NHS (Charitable Trusts Etc) Bill

Lord Bird Excerpts

Friday 26th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, I know it is normal to declare an interest, but I have to declare an ignorance: I am not too hot on charitable trusts around hospitals. But I am hot on some things.

In 1991, I started a project called the Big Issue. The reason I started it was that the provision from government, and from charities, was completely and utterly lacking in one area, which I will refer to later. I support this Bill which gives trustees their head, the belief that they can make changes and the opportunity to spend money wisely. The very idea of a Minister of State overseeing charity trusts is a situation that I would want to end. I would like to use the opportunity of my maiden speech to get behind freeing up charities and encouraging them. But, as the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, said, charities themselves need to go through some pretty thorough work. When we started the Big Issue, we ran into enormous problems with virtually all the charities that acted in and around homelessness.

I am also interested in the subject because, even though I have never used Great Ormond Street Hospital, I am from west London, where Paddington Green kids’ hospital was where we went when we harmed ourselves. Unfortunately, it is with us no more. But I was born around the back of where JM Barrie wrote “Peter Pan”—I am a Notting Hill-Bayswater boy, and the swings that the Llewelyn Davies children played on in the early part of the last century are the same swings I was playing on just after the Second World War.

I should give the House an introduction to who I am. Thank God I am in the House; I am really pleased, and I think noble Lords will become aware of that. I would like to thank my probation officer. When I was 10, my probation officer stood beside me and, instead of chastising me as a post-war statistic, encouraged me to read and to write, even though it took me many years to master those arts, and encouraged me to look upon myself as not simply an underclass boy who, at the age of 10, had already been banged up for a few things, put on probation and fined. They were silly little things for which, today, they slap a child’s hand and say, “Don’t do that”. But in the good old days after the Second World War and in the 1950s, they trod on you hard.

I would also like to thank a wonderful woman, Baroness Wootton. Baroness Wootton was a marvellous woman who, when I was 10, put me on probation; when I was 12, made me a ward of court; when I was 13, put me in a remand home; when I was 14, sent me for a short, sharp shock; when I was 15, took me from a boys’ prison and put me back into a reformatory so that I could learn to read and write. Baroness Wootton is very important to this House: in 1958, she became one of only four women who were allowed to sit in this House and broke the male domination of the House—we should be thankful for that. I would love to think that, if she were alive today, Baroness Wootton—who would be now 118—would come running over to me and give me the biggest hug of my life.

I want to pause for a moment and go back to the Big Issue. When we started the Big Issue, I was rather aggressively anti-charity because I saw a situation where there were 501 organisations in London alone working with the homeless. They supplied you with everything from auricular acupuncture to a place to wash your undies and a shoulder to cry on, but one thing they did not give poor people was the opportunity of making money. One of the reasons they did not give them the opportunity to make money is that the laws around charities meant that you could give all sorts of things but you could not give opportunity in the form of work.

I was born in the slums of post-war London, brought up a Catholic racist—I am not having a go at the Catholics. I was brought up to hate black people, Jewish people and even English people, because we were London-Irish. I was brought up with all that poison. I was sent to all sorts of institutions, I slept rough and I stole. Someone asked me how I got into the House of Lords, and I said, “By lying, cheating and stealing”, because if I had not gone through that terrible self-defeat, I would never have been able to get out and learn to read and write in a boys’ prison at the age of 16.

Then I had a period of being a Marxist-Engelist-Leninist-Trotskyist—I would not recommend that to anybody—which lasted a considerable time. I tried becoming a working-class Tory, but that did not work very well. I tried everything. But eventually, I realised that I had got out of poverty. I had got into the middle classes, and the most exciting thing about being in the middle classes, which sounds remarkably rude, was how clean their beds were, the fact that they had clean underwear and that they were nice to each other. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be good if I could get some of the people I grew up with and who I knew and morph them into the middle class”, but how could I do that? I could not do it politically. There was no party that could get the underclass out of the grief—the long-term unemployed, the drug users and the drunks whom I knew. There was no conceivable way.

When I was 21, I had the misfortune—and the fortune—to be hiding from the police in Edinburgh of all places. I was begging, and I can tell noble Lords that it was not a very good place to beg—that is no reference at all to our Scottish colleagues. I met a very large-nosed Scotsman called Gordon Roddick, who had no money. We became friends. Then he met a young lady called Anita. They got married and they started the Body Shop. I did not see them for 20 years, but 20 years later I saw them on the telly. My son Paddy was with me and I said to him, “I know that big-nosed bugger”—excuse my French. I got hold of him and we became friends again and he said to me, “Are you one of those persons who crawls out of the woodwork when someone becomes incredibly successful?”. And I said, “Yes”. He said, “Well I know where you’re coming from”.

In 1990, Gordon Roddick was walking through New York and a very large man whom he described as looking like a wardrobe came towards him. Gordon blessed himself and thought, “This is it”. The bloke said, “Excuse me Buddy. Would you like to buy a copy of a street paper?”. Gordon said, “Yes, how much is it?” He said, “It’s $1”. Gordon said, “That’s brilliant. I’ll buy it. How does it work?” .The bloke said, “I buy it for 50 cents and sell it for a dollar”. Gordon said, “Why are you doing this?” The bloke said, “Well, I’ve been in and out of prison and I come from Brownsville”. That is where Mike Tyson comes from and you do not get out of Brownsville without being a sportsman or having a criminal record. That was how predictable the failure rate was for that particular part of New York.

The bloke said, “I’ve got a drug habit. If I go back to where I come from, I’ll be banged up again and they will throw the key away”. So Gordon said, “This is brilliant. What you’re doing is working and poisoning yourself, but you’re not harming anybody else”. The guy said, “Yes. I don’t rob old ladies to feed my habit. I’m like everyone in Manhattan who works in the finance industry. If they want some drugs, they just ring up their dealers”, which is brilliant. So Gordon came back here and tried that. He got the Body Shop Foundation to do a feasibility study, and every one of the homeless organisations said exactly the same thing: “What do you want to give money to homeless people for? They will only drink it all, shove it up their noses or stick it in their arms”. That was that.

Gordon came to me in the early part of 1991 and he said, “Why don’t you do this free paper? First of all, you have been homeless. Secondly, you’re a printer and you know about magazines and, thirdly, you are a cheeky sort of chappie and a great beggar and ponce”—which is a subdivision of begging. He said, “Also, you do not have one sentimental bone in your body for the poor”, and I do not have one sentimental bone in my body for the poor. I look upon the poor as people who should use poverty as opportunity, which it was intended for. There is nothing wrong with poverty so long as you can get out of it. You will be stronger and fitter and better. You do not want all this always stopping you and impeding you from getting out of poverty. You only have to scrape the surface and the patina of most people in Britain today and go back a few generations to see someone who burnt the candle at both ends so that they could get out of the grief, and they passed that on to their children. That is what we need to replicate and duplicate.

We started the Big Issue and we ran into all the problems. We stood up and we said, “Look, what we want to do more than anything is give people the opportunity to make their own money”—a hand-up, not a hand-out. Later on, we started a charity and we melded those together. We helped them to get ready to become capable of finding the means to help themselves. But many people could not get to self-help, so we held their hands, and we keep on holding them.

My wife is now telling me to wind up, so I should listen—I guess that must be the only reason for that sign. I will wind up. But I end on one point. The simple fact is this. We need to prevent people from falling down, but once they fall down, we have to have the means of getting them up as quickly as possible. The Big Issue has invested in 320 businesses—social businesses around Britain and charities—to prevent the next generation of Big Issue vendors and the next generation who are using drugs and falling through the net filling up our prisons and our A&E units. I thank noble Lords for their patience.

I was going to go on for another hour and a half, a bit like Ken Dodd, but I will not. Thank you and God bless you all.

[Noble Lords]

Follow that!

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, I know why noble Lords are all laughing. I have to follow that. Many a bigger man than me would have found that difficult. It is a privilege to follow my noble friend Lord Bird, and I thank him on behalf of the House for his remarkable, moving, humorous and rather unusual maiden speech.

[Lord Bird]

You chose me.

[Lord Patel]

It will go down in the records of maiden speeches. I do not know what words will be used—astounding, eccentric, and I hope not to be repeated. My noble friend has educated noble Lords in words they have not heard for many a decade; they will have to go and look them up in the dictionary. My noble friend is also a truly remarkable person. Today really is a Big Issue day.

My noble friend’s personal story is, as he described, also remarkable. If I can encapsulate it in one sentence, I would say that it is poverty to purpose.

[Lord Bird]

You have stolen my line.

[Lord Patel]

Brought up in a slum, raised as an orphan, illiterate to start with and sleeping rough, my noble friend Lord Bird went to jail several times. But he has inspired millions. He is a trailblazer. He is a social entrepreneur. He has a mission to provide a hand up to thousands of people who are too often forgotten by society.

My noble friend was awarded an MBE in 1995 for services to homeless people and he is a doctor, holding an honorary doctorate from Plymouth Business School at the University of Plymouth. He also tried to stand as Mayor of London—there is a vacancy coming up. Then, as he told us, in 2010 he was asked what his guilty secret was. He said, “I am really a working-class Tory”. He also said that he would actually like to be a Liberal because they are nice people, but that that would be too much like hard work. I cannot repeat what he said about being a socialist. Noble Lords will have to look it up because the language he used cannot be repeated here.

He was also asked whether he has any ambitions, to which he replied that he would like to write a book; I hope that that is correct. The book was to be a different version, or a replacement, of Fifty Shades of Grey. I do not know how many here have read the book; it is an education in itself. Noble Lords might not be surprised to learn that the title is Why Drawing Naked Women is Good for the Soul. I have given the noble Lord a plug for his book because I am sure that the sales will now go up by millions.

I welcome my noble friend Lord Bird to this House. We look forward to many contributions from him. They are obviously going to be challenging, colourful and, dare I say it, enjoyable.

I now move on to my contribution to the NHS (Charitable Trusts Etc) Bill. Before I do so, I hope that the whole House will join in me congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, not because she is introducing this Bill but because today is her and her husband Les’s 50th wedding anniversary—I have let the secret out, Doreen, and I offer my congratulations.