Inequality

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 3rd October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, I was a nutritionist before I went into politics. Some people on low incomes might find the suggestion that their children were necessarily malnourished to be insulting—in fact, rich people may well be malnourished. Malnutrition and undernutrition are two different things. Malnutrition obviously correlates with inadequate diet, but not necessarily with poverty.

The 4 million figure to which the noble Lord refers is for the number of children living in low-income households, relative to the population as a whole. There is no evidence to suggest that there are 4 million children in food-insecure households. However, I accept his point about food banks. As he will know, the reasons for that are many and varied. I also accept that the initial rollout of UC led to some of the proliferation of food banks.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, is it possible to accept the fact that we would be able to ride a coach and horses through those figures over the next five or 10 years if we did something about the 35% of children who we fail at school? Let us put education first. When you look at that 35%, they are the people who have all the cheap jobs and are the long-term unemployed, as well as filling up our A&Es.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I could not agree more with the noble Lord that education is absolutely key to good nutritional status and prospects for employment in future life.

Sustainable Development Goals

Lord Bird Excerpts

Wednesday 10th July 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I welcome the opportunity to talk in this debate, but I am sorry to say that I come as a sheep in wolf’s clothing. I am very much here to promote the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015. I have been itching to mention my interest in this Act at every opportunity.

I am very pleased to see in the voluntary national review of progress towards the sustainable development goals published by the Government that the Welsh Act,

“provides a robust legal framework for policy coherence on sustainable development”.

The report says this on 15 occasions about the Act. I would like to see it become available to the rest of the United Kingdom. I am very pleased that the Government recognised on 15 occasions in the report that the Welsh are doing something very clever in bringing together the ideas on the environment, education, and the fight against poverty and for social justice. Next year, after its fifth year, we will see how well it has done. The proof of the pudding is still in the eating.

I am inspired to promote much of the work that Wales has done. There are 17 sustainable goals—we all know them—but we could get rid of 16 of them immediately. We could throw them away because we really need only one. Goal 1 is poverty, and would it not be wonderful if we got rid of poverty, because we would be getting rid of poverty of spirit, poverty of mind, poverty of delivery and poverty itself? We do not need the other 16, because they are variations on the fact that we have not put our time and effort into getting rid of poverty.

We have not dismantled poverty. Much of the work that is done in and around poverty is a kind of handholding. It is about getting people through the day, the week, the month and the year: it is not about dismantling poverty. Eighty per cent of all the social intervention money spent in the world is spent in and around emergencies and coping, and very little in prevention and cure.

I look at this issue differently. I would like us to kick a hole in poverty because, by doing that, we could take on all the questions that have come about because of the poverty of spirit that dominates many of our political debates and the other things that we do. I keep saying—I will say it until the day I leave this place—that this House and the other place spend about 70% of our time on the problems that are thrown up by poverty. We fail 33% of our children at school and 30% of many other areas in the world. About a third of the world’s population have problems in and around poverty, which leads to despoliation.

In the poorest countries people are living in trash. I have worked in Africa, India and the Far East and have seen the relationship between poverty and the poverty of spirit. If you are in poverty, you can never lift your eyes above the horizon. You are like a meerkat, waking up every day, looking around and saying, “How can I feed my children? What do I do? Do I have to prostitute myself? I’ll have to do anything”. If we want to achieve these 17 goals, let us put more effort into dismantling poverty rather than just making the poor comfortable and putting it off until another time.

I started with Wales—trying to make the UK Welsh is my big thing—because I have never seen legislation that so uniquely covers all the considerations, especially around the SDGs, in a way that enables us to say at last that we can put behind us all the rather nasty, limited political debates we have had; all the short-termism that is dominant in this House and the other House and in many of our discussions, the handholding of the poor and not getting people out of poverty.

I will come forward again and again until I get a Bill through the House. I am pleased that the VNR report praises the work of a Future Generations Commission. I hope that the Government and the Opposition will take up this issue so that we can all look forward to the day when we can put aside all the stop-gapism, tokenism and box ticking and concentrate on destroying poverty. Poverty destroys lives. It makes us cheap and makes the lives of the poor the cheapest.

Retailers: Business Rates

Lord Bird Excerpts

Monday 8th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

My noble friend looked at this area when she was Commercial Secretary to the Treasury. As a result of that review in 2016, a number of changes were made that had a significant impact, such as doubling small business relief from 50% to 100% for those with a value less than £12,000, moving to more frequent revaluations, which were asked for, and moving the multiplier in inflation rates from the RPI to the CPI. All these things are making a difference. It is not that we cannot see the big problems on the high street at the moment, which is why the Chancellor announced his £1.6 billion package in the Budget of 2018.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Can we accept the fact that a bookshop on a high street has such an enormous social echo that it actually makes the high street a lot better? Can we start seeing our bookshops in a different way and not simply as traders in the marketplace?

[Lord Bates]

There is a social value there, and significant steps are being taken on the purely financial side—the retail discount and the small business rate relief apply to eligible bookshops—to protect that vital form of social and intellectual capital on our high streets.

National Insurance Contributions Holiday

Lord Bird Excerpts

Wednesday 27th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

We are running very hard on this agenda. I mentioned the 713,000 more people in work, and I would have thought that that would be welcomed on all sides of this House.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Is it possible to include people who are banged up at the moment? If we can actually get them into work when they get out of prison, as a disadvantaged group, the knock-on effects are enormous. People who have a job when they leave tend not to reoffend.

[Lord Bates]

That is absolutely right, and the noble Lord has done more than probably anyone else to improve the chances of people in those circumstances. That is one reason why we announced the rough sleepers initiative and why we have this new education network, which is being trialled with governors. But we cannot get away from the stark statistic that although care leavers represent only 1% of 19 to 21 year-olds, they represent 24% of the prison population. That has to be an area that we all focus on, on a cross-party basis.

Housing: Rent Payment History

Lord Bird Excerpts

Wednesday 31st October 2018 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Bird]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to ensure that where tenants share payment of rent their individual payment histories will be taken into account by credit service providers.

[The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Lord Bates) (Con)]

My Lords, the Government believe it is right that a history of paying rent should be recognised in tenants’ credit scores, including where tenants share payment of their rent. At the Autumn Budget in 2017 we announced the Rent Recognition Challenge, a £2 million competition seeking technological solutions to enable tenants to record and share their rental data.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that Answer. The real problem is not so much gathering the information—although it is very good that we are getting a move on towards doing that—but getting the credit service providers to use it. Are the Government doing anything in particular to make sure that all this information helps to put an end to the divide between the people who have a mortgage and can get a high credit rating and those who get a low credit rating simply because they are paying rent?

[Lord Bates]

First, I pay tribute to the work that the noble Lord has consistently done in raising this issue up the agenda. It is indeed something that the Government are taking seriously and they are working with the Financial Conduct Authority and the regulators to see how this can be done. The noble Lord will have noticed the welcome announcement last week that Experian intends to take into account rental contributions as part of credit scoring. That will make a significant difference along the lines that we want—that is, getting the major credit reference agencies to use this data in ensuring that lenders have an accurate reflection of an applicant’s ability to service a loan.

Poverty Premium

Lord Bird Excerpts

Monday 10th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, for the opportunity to talk about the poverty premium. It is a very important debate. I do not know if the noble Lord picked up the good news that Lloyds is not going to charge people for unplanned overdrafts or the announcement over the weekend that Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates have got together behind Fair by Design to support the wage stream so that, if you are working and have earned some money, you could draw it down at a flat rate on a number of occasions throughout the week. Therefore, in a sense, pay day never really arrives; it is when you need it.

Maybe there is a problem that, when you are the poorest of the poor, you find it very difficult to get the deals and the good food necessary to keep you and your children healthy. Instead, you end up with loads of stuff full of salt and sugar, badly put together, that in the end will affect your health and ability to function. Therefore, we know that these are really interesting developments.

My own Bill, the Creditworthiness Assessment Bill, which has passed on to the other place—I do not know if I am allowed to mention it—is a simple attempt at stopping people who need credit paying through the nose. It is all part of the poverty premium.

I come from the poverty premium. My mother, for instance, was a lovely Irish lady who if you gave her a pound, it burned a hole in her pocket and she would have to go out and spend it. She knew where all the bad deals were. She knew how to waste her money. She knew how to cry when we were dragged before the court. So I come from this kind of background and what I find very difficult is that, when people talk about the poor, I am sorry to say that they seem to talk about another species: “The poor will always be with us”. We are not in the Victorian period, where we were telling the poor off; we have gone the other way. We have embraced them. We love them. We actually really like them because they do good stuff for us. They make us feel good. They make us feel that, if we can do something for the poor, then there has been a good reason for us to pass through life. I do not really like that, nor do I like the old method. I would like to find a way that, instead of ducking and diving and bobbing and weaving, lets us recognise that if you are poor all the doors are closed.

So how do you break open the doors and bring about a change in somebody’s life? I was very fortunate, because I could use the prison system. Every time I got nicked, I learned something—somebody was there to teach me. Unfortunately, we do not have that opportunity now. If you go into prison, you go in bad and come out worse, because rehabilitation has gone down the tubes. We do not have those social workers, or the NHS sending out wonderful paramedics to go into the community to help mother nurse her child. We do not have all that kind of pastoral care that we used to have when I was in my early years and in my teens. We have got rid of all that, and instead we have a poor who we embrace, and who in a sense we would like to find a way of indulging. But every time we do that, we do not move them away from poverty and, instead, we tie them up.

Interestingly, in Brazil, President Lula brought in something called the family allowance. It was a simple thing: you gave the mother $104 a month, but she had to do two things—it came with strings attached. One was that mummy had to go to the hospital and to the doctor regularly, because if she died and the children were left on their own, they would go feral, and then the police would get involved and there would be murders, and all sorts of things like that. The other condition was that the children had to go to school.

If we really want to do something about poor people, we have to break their poverty. We—as a Government, as a party, and as a Parliament—have to find ways of breaking through those doors, and we will not be able to do that in a liberal, loving sort of way. We are going to have to impose some order and structure on people’s lives who do not have order and structure. We have to find a way of breaking through those doors so that we can move them out of this miasma, out of this place where we are quite happy to keep coming up with wonderful new ducking and diving, bobbing and weaving—things that change nothing.

Creditworthiness Assessment Bill [HL]

Lord Bird Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 11th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

I hear what the noble Baroness says but, as other Members have pointed out in the debate, there is the risk of some unintended consequences as a result of taking this approach. I have also outlined that we are not dismissing the problem, but are seeking an alternative route to solving it which we believe will be more effective and fairer, and avoid some of those unintended consequences. If that turns out not to be the case, of course we are always open to review our position vis-à-vis proposals such as this, and we will continue to act in that way because our first priority is to protect the most vulnerable and help them make a better future for themselves and their families by getting access to home ownership.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I really enjoyed that. That was a brilliant array of political parties coming together in the House. I am really glad. I am also glad that the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, introduced the amendments in his name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, because they allow us to address the laws of unintended consequences. The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, also raised the question.

I come from a long line of people who did not pay credit. I am not likely in my dotage to be grassing up the people I come from. My mother used to go to a doorstep lender, who would direct her to a particular shop, where we paid through the nose over and again in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, until she died in absolute poverty in the late 1970s. I am not going to grass these people up, I assure your Lordships. Actually, I am much more interested in the 15% or 20% of people who are going to find it very difficult to get credit. They are finding it very difficult to get credit now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bates]

My Lords, I think I can be brief on this group. I thank my noble friend for moving the amendment. This group of amendments concerns the proposal for the Financial Conduct Authority to conduct a review into the experience of rental tenants, with particular regard to their ability to demonstrate their creditworthiness under the existing rules.

I remind the Committee that the FCA recently consulted on proposed changes to its rules and guidance on assessing creditworthiness in consumer credit and has undertaken research on this subject, which carefully considered the factors that firms take into account when making lending decisions. This consultation made direct reference to the current limitations on sharing rental data and the potential for new technology to alleviate them. That is the purpose behind the rent recognition challenge.

Furthermore, in April 2018 the FCA announced that it will conduct a market study on credit information. A consumer’s credit information affects how likely they are to be able to access a range of financial services, including mortgages, loans and credit cards. Consumers may experience harm, such as restricted access to credit, if this information, such as rental payment history, is not shared effectively. The FCA’s aim is to ensure the credit information market works as well as possible to maximise the benefits that it can deliver for consumers. The FCA will also collect evidence to gain a better understanding of the potential for harm in this market and, if necessary, identify remedies. This study will be launched in quarter four of 2018. Finally, the FCA conducts a review of all new interventions as a matter of course and continues to monitor the market for consumer detriment on an ongoing basis.

In conclusion, I put it to the Committee that the need for a further review by the Financial Conduct Authority into this issue is unclear, as the regulator is already carrying out extensive work in this field. The Government’s position on the Creditworthiness Assessment Bill therefore remains unchanged.

[Lord Bird]

I am pleased that the noble Lord has withdrawn—I feel a great victory. We have to move on to the next stage, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bates, for this great opportunity to respond to what we said. I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Grender and Lady Thornton. It seemed all a bit “spaghetti” just now, so forgive me my trespasses. I will sit down. Thank you very much indeed.

Domestic Abuse

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 22nd March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, on bringing up this really important issue of domestic violence. I have no answers—or few—but I have a few observations. I have no answers other than to find a way of incorporating into the very structure of our society the assurance that, if there is an emergency and somebody has to get out of their home, there is always a place that they can go to: a place of asylum; a place of refuge. It does not happen often enough. I know too many people, especially in and around homelessness, who are beaten quite regularly. We bring in the police and all sorts of people, yet very little is done because no opportunity is provided.

About 15 years ago, I saw an advertisement in the Big Issue for the Violence Initiative. I rang them up and said, “I’d like to come along and talk to you”. So I went along, and they were very pleased to see me and said, “We’d like to show you around”. I said, “Great. When do I start the course?” They said, “What do you mean, when do you start the course?” I said, “Well, I would like to start the course”. They said, “Oh, you want to see what it’s like to actually go through a programme”. I said, “The thing is, I’m a 58 year-old man, and I’m so aggressive that if I’m on a train, I’m aggressive if it’s late, for example. I’m about to remarry for the third time and I don’t want to be aggressive like I was when I was bringing up my children, because I will be having a new family”. They were absolutely astonished that this man from the Big Issue should be coming to them to ask for help, and they gave me help.

What I really liked about the help was that for the first time in my life, I could admit to somebody that I was aggressive, that I was overbearing. I might not beat up my children or my wife, but I had my finger in their faces on too many occasions and often destroyed the domesticity that we were supposed to be sharing. It was really interesting that I could be in a place where people said, “You are a victim. You have arrived at this because somebody else has done something to you”.

When I was 18, I came home from my reformatory, from boys’ prison, and one Sunday afternoon I found my father pouring a kettle of hot water over my mother. I rushed into the kitchen, beat my father to the ground, stamped on him, kicked him, did everything conceivable and said, “If you touch my mother again, I’ll kill you”. For the next nine years he did not touch my mother and actually, they grew in love with each other because, basically, let us not forget the fact that violence does not necessarily mean that one person hates another person; it is just that the real world—stuff like economic privation, lack of education, lack of opportunity, insecure housing—often overwhelm somebody who is passionately in love and they take it out on their children and their spouse. Often, afterwards they are crying and incredibly upset by the whole experience.

I gave my father nine years. Unfortunately my mother died very young from cancer due to being a night worker, a cleaner, and trying to hold the whole family together, but it was interesting to see that I established boundaries that my father could never cross again. I am not suggesting in this noble House that we now go around and beat up all the people who have beaten up their children and their wives, but I do feel it is necessary to address the cowardliness, the frustration that is shown towards the weak.

I went on and got married again. I have two beautiful children. I do not beat them up, I do not beat my wife up, I do not act aggressively towards them, and I thank God for the Violence Initiative, which was a private charity. What I would like to see in this debate and from Her Majesty’s Government is a balance in the way that we offer refuges. We must always give somebody the chance of escape, because it could be the thing that saves their life and their children’s lives. I would like to see Her Majesty’s Government put an enormous emphasis on helping people deal with the difficulty of being unable to control their anger and passing it on to their family.

National Debt

Lord Bird Excerpts

Wednesday 14th March 2018 Lords Chamber

Tabled by

[Lord Bird]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what investments they will make in order to reduce the national debt.

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, in the absence of my noble friend Lord Bird, and at his request, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in his name on the Order Paper.

Creditworthiness Assessment Bill [HL]

Lord Bird Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 24th November 2017 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Bird]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

It is a great honour to be talking about poverty again in the House. Whenever I get to the House, I would love to jump up and say that we are not doing enough for the poor; we are not creating the escape ladders for people in poverty. If you look at the work that I have been doing over the last 26 years, it has nearly always been aimed at how we can dismantle poverty in the lives of the neediest. One escape route is obviously around education and housing and the opportunities that you get through work—but another thing, which is hidden, is how expensive it is to be poor. It is incredibly expensive. If you are poor, you pay more for your electricity, gas and credit. That is why this Bill is based on the work that the Big Issue has done over the last seven years, when we have been working with a credit agency called Experian. We have worked to find the records of 1.5 million social tenants and to look at ways we can reduce the cost of their credit and, we hope, move them incrementally towards democracy and justice. As we know, the poorer your life is, the less likely it is that you will be able to participate in democracy. Democracy is about choice and the poorer you are, the less choice you have.

The work that we have been doing with the Rental Exchange looks into the ways in which people’s rent can be used when they go forward to get themselves a credit rating. Interestingly, if you are a mortgage holder, and if you pay your mortgage on time and do not miss it too often, you will automatically have a higher credit rating, because the credit agencies will look at you and say that you are a jolly good chap, woman, student or whoever. But you might have been living in social housing, or in another form of rented accommodation, for one year, five years, or 10 years. There are the boxes to be ticked at the bottom of the form saying, “Are you a tenant?” or “Are you a householder?” and, if you are a householder, that box is ticked. If you are a tenant, the paper is normally thrown away, not even considered, or you will be given a very low credit rating, because they do not take into account the fact that you are paying your rent. You could be an incredibly good tenant, paying regularly for many years—or you could be a lousy mortgage holder.

There is this injustice, and the Creditworthiness Assessment Bill is an attempt to change the way the credit agencies look at this social morass, this social gap, this representation almost of a class line that is drawn between those who are in luck and those who are not in luck—the people we want to address. The Big Issue has done this work and is proposing to carry on with it. I am proposing that we change the legislation so that the credit service providers have to take into account the fact that people have paid their rent. There are, however, a number of problems, because some people’s credit score could go up, while others’ could go down. We need to make sure that those people whose credit is poor and will stay poor, or even get worse, are helped. What happens now is that nobody’s credit is taken into account if they are a renting tenant. We therefore do not know how we can put our arms around those people who need to be supported in credit and who do not have a credit record. These are some of the considerations that need to be made. We have to be very careful that we do not help only the low-hanging fruit, so to speak. We need to also socialise and engage with those people in need of support.

The other thing about having a credit record is that it means you also have a digital identity, which means that you exist. There are so many occasions in this world, and they will increase, where people do not have a digital profile. Without a digital profile, the real problem is that not only will you not be able to get credit, but there will be all sorts of other knock-on effects. The poorest among us often do not have a digital profile, and we need to address that as well.

I will not go on, because there are some very good speakers following me who can do all the numbers and so on. I am very pleased that we have a tidy little bunch of people. The Government have in some ways gone towards some of the things that we need to do. In the Budget the other day, there was a suggestion that there will be a £2 million competition to support fintech firms—which I think means finance technology firms—to look at a financial or technological solution to collecting this data. I should like to think that this is not a torpedo but an attempt to carefully negotiate our way through the body of knowledge that the Big Issue, Experian and others have built up, bearing in mind that we do not want to leave people behind. One of the worst problems with having a bad credit record is, if you are buried in it, that it closes down the whole of your life and stops you living. We need to address that. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bird]

I thank your Lordships very much for that interesting discussion about what we all agree is an irregularity that happens when you live in poverty. It is one of the many irregularities there. What I found quite interesting about the Minister’s response is that when it comes to a market-based solution, which the Conservative Government would obviously love to promote, there is a bar on operating in the market healthily. People say, “I have a mortgage, therefore I am much more reliable and bankable than if I am a tenant who pays rent”. What is so interesting is that there are probably millions of such people who the lenders would love to lend to, but they do not have the information. They do not have the key to the door. If it was a true market-based solution, it would be a matter of turning to tenants and saying, “Show us how reliable you are by showing us the data you’ve collected over the years by paying your rent”.

The Bill opens up the possibility of enfranchising a whole group of people who are disfranchised now. Fintech goes towards the idea that you can gather your own data and share it with a third party, which may or may not choose to lend you the money. There are ways towards a solution and the fintech will come along, irrespective of whether we see it in, but there is this entrenched idea. The work of the Big Issue has proved that the evidence is there that millions of people are being disfranchised, and that it is affecting the health of the market. If we really want to find a market-based solution let us look at a true one that includes those people, who are not able to participate in the market.

The Bill is also a bit broader in its base; it is not exclusively about people getting mortgages. I think there was a kind of wrong-footing—not intentional, because I trust the Government to be noble in all things—that we are talking about mortgaging and housing. We are actually talking about, for instance, people moving into social housing. When you go into the apartment, what have you got? You might have a gas oven or an electric oven, but where are the white goods? You move in, you are on universal credit and you have to wait until you can buy the goods that enable you to feed your family. What happens? You then have to turn to BrightHouse. You have to turn to BrightHouse because you are desperate to feed your children and therefore you have to go to a very narrow sector of the credit market, and that sector knows that you are hoist by your own petard when it comes to your poverty and it is going to charge you through the nose. That is a disreputable thing masquerading as a part of democracy. You take it or leave it. We need to recognise that somebody’s credit score should begin to liberate them and enable them to begin the process of their own reconstruction. It is about people reconstructing themselves, irrespective of how hard and tirelessly we work to extend the franchise that we need to extend around credit.

I thank noble Lords for taking part in this debate, which I enjoyed very much. I very much enjoyed the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Davies. I can see he is not a pusillanimous man. He upped the game. I enjoyed the contributions of the noble Baronesses, Lady Thornton, Lady Grender and—unfortunately I did not get her name.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)]

Lady Wilcox.

[Lord Bird]

God bless you. I am only a new boy. When, or if, we get this Bill through the House, it will benefit all political persuasions in the House because we will all be able to do our job around poverty a little better, but we will also have to make sure that in the detail, where we know the devil is, we do an awful lot of work for people who are left out and whose credit is damaged.

I was out last night talking to some homeless people. A big problem is that they have no credit references. One of them, a young woman, had been driven out because of problems around credit and her ability to respond to it. When you see those things, you know that we have an emergency on our hands and we need to do something very desperate. One of the ways we can do that is by helping people with their credit while making sure that people who are not the low-hanging fruit do not get left behind. We have to ensure that there are all the safeguards so that people can opt out and not be punished in the process. I thank all noble Lords.

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

House adjourned at 3.43 pm.