Set target for everyone in UK to speak English, ministers told

MINISTERS should set a target for everyone in the UK to speak English, the former integration tsar has said.

Dame Louise Casey called for a ‘significant boost’ in help for migrants to speak English to help heal social rifts.

She was commissioned by the then prime minister David Cameron to produce a report on integration and divided communities. This week ministers are expected to publish a long-delayed strategy likely to address many of the issues raised by her report.

Dame Louise demanded a ‘very, very progressive, proactive social integration strategy’ to help ‘heal Britain’.

‘I don’t care how we’ve got here, I don’t care who can’t speak English, I don’t care what’s going on, but what I do know is everybody of working age and of school age should be able to speak one language and I think the public would feel some relief,’ she told Radio 4’s Westminster Hour.

‘I would set a target that says by X date we want everybody in the country to be able to speak a common language.

‘Those are the sorts of big bold policies we need in order to try to heal some of the rifts across Britain.’

Dame Louise, who left government a year ago, also called on ministers to act more strongly against ‘Sharia law and other alternative religious or legal systems which cannot trump the legal system of the country’.

And she raised concerns about the position of Muslim women from Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds, and the ‘social and economic disadvantage’ affecting the white working class.