Budget Statement

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 16th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Moyo. I heard her speech and was very impressed, not least by her call for 3% growth in GDP over the coming years—I think she said by 2026. I have a way in which we can achieve that, but you could not achieve it as an economist; you would have to achieve it another way, which I am here to suggest.

About 10 years ago, I wrote a book called The Necessity of Poverty. It was a very simple book that looked at how important poverty has been in the life of the economy. When Chancellors talk about money and the economics of the country, I think to myself: why are they looking at the world in an arsy-versy way? “Arsy-versy” is a polite printing term for when you print something upside down. The Government are arsy-versy because they do not look at the glaring elephant in the room—in fact, I would say it is more than just an elephant; it is an elephant along with its mum, dad and children—and that is poverty.

Here is the thing about poverty. The Government have in the region of £1 trillion a year to spend; with borrowing, I think it is about £1.2 trillion. If you analyse that and look at how much money is spent on pushing the ball of poverty around, you find that the figure is 40%. So you have a Government, a Prime Minister and a Chancellor of the Exchequer all obsessed with avoiding the fact that the largest amount of money spent by government is on the collateral damage done by poverty. That is extraordinary to me.

Why is there not an economics of poverty? Why are we looking at poverty as though it is something that we just have to put up with? Why are we making as many concessions as possible to keep the poor as comfortable as possible without actually getting them out of poverty? I think that what we need is smaller government. We really need small government; there are too many people in this world who are obsessed with big government. I think we need to cut government. And how are we going to cut government? We need to cut the costs of the NHS by half. We have to do it, and we have to do it as soon as possible. So how are we going to do that—how are we going to get the 3%? I will tell you how: we are going to be bright and clever, and look at the fact that 50% of the cost of the NHS is spent on trying to keep the poor as well as possible. So, actually, if you were to grow up, and if we were to move away from the very primitive look at the economy as though the biggest part of it were not poverty, what we would do is make heavy investments in getting people out of poverty. And we are not doing it.

We spend in the region of £50 billion a year on our education system, but we know that our education system is loaded down with the problems caused by poverty. We know that the four or five children in a class who are having all sorts of problems at home, who are not getting the correct food, and whose parents are under all sorts of duress, will cost maybe 70% or 80% of the time spent by the teachers, so the educational quality of other people is hampered. I know this because I was one of them. I was actually a part of the avant-garde; I was banned from school at the age of 14. I cost an enormous amount of money. Actually, when I was put away as a wrongdoing poverty boy at the age of 14 and 15 and 16, I was costing about three times what it cost to put somebody through Eton. The poshest among us had nothing on me; in fact, you could not get into my school or my reformatory unless you did something wrong.

So we have this really weird world. I do not understand where the Government are coming from, because if you were really to do something, you would do something sensible about reducing that and slashing the NHS. Let us slash the cost to the NHS. Let us remove much of the cost of the NHS, by keeping people healthy and by, when you bring them into this world, supporting them and giving them the priority—the Rolls-Royce service—at that stage. Because if you do not, you will be paying Rolls-Royce prices until they die.

Last weekend, I was down in Canvey Island. My eldest brother is 80, he is unwell, and he costs thousands of pounds a year in his health bills. Because he is unwell, he has always lived in poverty and his children have always lived in poverty, because nobody made the investment in him at the beginning. He is in crisis, and all the people around him are in crisis. I was fortunate, as I said, because every time I got nicked, they taught me something—as I have told this House many times.

I do not want to go on too much, but I want to say another thing. We have the crisis of poverty, and we will until the Government and economists grow up and realise that they are getting rid of the largest amount of their money on poverty—40%. Unless we have that change, whether it is this Government or the next Government on the other side, and unless we have a real growing up, we are not going anywhere. All we will be doing is kicking the can of poverty down the road. We will not be making inroads or accepting the fact that, whatever has been done, it has not actually worked.

I now want to talk about the fact that what really worries me about this Government—and maybe the next Government and the last Government—is the problem that we are in now, which will go on for the next five years in some form or another. That is the problem of the terrible emergency that we are in. I can tell your Lordships that 140,000 children and their parents are in temporary housing, in transitional homes such as hostels. Do you know what that is going to do to them? I bet you a pound to a penny that at least a third of them will have all sorts of problems to do with mental well-being. I can tell your Lordships that, when they enter the workforce, those children will have been so atomised by the experience of being homeless that it will affect their ability to operate in the marketplace, to get the kind of jobs that are necessary—the jobs that will produce the 3%.

At the moment we are not addressing ourselves to the emergency but doing a bit here and a bit there and not even waking up in the morning and saying, “What are we going to do about stopping circa 300,000 families falling into poverty?” They are falling because they have been evicted as they could not pay their rent—they lost their jobs and all those sorts of things. I am absolutely frightened of the fact that, because of that, I am going to wake up in a year’s time and 50,000 people will be wanting to sell the Big Issue. At the moment our sales have gone up. Why? Because there are more people who need to sell the Big Issue. They are not homeless but, if we do not work with them, they will become homeless. Our figures went up last year by 10%. We do not know where it is going to go this year. Will it be 15% or 20%? We cannot handle that number of people. We work with about 7,000 to 9,000 people a year.

I am saying that we are in an emergency. I suggest to the Government that they bring that emergency forward, because it will echo down the next 10, 20 or 30 years and we will have the decimation and destruction of people who will be caught in poverty and will not be able to respond to the opportunities that come. I suggest that we need a COBRA. We need what we tried to do during Covid; you wake up in the morning and you get all the Ministers together and all the departments working together and—God bless them all—they get somewhere in the end. We need an emergency COBRA to address the fact that we do not want to condemn the next generation and the bit of the generation that is moving on and push them into poverty. That is the costliest thing to do—the Government will never get their 3% then, because their costs will be up and it will be 50%, but the money will be taken by the problems of poverty.

I am sorry—I am going on a bit. Normally I try to be economical. There are a couple of really wise things. Can we ask the Government to stop no-fault evictions? That would be a useful thing as it would stop hundreds of people falling into homelessness because they have been evicted by their landlord. Can we also look at why we cannot give universal credit so that it matches the requirements of the crisis that people are in at the moment, which is the crisis of inflation? Can it not match that? Otherwise, people will not pay their rent because they will use the money elsewhere, and they will fall further into poverty and be evicted.

The other thing I would like to do is to liberate our local authorities to be able to pay the rent and for central government to give local authorities enough money so that it is the rent that is expected and there is no gap, because if there is a gap between the money that the Government give and the rent, people will be thrown out on the street. Anyway, those are my arguments. Thank you very much and God bless you all.