up to the planned events and we started to see those involved in violent disorder arrested. Luckily, we didn’t see any local disturbances in Wales.
Our events that we had planned for the end of the summer for Adamsdown and Splott were able to go ahead and on 25th August, we opened our community centre on Bute Street for the community to use for the Butetown Carnival, celebrating the rich culture of the area with music, dance and costumes.
We have reflected on our approach, did we come out and post our external message quickly enough? Should we have picked up on how our people were feeling before they raised this? I think we would say yes to both of these. It’s not something that most of us have experienced before and there is learning for us all about what we would do differently in the future.
As an organisation we have removed our ‘X’ account. It wasn’t a method of communication that our customers used and given the level of hate we were seeing it no longer aligned with our organisational values.
What we do know is that between 30th July and 7th August 2024, an estimated 29 anti-immigration demonstrations and riots took place across 27 towns and cities in the UK. Many of these were violent. By 2nd September 2024, 570 people had been brought before the courts in response to their involvement.
For our colleagues and communities, it is clear that there is more we need to do to build cohesive communities and to understand the underlying issues affecting them. We need to keep talking about racism and Islamophobia as whilst the riots may have stopped, the negative views held by a proportion of the population have been made clear. Members of a generation of Britons from minority communities will have traumatic memories of what they experienced in 2024 that won’t be easily forgotten.