Drug-related Deaths in England and Wales

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 26th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

The right reverend Prelate is absolutely right to highlight the situation in the north- east. I can assure her that funding is allocated on the basis of need, and that includes the rates of drug-related deaths. I hope it was helpful that senior officials from the department recently met with the drug and alcohol service commissioners, the police and crime commissioners and the directors of public health from across the north-east to discuss synthetic drug threats. We will certainly continue to work with local areas, including the north-east, to tackle this very real issue.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Can we accept the fact that a lot of the people who are dying are homeless, and a lot of them are the people who are on our streets? We know that drug addiction and bad health on the streets are a cocktail of death. Can we see some effort by the Government to put in place the rehab, detox and therapeutic communities that are necessary to get the demons out of the lives of people who are on the streets and in homelessness?

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

I understand the point that the noble Lord is making. We are funding the rough sleeping drug and alcohol treatment grant, which gives targeted treatment and wraparound support services to those who sleep rough, or who are at risk of doing so, in 83 local authorities. That includes a whole range of things. In addition, we are funding the housing support grant and working across government, including with the Deputy Prime Minister, who has brought together a dedicated interministerial group to tackle the very real problem that the noble Lord describes.

Support for Infants and Parents etc (Information) Bill [HL]

Lord Bird Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 6th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, on this very simple—you could almost say dumb, in the best sense of the word—concatenation of a Bill, which brings together things that should have been brought together hundreds of years ago, or certainly since the creation of the welfare state.

I will give an example which is not from the area we are talking about. About 20 years ago, in Bakersfield, down there in southern California, a doctor noticed that there were lots of homeless people living on the streets. He worked out one of the problems. The police were involved in the disorder that came from street living, the doctors were also involved, as were the psychologists, the local authority and all sorts of others who had a vested interest in concatenating all of the services. That is the dumbness, so to speak, of this thing; the cleverness of simplicity, is how I would describe it. What actually happened is that, in a very short space of time, they managed to dismantle poverty and homelessness for many hundreds of people in southern California.

This thing which is now called Housing First is all over the world. The people who lead on it are the Finnish, as the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, referred to. They are in love with the idea of putting things together—why deal with things by themselves? Why say that people should go here for breastfeeding and there for psychological support? When I read the Bill I thought, “Great! We are entering a new period of government”. In my opinion, we are entering a new period where we might all try to concatenate ideas; joined-up thinking, as John Battle talked about 30 years ago—a wonderful man who tried to get all of the homeless organisations back together. I pat the noble Lord on the back—this is great.

What is hidden behind all of this—dare I come back to the issue I am always trying to address?—is poverty. Clause 1(2)(c) mentions

“services promoting positive relationships between infants and their parents or carers provided by or on behalf of a public authority”.

We have to do something about turning the tap off. Most of the people we are referring to have problems because, largely, with some notable exceptions, they have inherited poverty. I pat the noble Lord on the back and praise him, because what we are doing here—and, God willing, it will go through—is putting one brick in the wall of dismantling poverty.

However, we will not dismantle poverty unless we actually tie that in with other things. For instance, I suffered when, aged five, my mother took me to the school gate at our little local Catholic school in Notting Hill and said, “Get in there and behave yourself”, not, “Get in there, get educated and get socially transformed, so you can have a full and complete life”. The problem is that we can try to address questions of breastfeeding and various other things but, if we wanted to do something really dramatic and dynamic, we would begin to turn off the tap. In spite of the fact that we have a social security system, an education system, and a prison system—where people go in bad and come out worse—we are not addressing poverty. Instead, we are responding to the problems of poverty.

I am not saying that every poor person will have problems with breastfeeding. I am saying that until we intellectualise this argument into one about education, social justice and training people on how to be parents before they are even parents, we will be playing catch-up. This Bill is unfortunately a catch-up, because the social training that most people in the middle and other classes get was not there. The people who are left behind are the people we are talking about now.

I now move on to my favourite subject, which is the ministry of poverty prevention. I have been banging on about this, and I have just enlarged its remit to become MOPPAC: the ministry of poverty prevention and cure. We have eight different government departments not concatenating over poverty, but that all have a finger in the poverty pie. If this Government—or the next Government—were to work on concatenating poverty and bringing it together, it would save 40% of the cost of government. Looking deep into the figures, we see that 50% of those who present themselves to the hospital service in cardiac arrest suffer from food poverty. These are the majority of people we are talking about now.

I have advocated—and will continue to advocate—for this. When are we going to dismantle poverty? When are we going to turn the tap off? I am very happy to say to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, that I am in the process of building a simulated government department outside Parliament. I would love for his work to be one of the bricks in the wall that we need to create, because we need to end the inheritance of poverty. That is the big issue today.