Tackling Intergenerational Unfairness (Select Committee Report)

Lord Bird Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I would very much like to begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Hain, for promoting the Bill that I have going through the Lords; it is going through the Commons under Caroline Lucas. I thank the noble Lord very much—that saves me having to talk about it.

Why are we here? Where are we? Why are we talking about unfairness? This is an historical issue. One of the big problems that we have is the fact that we are a low-wage economy. We were one for most of the 20th century. If you go back to the 19th century, you will see that it was much easier for investors to invest in services and industry. It did not involve an awful lot of risk. As a low-wage economy, one thing is that, when there are a lot of low-wage jobs around, you can mop everybody up and everybody can be given something to do.

Unfortunately, in 1944 the Butler Education Act was enacted. It left about 35% of our children without schooling. Therefore, even today, we fail about 35% of our children at school and, because of that, dealing with them takes up to 70% of the time of both Houses of Parliament and local authorities. These social echoes are created because of the fact that there are people who have not been educated and have low wages. They are the working poor; they are the long-term unemployed; they are the people who use A&E departments. Unfortunately, as in my case, they fill up our prisons and institutions too. If you actually look at the low-wage economy, that is what is behind everything that we are talking about today.

Living in a low-wage economy, how does somebody create some wealth? Is it by saving their pennies and all sorts of things like that? How do people find their way out of a low-wage job so that they can move on? The way to do that is buying property. So we have the crown jewels. In Great Britain, they are the fact that you get on the housing ladder. That is virtually the only way that most ordinary people—people who want to move up socially—can get anywhere in life. Until we break that situation, we are not going anywhere. When 79% of the investments and concerns of our high street banks are to do with buying and selling property, you have 21% going on the development of businesses and investment in new businesses. Compare this with Germany, where 20% of banks’ time and investment is spent on the buying and selling of property, and 80% is spent on businesses and the creation of a high-wage economy. Germany has the opportunity to morph people out of poverty because it is a high-wage economy.

We must look at the fact that we in Great Britain have a very difficult investment history going back to the time of the Empire. We must start to make these big changes—that is, as in Germany, the Government becoming the big investors in new industries and technology so that we can morph people out of poverty and move them on. We have to move away from the fact that the only way you can become middle-class, socially mobile or prosperous in Britain is through buying and selling property.

The unfortunate thing is that, as well as creating a low-wage economy, you therefore have low-wage health, as we have realised in the Covid situation. What actually happened is this: our hospitals were 85% full before we even got into Covid. If you analyse those people who were in hospital, a lot of them were quite old and had passed through poverty. A lot of them had nutritional issues; 50% of people in our hospitals have nutritional issues because they have only been able to afford to eat stuff that is next to rubbish.

In my opinion, until we face up to these things—until the Government stop and have an audit of what is going well and going wrong—we will always be going round and asking “Is it this? Is it that?” The biggest thing that we can do at the moment is keeping our young people in their homes so that they have a future. Do not evict them; that is the big pressing issue. We must not prepare the children of tomorrow for the evictions and homelessness that could come at this particular time.