Lord Roe of West Wickham (Lab)

My Lords, I would like to ask my noble friend the Minister a practical question, but first I must commend the actions of my former colleagues in tackling this terrible incident—this vile attack on the Jewish community in London—because they faced great danger and difficulty in doing so; having spoken to them, I am sure of that. My question is focused on, and builds on, the question from the right reverend Prelate: what is the Home Office doing in combination with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government in interfaith work? My experience in these matters is that after events escalated in the Middle East, in the London Fire Brigade and in the Metropolitan Police we saw an extraordinary rise in physical attacks on both the Jewish and Muslim communities, almost in parallel. Our view as professionals in the security and safety space was that more work needed to be done to generate co-operation and mutual understanding and to counter some of the vile politics, antisemitism and Islamophobia that we were seeing played out in the most awful way in physical attacks on the streets. What are we doing in the interfaith space to support local community groups, which very often do great work but not always with the resources they need?