When Robert Jenrick complained that he “didn’t see a white face” in Handsworth, he revealed more about his own worldview than about the community he was criticising. His words betrayed a common political simplification: treating all Black and brown people as one homogeneous mass. But the reality of Handsworth, like so many places across Britain, is far more complex, layered, and beautifully diverse.
Handsworth: A Community of Many Stories
The data tell a different story. Handsworth’s population, for example, includes residents from Bangladeshi, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, African, Caribbean, and mixed ethnic backgrounds, all living side by side. White residents are still the fourth largest ethnic group, hardly “absent” as Jenrick implies. But beyond these numbers, what really defines Handsworth is its mosaic of cultures, religions, and histories.
If we look at ethnicity and religion together, rather than in isolation, we see not division but diversity in action; people of different faiths and heritages sharing the same schools, markets, and community spaces. That’s the true picture of integration.
The Real Issue: Inequality and Opportunity
When conversations about integration focus solely on race, they miss two crucial dimensions: age and employment.
Many residents in areas like Handsworth are young and of working age, yet face disproportionately high barriers to employment. The jobs market remains scarred by systemic racism, where CVs with “ethnic” names are still less likely to be shortlisted.
This isn’t about a failure to integrate, it’s about being trapped by inequality. With greater opportunities, fair employment practices, and affordable housing options, many people would have the freedom to move and settle where they choose. Integration doesn’t fail because people of colour “stick together”; it fails because structural barriers keep them in place.
A National Reality Check
Here’s the irony: the least diverse places in Britain are also the least integrated.
There are vast parts of the country that are more than 95% white. Some of the wealthiest areas, particularly in the Southeast, remain overwhelmingly monocultural. Yet it’s communities like Handsworth that are expected to prove their “integration credentials”.
Britain is, in fact, becoming more culturally and ethnically mixed. Census data show steady growth in mixed-ethnicity households and communities across the country. The areas with the fastest growth in diversity are not the wealthiest postcodes, but the middle towns and cities, places that are neither rich nor particularly poor, but where new connections are constantly being made.
The Housing Truth
Integration doesn’t happen by accident, it’s shaped by housing policy.
When the first generations of Black Caribbean and South Asian families arrived in the UK, they were often restricted to the poorest inner-city areas.
White flight followed, as white families moved out, often supported by better access to mortgages and suburban housing. The result wasn’t self-segregation, but state-structured inequality.
If we truly want better integration, we need to tackle housing inequality head-on.
Building mass affordable housing in Britain’s whitest areas would create opportunities for genuine social mixing.
The more affordable and accessible those homes are, the more we dismantle the barriers of income and racial inequality that keep our communities apart.
So, Mr Jenrick, There’s Your Answer
Integration is not about counting faces. It’s about creating fairness in housing, in employment, in education, and in how we speak about one another.
Communities like Handsworth are not a problem to be solved; they are the living proof of what integration looks like when people are given the chance to belong.