Achieving community cohesion is the most vital challenge facing Bradford. Get the many and varied communities talking to each other and all pulling in the same direction, and the prosperous future that so many people are working towards will be much easier to achieve.

If they remain suspicious and resentful of each other, though, it will be very difficult for the dreams of recovery to be turned into reality. That much is acknowledged in the community cohesion plan which was launched following Lord Ouseley's report into Bradford's situation 18 months ago.

The district's fate rests on the willingness of every one of us to regard ourselves as Bradfordians and to respect our fellow citizens whatever their cultural background.

Some progress has been made towards achieving that thanks to work going on among those communities which are well established here. Unfortunately the situation has been complicated by the number of asylum seekers who have arrived here in the last two years - 3,500 of them from countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, the Congo, Czech Republic, Poland and Somalia, sent here by the National Asylum Support Service.

There is little chance of many of these people returning to their own countries so the Council is right to be discussing their needs and ways in which they can be assimilated into the wider community. Bradford must absorb them, as it has traditionally welcomed and absorbed people from other parts of the world.

The Government, however, needs to be very careful that the influx is properly controlled to avoid placing the kind of pressures on our already stretched community which could damage our ambitions of a harmonious future.