Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill [HL]

Lord Bird Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 25th June 2021 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Bird]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, I would like you to imagine how you would approach a Government, any Government, who always say, when you speak to them—they have to say it, God bless them—that they take the future into account. I spoke recently to quite a number of MPs and members of the Government. As always, they said, “Actually, what we are doing is probably enough”. I come along with a Bill that is nicked—stolen from our Welsh colleagues and made slightly different—and I say, “Well, actually we have to do more with the future, because the future is always being postponed.”

This is the problem that I have. How do I get the Conservative Government to look seriously at the future, in the way that the Welsh are seriously looking at the future, at the same time as trying to keep them onside, befriending them, being nice to them, being kind and thoughtful and never, ever telling them off? We know that as soon as you tell a politician off, they close their ears, in the same way that I close my ears when people tell me off—I am no different from anybody else. So, I have a problem. I want this Bill to go through and to be about the future today. I do not want the future to be continuously put off.

In my journeys around the United Kingdom, I talk to MPs, to charities and to local authorities—I talk to everybody. I am a bit like the Queen Mother; I go around shaking hands. I do not open supermarkets—nobody has asked me to do that yet—but I am a busy little lad and I go around. On one occasion quite recently, I was with a new MP—someone who came in in 2019 somewhere in the north of England, with a strong political record and a complete commitment to the well-being of their constituents. This young lady said to me, “What is your Bill going to do for my constituent who comes up to me in absolute terror or with an absolute problem? What is your Bill going to do?” I said, “Nothing”, and she said, “Well, why would I support your Bill, why would I vote for your Bill?” I said, “Ah! What would have happened if your predecessor, or your pre-pre-predecessor, had addressed the problems in the first instance that your constituent has to face now?”

Many of the problems that people face in their constituencies, and I face in my life, did not come from the future; they came from the past. In a way, had we had a future generations Bill 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago, we might have hesitated before we did certain things. In fact, we could rename my Bill. It does not have to be the Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill; we could just call it the “Hindsight Bill”. Why do we not have a Minister for Hindsight? Very clever—somebody who can read the future or who can say, “Hang on, why are we always doing things that come back to bite us in the rear at some later stage?”

For instance, would we have charged our children to go to university? Would we have done that almost beautiful act of them and us-ism, increasing the divide between them and us? Many people I meet would love to go to university but are frightened because they do not have what the public school boys or grammar school boys have, or whoever it may be, whose mum and dad have got a bit of money put aside, maybe property and all that. Now, university is not everything, but the message was sent out, just after we rescued the banks, just after 2010, at the time of the coalition. Had there been a future generations Bill on the statute book then, maybe we would have said, “Hang on, what are you doing here? You are trying to solve an immediate problem, but you are being oppressed by the needs and demands of today and you are throwing tomorrow away.”

Would we, for instance, have closed down our mental health institutions in the mid-1980s? People like me, even before the Big Issue, were saying “Hang on, do you know what is going to happen? If you close the mental health institutions and have care in the community”—it looked as thin on the ground then as it does now—“you will have an enormous increase in people on the streets; the streets will fill up and the prisons will fill up.” If you go into a prison, you meet people who, 30 or 40 years ago, probably would have been in the mental institutions. That is a major problem. Being mentally ill now, you are worse off than in the days of the mid-19th century when the poet John Clare was locked up. He was first put in a private institution and then a public one.

You have people wandering around the streets. When the Big Issue started, we were inundated with Jesus Christs and Napoleons on the streets. We even had a few admirals as well, I assure you—I do not know whether they were admirals; they did not look like admirals, and they certainly did not look like Napoleon or Jesus Christ. I had people coming up to me and telling me that they were angels. That was probably about 50% of the people we were working with in 1991, because in 1987, I believe, the institutions were closed down.

With a future generations Bill, you would have something that I find missing in modern politics. When I came into the House of Lords—forgive me for saying this—I was chased hither and thither by Barons and Baronesses who said, “Look, there’s this problem, and this problem, and this problem. What will you do about this? What will you do about the homeless sleeping in stations?” All the time I was being pushed and pushed. I said, “Look, there are millions of people in this world obsessed with the crisis of now. They will continue to be obsessed with it, because the crisis of now never gets solved, because we do not think about the future.” I have come into the House of Lords to do nothing more than prevent poverty forming in the first instance, and not be controlled by worshipping again and again at the altar of the accomplished facts—that you have to do this. Of course, because we are always responding to emergencies, we think that that proves our humanity, but actually it does not. We cannot just keep responding to the emergencies; we must do much more.

I apologise, I realise that I have 10 minutes and I have only started. How are your Lordships? I hope that you had a nice Friday. I walked here. I walk everywhere; that is why I am so young and fit—and only 75. If you sit in the House and are not really a politician, you notice that we spend an enormous amount of time untangling legislation from former times. We are always undoing it. If you look at the facts, about 70% of the time of the House is spent unravelling the damage done by poverty—why have we never done this?—the damage done by lack of biodiversity and by industrialisation, and the damage done by closing down the mines, steelworks and heavy engineering jobs, largely up north, without putting anything in their place. Forty or 50 years later, we are still suffering the damage from the fact that we did not look at how the future would pan out when we did these things. The most graphic example was when I stood with many people who were mentally ill and brought them into the House of Commons 20 years ago. It was incredibly moving to be here and meet people who said, “I wish we had not done it.”

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

Before I call the next speaker, I remind all noble Lords that I clearly stated that all of us in this Chamber, when we are not speaking, should be wearing face masks. I ask noble Lords to respect the House and everybody else and to wear masks when not speaking. I call the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I thank noble Lords for getting behind this debate. It has been very interesting; I have learned an awful lot. I learned that I am anti-democratic in nature from my good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. I remind him that those railways that were built ran into the sand in 1936, when Stanley Baldwin had to rescue them and nationalise the railways, the first big industry that was nationalised. I am also really glad that the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, brought in Lenin, because I can now remind the House that Lenin said—appositely, in my opinion:

“The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them”.


There is an element—is there not?—that if we rely on the market in the way that things go, we will move inexorably towards a much worse world, in which we fail 37% of our children at school and fail when it comes to biodiversity. Our consciousness of the environment over the past 50 years has increased enormously, yet 50% of all the damage ever done has been done in the past 50 years. It took us thousands of years, up to 1970, to do half the damage. In spite of our having committed Governments, reports and thousands of organisations created to look at saving the world for our children, we still have a situation where things are getting worse for our children and the quality of life they lead. A lot of them, including my own children, are led by the domination of their digital separation from each other. There are all sorts of problems like that, and I do not think we can leave it simply to a Government—any Government—to put on a kind of patina, a surface of future.

I have spoken to Ministers and I can tell noble Lords that they nearly always say, “We take the future into account”, and I say, “I’m sorry, I don’t believe you’re really embracing the needs of today”. What is happening with the people I work with, the homeless? I am sorry to return again to something I keep bringing up in this House, but we are facing one of the biggest crises of homelessness we have ever seen. Some 800,000 people are facing eviction because they are behind on their rent and 200,000 children are sofa surfing. That was not the case 30 years ago, when I started the Big Issue. Things got better, and then they got worse. Maybe we are going to leave it to cycles.

I just want to say that I think there is an urgency. I wanted this brought forward with urgency. What my organisation will be doing, and what I will be doing as an individual, is going around the country and stirring the people up, so that we have extra-parliamentary arguments as well as parliamentary arguments, because it is not working. When I go up north, I see the damage that was done because we did not replace the industries we destroyed. Then I look at the mental health situation. I am no defender of mental asylums—I have been to many of them, with members of my family and people I have worked with, and I would never defend them—but it is indefensible to close something and provide nothing to replace it. We did that in the north, we did that in the Midlands, we did that with the coal mines and we did it to our mentally ill. I am sorry to say that we have done it to our children. If a child today presents with mental problems at school, they may wait three, six or nine months to be handled, because there is no real provision for children with mental health problems.

I am also a very badly beaten child; that subject was returned to. I have spent the whole of my life struggling with the problems of what happened to me as a child. I meet ever more children who are going through that now, and that is what I want to avoid. I beg to move.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.