Universal Credit (Removal of Two Child Limit) Bill

Lord Bird Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading
Thursday 12th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I say “well done” to the noble Lord, Lord Walker. I was confused when I was asked to follow the noble Lord and, in the tradition of the House, to praise him. I thought to myself, “I don’t know anything about Walkers crisps”. That was the only Walker I knew. Then I thought, “Ah no, it is Johnnie Walker”. For a while I was confused, but I got there in the end.

What really excites me about what the noble Lord is doing, as well as putting a lot of people into work, is the idea that he extended the hand to people who had been banged up. He has given jobs to people who were in prison. I am glad that the noble Lord is in competition with Timpson. I think, in a way, he is a bit ahead of it and maybe it is going to have to catch up. It is a good bit of competition. The only problem I have with the noble Lord—and I really do have a problem—is: where was he when I needed him? I remind noble Lords that I am an ex-offender.

I turn to the Bill. What a wonderful Bill, to get rid of something like this. We may like it or not; we may or may not be with the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, wanting to give hand ups rather than handouts. I have to say that the noble Baroness stole that from me; she knows that. I was the first person in the United Kingdom to use those terms, and I stole them from Bill Clinton, who stole them from Jesse Jackson. Is that not interesting? Is it not wonderful that we can talk about a hand up, not a handout? The whole of my working life, since starting the Big Issue 34 years ago, has been about giving people a hand up, not a handout.

My mother had six children. Every year that she had a baby, she got poorer—and poorer and poorer. Big families are not good for the bottom line. They are not good for you. But the problem with this Bill, and where I fall out with our Conservative friends, is that while it may punish mum and dad, it really punishes the children. To me, if we need anything in life today, it is to be behind our children. Our children are being undone before us: mobile phones and social media are undermining them. Our children are really at the sharp end of things.

I come from the pre-social security period. We were brought up with very little help from the state—in the 1950s and 1960s, there was none of that. We got five shillings per child: that was about one pound and 10 shillings for a family of six boys. Because Britain is a low-wage and low-investment economy, British capitalism is really good at making slithers of money out of jobs that are low-paid. It is very difficult now for a lot of people to nobly go out to work and earn enough money to feed themselves and their children, even though they are doing a 40-hour week. We are a low-wage economy because we are a low-investment economy.

Capitalism is quite happy with that. It does not matter if you make millions of pounds out of slithers of profit, or whether you buy and sell things that are worth £50,000 each. This is the thing that I came into the House of Lords to try to sort out: I came in to dismantle poverty, not to make the poor more comfortable, nor to keep them outside as though they were a different species. I have listened to the debate so far. I am not sentimentally attached to the poor; I do not cry over them. I think there are too many people who cry over the poor and who do not do anything. I want to get the poor out of poverty. I want to get the poor into a situation where they can make decisions about their own lives, where they can have the kind of life that they want, where they can get rich and socially mobile and get out of poverty. There is only one cure for poverty and it is not the state. The only cure is social mobility. If you get social mobility, you are out of it.

The funny thing is that most people in Britain, even Conservatives, will be a few generations away from the coalface. They will have morphed their way to better times. The problem is the inheritance of poverty—for example, 90% of the people I have worked with in prisons and on the streets come from poverty inherited from their parents. Until we work on that, we will not get anywhere.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I am so grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate. I love listening to maiden speeches, when we get an insight into the range and depth of experience coming into this House. Today we heard three magnificent examples. If anyone outside is listening, that exceptional richness of experience is what this House can bring to debates. We have heard about defence and air power; conflict and resolving conflict; climbing mountains, both literal and metaphorical; the importance of business; the compelling relational power of tea in the Long Room and learning to play dominoes—I may be better at one of those than the other, but maybe time will tell. I thank all noble Lords so much for coming in and contributing.

In developing our child poverty strategy, we engaged extensively with all kinds of people, including families, campaigners and experts. The aim was to try to work out what would have the greatest impact on the day-to-day lives of children living in poverty. The message was really clear: remove the two-child limit. I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Shah for pointing out the challenges we inherited and why it takes time for Governments to work through dealing with everything that comes out.

The Bill is supported by over 60 organisations, representing anti-poverty charities, which is perhaps not surprising, but also children’s doctors, teachers and health visitors—the people who know only too well the damaging effects of poverty and see its consequences every day. I remain very grateful for the work of the campaigning organisations, those professionals who support our children and all those who pushed for this change, including the Bishops’ Bench. I share the remembrance of the former right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, who pushed for this in his time in this House.

The Bill is an investment to deliver a better future for children and for our country. Many noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Teather, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester, have set out the devastating impact that poverty has on children. Many, including my noble friend Lord Babudu, have pointed out that poverty is not evenly distributed.

Poverty imposes really significant costs on individuals and the country. Let me start with the Official Opposition, because they have set out clearly why they oppose this. It is my experience, in many years in and around politics, that, if you want to defend the indefensible, the first thing you do is set up some clearly false dichotomies. What have we listened to today? “It is children versus defence”. Of course it is not. If I were going to play politics, I would point out that, if the Conservatives felt that passionately about it when they were in government, maybe they should not have cut £12 billion from defence spending in their first term alone; maybe they should not have cut spending from the 2.5% the last Labour Government left, pushing us to raise it to 2.6% by next year; maybe they should have slashed child poverty. They were not choosing between the two things: they attacked both of them. Now, we could have that kind of conversation, or we could have a different kind of conversation. Let us take a step back and look at what actually happens with the policies.

What is the other false dichotomy? I think we fall into making a mistake if we try to set up social security versus work. I am not repeating the figure that 59% of families hit by the two-child limit are in work, in order to make a political point; I am pointing out that our social security system is there to help people in and out of work, and to help them get from being out of work into being in work. If the barriers get in the way of people being able to move into work, the system is not doing its job. Every time we start trying to pretend that this is contrasting people lying in bed all day with the blinds shut with those who go out to work, we do everyone a disservice. Please let us not have that conversation.

What we want to do is recognise that we have to enable work, encourage work and take away the barriers to work—that is really important—and that neither those in nor out of work are static populations: people move between those states, for a whole range of reasons. Our job is to make sure that, for those who can work, they stay in work as much as they can, for as long as they can, and, if they come out, to help them back into it when they can—but, if they cannot, to support them, because that is what we do by pooling risk.

The noble Lord, Lord Redwood, made some very interesting points. I parted company with him when he got to a certain point in his speech, but he made a really interesting point in saying that this policy is clearly not a panacea. The state cannot and should not pretend that it can solve all the problems families have, and the state does not raise children: families do.

The starting point, however, is that, if we want to tackle child poverty, as the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, said he does, the first thing we have to do is stop making it worse: stop tipping more children into poverty every year. The second step is to work out what the barriers are to people moving into work and developing in their lives. The noble Lord, Lord Redwood, mentioned some of those that are nothing to do with money, and the state can only do what it can to try to make it as easy as possible for families to do the right thing: investing in relationships education, supporting families —all kinds of education—and communities and relationships. What the state can do is tackle the things it can do something about. It is definitely not all about money, but it is not not about money: the statistics show really clearly, for example, the impact of poverty on family breakup and on parents struggling to do the right thing by their kids. We need to do both.

The next thing we need to do is create opportunities. I always hate disagreeing with the noble Lord, Lord Bird, because I know that he will come back at me, rightly, but we have to start to move not away from but beyond “handout versus hand up”. I absolutely agree with him that our job is to give people a hand up. He has done that in his time—as, indeed, has the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott—but I would not contrast that with any support the state gives to those who are struggling when they need it. A lot of what we do is on both those things. Like my noble friend Lord Walker, I have a real interest in how we use my department to help those who are struggling to get into work. Just this week, I was at a conference talking to businesses that are helping ex-offenders into work.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I knew I should not have mentioned him.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Is it not wonderful that social security can be used as a hand up? That is the point I am trying to make. I am not trying to make the point of work versus social security. I am saying that a hand up is absolutely marvellous. The greatest hand up that I got was a probation officer.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

Indeed, and that probation officer clearly did a very good job: look where the noble Lord has ended up. Would that they were all that successful. I suppose that that is quite a high bar at which to set them, but I commend it. That is a really great point, and I am now violently agreeing with the noble Lord; but I will move on.

I want the social security system to do its job, and for most people its job is to support them into work, and in work, and to develop them in work. That is very much what this Government are seeking to do.

One of the challenges with universal credit is about assumptions. It was designed to move people into and out of work—to work in and out of work—and when it works it does so very well. All we are doing is making sure that the system works even better than it does. But the assumption that this Government are doing the wrong thing by spending money on tackling child poverty is fundamentally mistaken. My noble friend Lord Walker talked about the need to make sure we tackle NEETs, for example. We have one in eight of our young people not in employment, education or training. They did not start at 16.

Free Speech Complaints Scheme

Lord Bird Excerpts

Monday 23rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is right that the freezing of tuition fees by the previous Government put considerable financial strain on the university sector, which is why I am sure she will support this Government in our inflation-linked increases to tuition fees in order to fund universities. There is no point willing the ends if you are not willing to will the means.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Can we include criticism of the actions of Israel in Gaza in the freedom of speech argument, because there are many of us who are being silenced by it?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I have not seen much evidence that the noble Lord is being silenced, but it remains an important part of free speech provisions to be able to protest legitimately—but not, of course, to harass or to promote antisemitism on campus. It is completely clear that that is the case, and there is a clear distinction between the two.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Bird Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Bird]

107: After Clause 27, insert the following new Clause—
“Child poverty targets(1) The Secretary of State must, as soon as reasonably practicable and no later than 30 September 2026, and then at the start of each Parliament, lay regulations made by statutory instrument that establish binding child poverty targets.(2) Child poverty targets must include—(a) targets for reducing the number of children living in poverty,(b) targets for reducing the number of children living in deep poverty, and(c) timescales by which each target must be achieved.(3) The Secretary of State must lay an annual report before Parliament setting out—(a) steps they have taken to deliver on the child poverty targets, and(b) progress that has been made towards the child poverty targets.(4) A statutory instrument containing regulations under this section may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would place a duty on the Secretary of State to set binding child poverty reduction targets in regulations at the start of each Parliament.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I am very pleased that this amendment is to be discussed again. What troubles me is that it could be such a small, insignificant thing to ask for targets from the Government. Are targets part of the armoury that we use to get rid of poverty? If we are endeavouring to get rid of poverty, we will need more than targets. We will need houses; we will need training for parents so that they do not pass poverty down to the next generation; we will need a Government who will converge and co-ordinate all the efforts into some form whereby they can say that they are disentangling the situation.

At the moment, we have eight government departments dealing with poverty. I imagine that if we did not have a Ministry of Defence and people decided to attack this country, we would form a Ministry of Defence, bring everything together and not leave it to eight different ministries. The same goes for poverty. Poverty is destroying us. Poverty is stopping schools delivering schooling: 30% of teachers’ time is spent on the problems that are caused when poverty enters the classroom. In our health service, 50% of people who suffer from cardiological—whatever you call it; forgive me, I have new teeth—are suffering from food poverty.

I have used this amendment to raise not only the question of targets but the point that the Government should use them. They should have others measuring their homework rather than doing it themselves. I have heard from the Government that, if you have targets, you tend to have people massaging the figures to make it look as though the targets are being achieved and that you then go after the low-hanging fruit because you do not get anywhere near the hardest to reach—you can achieve your targets by concentrating on the fact that it is easier to help those who are the low-hanging fruit.

Overall, my big question is whether targets could fit in a panoply of organised, convergent energy that is used to get rid of poverty. I am not here to talk just about just this amendment but about the fact that every Government I know have had all sorts of initiatives to get rid of poverty, but we never see the end of it. Some 4.5 million children are caught in poverty and that is a tremendous indictment not of this Government nor of the last one, and not even of the Government before that, but of the methodology. It is an inherited methodology that is passed down every generation of Government and takes the same form.

Let us please look at targets and be honest about them, and begin, as a society and as a Chamber, to look at the idea that we follow my example and put a lot of work into having a ministry of poverty prevention and cure. The problem is that 90% of all the money that is spent on poverty is spent on the emergency of poverty. We cannot put all our energy into the emergency; we must try to have prevention and cure.

I shall end there because I have not got an awful lot to say about targets. I have said everything; it is all in Hansard. I would love all noble Lords to consider that the Government should at least allow us our targets, and then we can look at all the other things that we need over the coming months and years where we converge and concatenate the energies necessary to get rid of poverty. I inherited poverty and that makes me a fierce warrior to end the inheritance of poverty. I started from behind. Most of those who live in poverty never get to the starting line. We cannot all be Boris Johnson. I beg to move.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to speak in support of Amendment 107, to which I have added my name, moved by such a warrior against poverty, not least as it provides an opportunity to welcome the Government’s landmark child poverty strategy. Sadly, the Opposition did not think it important enough to ask for the Statement on it to be repeated in your Lordships’ House. I welcome, too, the strategy’s accompanying monitoring and evaluation frameworks, supported by a theory of change, based on clear measures and what it calls a “wide-ranging evidence base”. This includes hearing directly from children, young people and families with lived experience of poverty, building on the strong engagement with them during the strategy’s development.

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[The Minister of State, Department for Education and Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendment 107, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, seeks to place a duty on the Secretary of State to set legally binding child poverty reduction targets. I agree with other noble Lords that we have a shared objective to tackle child poverty. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for his commitment, the campaigning that he does and for the engagement with the Government on child poverty. We had a very good meeting, I thought, where we talked about the work of the Big Issue and the rightful challenge to the Government to ensure that the structure within government and the measurement of our objectives meet the challenge that has been set here. I will talk about how we will ensure that this happens.

I am proud that this Government have now published our child poverty strategy, going far beyond rhetoric—as one noble Lord suggested that we should do. But I do not agree with those who have argued that all Governments are the same or that the strategy lacks credibility. Several noble Lords have quoted the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Its annual poverty report, published yesterday, states that the child poverty strategy is “hugely welcome”—particularly after the last Government made no progress in reducing poverty. The foundation welcomes the child poverty strategy delivering the projected biggest reduction in child poverty in a single Parliament.

We have been clear that our wide-ranging child poverty strategy will see the largest reduction in child poverty by any Government in a single Parliament, lifting 550,000 children out of poverty, principally through the expansion of free school meals and removing the two-child limit. These are both things that this Government have already done—to take up the challenge set by the noble Lord, Lord Storey. But, of course, we need to measure and demonstrate progress being made on this strategy.

I completely take on board that challenge. That is why the monitoring and evaluation framework, which was published alongside the strategy, set out that a baseline report will be published in summer 2026, with annual reporting on progress thereafter. It will be quite clear what progress the Government are making in a range of areas, and it will be possible to hold this Government to account for delivering on this crucial strategy and on our objectives. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that it will be very clear to voters that this Government will make progress, as the previous Labour Government did, in tackling the scourge of child poverty.

We recognise that our approach to monitoring and evaluation will need to evolve and adapt, as the strategy must, reflecting the dynamic nature of poverty and the broader social and economic factors that influence it. Although I understand the powerful point made by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, about the government machinery for ensuring progress, I think a strength of the child poverty strategy is that it is explicitly cross-government. It recognises that it will need action in a range of different areas to tackle child poverty. I also take his point that there needs to be a central directing part of government. That is why we have committed to maintain a child poverty team with cross-government oversight by Ministers.

These clear reporting arrangements and the focus on child poverty within government show our commitment and leadership and will ensure that the progress that we make is transparent to all. We will continue to work closely with the whole sector committed to tackling child poverty, as we have done in developing the strategy. We believe that this is the best approach, rather than introducing statutory targets. For these reasons, I hope I have provided some assurance about the commitment of this Government, the broad action that we will take as a result of the strategy, and the measurement and evaluation that we will put in place in order to ensure that the public and this House can hold us to account for progress. On that basis, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, will feel able to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Thank you very much. I have decided to join the Conservative Party. Can I meet the noble Earl afterwards and fill in the forms? Forgive me, I was only joking. I have never received such praise in the House.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Storey. I was trying to say that we need a new toolkit to dismantle poverty. Having a way of measuring it and of taking people to task because we say, “This is what you said you would achieve” can never be, as the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, said, the be-all and end-all. It must be part of the road towards the accumulation of evidence, the accumulation of opportunity and the accumulation of thinking that gets us somewhere we have never been before.

I do not want to pooh-pooh the Government or any Government for achieving the remarkable removal of 450,000 young people from poverty, but what about the other 4 million? That is the real problem. The real problem is that we are passing from generation to generation. A load of people who I have identified— 90% of the people I work with in homelessness, 90% of the people I work with in long-term unemployment, and 90% of the people I work with in the custodial system—come from the inheritance of poverty. They inherit poverty in the same way that Boris Johnson or David Cameron or anybody else inherits their position in the pecking order. If we have a situation where we have millions of people never arriving at the starting line of life, we have a major problem. That is where we need to concentrate our energy.

Household Support Fund

Lord Bird Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I am grateful; that is a really important point and I thank the noble Baroness for making it. Prevention is always better than cure, even if it is not always possible to replace cures entirely with prevention. There may always be the need for some support locally. The way that the fund runs has been designed deliberately so that every local authority can choose how it spends it; and they have chosen to do it in different ways. DWP has given guidance about the nature of the groups that need supporting, and it is for essential support. Some authorities have given grants to third parties; others have given money directly to people and some have even given food. But her broader point is well made. I certainly know that my colleagues in the Ministry for local government—MHCLG—are talking closely with local authorities about how we can get better at doing multiyear funding, giving stability to local government and engaging more effectively in the way that we spend this money.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

While we are talking about poverty and children, can I ask a very cheeky question? Why is it that the Government are punishing seven members of the Labour Party who have put the party behind the interests of the people? Why are they doing this? This is a very disgraceful thing to be doing so early in their Administration.

Child Poverty

Lord Bird Excerpts

Monday 29th April 2024 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Bird]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to address the root causes of child poverty across the United Kingdom.

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

My Lords, as dinner break business is now the last business of the day, the allocation of time is now 90 minutes. Therefore, the Back-Bench speaking time has increased from four minutes to eight minutes.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I welcome the chance to sort out the problems of poverty in an hour and a half. I welcome the idea that, in such a short amount of time, we can sort out the problem that a third of all our children are in or around poverty—that is 4 million children in the United Kingdom.

I alert people to my belief that, in the seven or eight years I have been in the House of Lords, I have never come to a debate or discussion where the root causes of things are dealt with. I believe strongly that one of the main problems we have is that Governments, Oppositions and people who have worked for many years in and around poverty are always dealing with the effects of poverty; they do not deal with the root causes of poverty. So when I proposed this small debate, I was actually trying to be revolutionary. I was trying to move the House of Lords—and, I hope, the House of Commons—towards the idea that instead of continuously dealing with the effects of poverty, we move the argument towards the root causes of poverty.

Throughout the world—it is not just the United Kingdom—in the region of about 80% of all money spent on social intervention is spent on dealing with the emergency and problems of coping with poverty. There is very little money spent on prevention or cure—the two opposites. Since the time I came into the House, I have been like a scratched record; I have gone on, again and again, asking when we are going to spend our time on eradicating poverty rather than ameliorating it and trying to accommodate it. That has been my real argument.

I think that His Majesty’s Government and His Majesty’s Opposition, and the previous Governments and Oppositions, have always dealt with the terrible reality poverty throws up. Tonight, I want to be a revolutionary and ask why we do not all look at something quite real. Why is it that, for all our efforts over decades—my decades go back to the end of the Second World War—we have always tried to deal with the obnoxiousness that is thrown up by poverty but we have never done a scientific analysis of the root causes of poverty? We have never had a Government or an Opposition, or an argument within our universities and charities, or among those who get involved in the struggles of the poorest among us, ask when we are going to do something about eradicating poverty.

I am sorry if I sound a bit Joan of Arc. I came into the House of Lords with one strict instruction from the people who encouraged me to come here, which was to help to dismantle and get rid of poverty, not to shift the deckchairs on the Atlantic. My instruction was not to make the poor more comfortable but to actually get rid of the concept of poor people.

I come from poverty, and maybe that is what drives me on. I come from people who came from poverty, who came from poverty and who came from poverty. The interesting thing is that when I grew up, I realised that they were surrounded by poverty; they could not get away from it. The mind-forged manacles that go with poverty meant that they perpetuated it. I have done my best within the lives of my own children to get rid of poverty in their futures, but the larger part of my family is still perpetuating poverty. Why? Because the root causes of poverty were never dealt with in the course of their lives.

To me, the big problem with poverty is the inheritance of poverty. In the United Kingdom, about 4 million children—a third of our children—are in poverty. It is interesting that a third of our children are in and around the problems of poverty, and in spite of all our efforts they remain so. What are we, the Church, the charities or the political parties going to do about it? Will they wake up one day and say, “Actually, we’re getting no nearer”? We know that in the last year, 100,000 more children have arrived in poverty.

We need an enormous mind shift, but I do not see it happening. I do not see anybody building the intellectual appliances or the university courses to find out why we are always trying to address the problems of poverty as if a bit more to the poor will actually change anything.

I came into the House of Lords and was astonished at the number of people who wanted me to get involved in agitating to give poor people more. I was determined, however much it would damage my reputation, not to do that. If the only thing you inherit is poverty, how do we break that situation so that you do not inherit it?

Can I just check: if we have more time, does this mean I can speak for another five minutes?

[Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone (Con)]

Speak for ever, as long as you let me speak for ever too.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

God bless you, because I was running out of time.

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

My Lords, I announced at the beginning of the debate that rather than an hour, we have an hour and a half. That extends Back-Bench speeches, but the noble Lord may have a few more moments above the 10 minutes for which he has spoken now. He can carry on.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I love democracy.

I was born in the London Irish slums of Notting Hill, but we moved to Fulham. On my road, I fell into being a friend of a guy whose family, like mine, came from Ireland. His father had accumulated a number of jobs. He was a very clever guy, even though, like my family, he was ill educated. He became very wealthy and bought his house, so he had a house in Fulham Broadway at a time when my family were living around the corner in social housing—what was called council housing. He became very prosperous and employed 20, 30, then 50 Irish people to make money for him, so that he could buy a house, then a bigger one. There were two kinds of poverty. That guy did not inherit poverty, but my family inherited it and made damn sure that we and other members of my family inherited poverty and the mind-forged manacles that go with it.

What do we actually do to break that situation so that people in poverty are given something—a “je ne sais quoi”, a little thing—that will mean they do not imitate the inherited poverty of their own family? To me, that is the big issue: Patrick Crowell and his mum and dad built a business, made money and became middle class and prosperous, but my family remained in poverty. Their children and their children’s children are still in poverty and stuck in social housing, having all sorts of problems.

I want to know how the House of Lords and the House of Commons, with all their great brains, can help us dismantle the mind-forged manacles that come with poverty and its inheritance. That is my passion. Over the next few months, as we move towards a general election, I will be campaigning through my work in the Big Issue, and in Parliament in general, for a reinvention of social housing.

Do noble Lords know that there are so many people in this world who are defenders of social housing? These people absolutely love it and think it is absolutely brilliant. But do noble Lords know that the children of people who live in social housing rarely finish school, get their qualifications, get skilled and move out of poverty? Do noble Lords know that a fraction, an infinitesimal number of people in social housing, ever get to university or college so that they can then start living a fuller life away from poverty? Do noble Lords know that in housing associations, on average 70% of people are unemployed? I do not want to be interpreted as rude or insensitive, but if you really wanted to condemn somebody to poverty for the next 100 years, you would give them social housing.

[Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone (Con)]

You have had 15 minutes.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Forgive me—I am now going to stop—but I wanted to move on to say that this is why I am campaigning to change the way we deal with poverty. We have a situation in which eight government departments are dealing with poverty, but we do not have a convergence to dismantle it. Some 40% of government expenditure is spent on poverty; we really need to change it. I am calling for the creation of a ministry of poverty prevention. I thank noble Lords very much for their time.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I agree with the noble Lord. Children do need a secure home, but the real problem is that all the conditions that lead you to need social housing mean that you never have a full life. I say to anybody in this House: try living in social housing, and then try to get to university or into a skilled job. That very rarely happens; that is the only problem. For me, the problem is not that social housing is not one of the most beautiful things in creation. The question is: what are we going to do to make social housing the foundation for a growth away from poverty and need?

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

I take the noble Lord’s point, and I understand. Perhaps that is why we need a broader, longer discussion. From my perspective, housing waiting lists are so long, and the quality of so many homes in the private rented sector is so poor, that the need to build decent homes within the sector for social rent seems imperative. Without that we will never solve the housing crisis.

Social housing providers can have a responsibility for providing wider support services, particularly for getting people into work and for giving help and advice to those who suffer from ill health. Estate officers can often do things to assist families or individuals that they would not be able to do if it were not for social housing. Maybe we need to have that longer debate.

I understand totally what the noble Lord was saying about a ministry of poverty prevention. Of course, all Whitehall departments are supposed to be doing things to reduce poverty, but the main one is the Treasury. It is about persuading the Treasury to invest more in things such as social housing that might help to reduce poverty.

There is an issue around income disparity. The first thing that has to be done to reduce poverty is reducing income disparity. That is why we have to deal with low pay, and make every effort to increase the minimum wage and the living wage above the rate of inflation so that those in lower pay brackets have more.

Mention has been made of absolute poverty and relative poverty. The truth is that too many children are being brought up in households with very low incomes. That is always poverty, whether it is absolute, relative or deep. We have heard the figures of 4.3 million children living in relatively low-income households and 2.9 million children in deep poverty—a household where income after housing costs is below 50% of median income.

All those tests are based on income, whereas child poverty derives from long-term unemployment, low qualifications, ill health, poverty of aspiration and poverty of opportunity. All those need tackling by the different Whitehall departments that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, talked about.

If levelling up is to be a success for the Government, child poverty needs to be addressed. The point is that levelling up is about people, not places. It is about individual children, and hence the two-child limit seems wrong. It was introduced in 2017, seven years ago. The Resolution Foundation has told us that it increased poverty, particularly for families with three or more children. It should cease, as it is increasing poverty in poor households. All the organisations that one can think of—the National Association of Head Teachers, the Church of England, Save the Children, the Child Poverty Action Group and Barnardo’s—say that it should cease.

As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lincoln reminded us, Sure Start was a success. It was introduced in 1999 to improve child development. Some 250 projects were created, concentrated in places where high numbers of children under five were living in poverty. Those centres helped with play, learning, health and childcare. I recall that, when I was leader of Newcastle City Council, we had a major success with our Sure Start centres. It is about aspiration and addressing some of the issues that the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, reminded us of.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies said in a recent report that the programme of Sure Start paid for itself with better GCSE results, improved skills in literacy and numeracy, personal development, and fewer interactions with the police and criminal justice system. It is a means of achieving what the noble Lord, Lord Bird, set out asking us to do, which is to spend more money on prevention rather than on solving the problems that poverty has created. There was too short a judgment in 2010, when there was a change of Government and an end to Sure Start. Too many people thought that it had not proved itself but, if a longer timescale had been taken, they would have known that it had.

Something needs to be created in a new Government. It may be called Sure Start or something else, but we need something like that, which intervenes with those who live in poor households.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for securing this debate and all noble Lords who have spoken. Before I say anything more, I add my reflection to those of my noble friend Lady Lister and the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, in memory of Lord Field. He was an example to all of us of what it means to take a whole lifetime and yet, at the end, never cease to be outraged by the level of child poverty in a rich country. We all owe him a debt.

Tonight’s debate has highlighted the multifaceted nature of poverty. Whenever we have debates on poverty, there is always a temptation for some people to say that it is not about money and other people to say that it is only about money. Manifestly neither is correct. It is not just about money but it is not not about money either. The noble Baroness, Lady Janke, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lincoln and other noble Lords made a very clear point of explaining what happens when you simply do not have enough money. If that is the case, all the strategies and all the preventive work in the world does not help you feed your kids that night; you simply cannot afford to do it.

On the basic level of access to resources, Britain is not in a good place. Over a fifth of our population lives in relative poverty. I know that the Government prefer absolute poverty as a measure, probably because it normally falls as real incomes rise, but, in the latest statistics in the document Households Below Average Income, we learned that the share of people living in absolute poverty is going up again, as the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, pointed out. There are 600,000 more people, half of them children, living in absolute poverty, in what is still one of the richest countries in the world by global standards. We should not be in this space.

Look at how this cashes out. The IFS has been pointing out that the number in material deprivation rose by 3 million in the three years to last year. In that same time, the proportion of those who could not adequately heat their homes jumped from just 4% to 11%. I must say to the Minister that, although the Government chose to give people cost of living support, they gave the same amount of money to everybody, whether a single person living in a studio flat or somebody with a family living in a larger house. As a result, the official statistics said:

“Incomes for those with children reduced the most. This reflects the flat nature of the cost of living and additional support payments, meaning for larger households they are split between more household members”.


Have the Government reflected on the best way to support people in these circumstances?

I fully accept that it is about not just incomes but support and opportunity. But child poverty has combined with the impact of 14 years of public service neglect, frankly, and the differential impacts of the pandemic to produce an attainment gap between children who experienced deprivation and their peers, with a lifelong impact on their life chances.

What should happen now? The last Labour Government lifted 2 million children and pensioners out of poverty. I know the noble Lord, Lord Bird, said at the start that he thinks, essentially, “A plague on all your houses. None of you has done anything”, but I am proud that the last Labour Government introduced Sure Start. As the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, pointed out, not only did it have an effect at the time but children had better GCSEs later as a result of having been part of Sure Start back then. I had a privilege of being part of the Treasury team working with Gordon Brown on questions of poverty when Sure Start was being introduced.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I just want to say that I used Sure Start. In spite of appearances, I was a very young father, and it was the most wonderful thing. I lived on the largest housing estate in south London and Sure Start was absolutely brilliant, so I am 100% behind it.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for clarifying that. One of the most depressing points of my career, frankly, was coming into the Lords in 2010 and having to sit on the Opposition Benches watching everything that I had worked on introducing being dismantled stage by stage in the name of austerity. However, we are where we are.

What should happen now? If the British people were to trust Labour again in an election—and obviously I hope they will—then we would want to introduce a mission-driven Government, and one of our five key missions would be to break down the barriers to opportunity for every child at every stage, with a strategy to tackle child poverty. It would be the responsibility of all government departments to tackle the fundamental drivers of poverty. We would address that by having cross-departmental mission boards looking at exactly how that was being driven across departments.

We would focus on increasing the number of young people in education, employment or training. We would look to reform childcare and early years support, introduce free breakfast clubs, and improve school standards. I agree with the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, about the importance of the nutritional content of school food and of access to sports.

On financial education, I am split. I agree with the noble Earl about the importance of financial education. However, recently I have met people who work for charities that traditionally have given debt advice. They told me in the past they would bring people in, sit them down, look at all the sources of income and all their outgoings, and help them to manage their budgets. They are now saying that more and more—sometimes most—of the people they come across literally do not have enough money to do it. Their budgets cannot be balanced; even the charity workers cannot balance them, with all their skills in financial education and management. So we have something of a crisis here. We need people who can manage to be taught how to manage well, while those who simply cannot manage it, however good they are, need to be helped to find a way through that. We would therefore want to support our social security system, strengthen rights to representation at work, improve social security and extend sick pay. We would boost wages by removing the minimum wage bands and expanding the remit of the Low Pay Commission.

We would want to tackle the housing crisis by retrofitting homes, strengthening renters’ rights and building more social and affordable housing. I take the underlying point that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, is making: decent, affordable and safe housing is a necessary but not sufficient condition to enable people to move out of poverty. It is both of those things. It is necessary because many of the people who would not be in social housing would otherwise be in bed and breakfasts, insecurely housed or, even worse, out on the streets.

We need nothing short of national renewal in this country. It will not happen overnight and will not be easy, but it should surely be the priority of any Government to guarantee opportunity to all our children. That is something I think we can all get behind.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

Absolutely. As I have said before, I do not think that we will agree at all on this—but, as I say, we are not minded to move on this policy. Both noble Baronesses will be well aware of our position on this.

There are encouraging signs that the economy has now turned a corner. Inflation has more than halved from its peak, delivering on the Prime Minister’s pledge, and is forecast to fall below 2% in 2024-25. Food price inflation is at its lowest since January 2022, at 4%, and wages are rising in real terms. We remain committed to a strong welfare system for those families who need it, and have uprated working-age benefits by a further 6.7% from this month and raised the local housing allowance to the 30th percentile of local rents, benefiting 1.6 million private renters in 2024-25.

Some questions were raised by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lincoln and also alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, about social housing, which is an important subject. Their questions were linked to items of damp and mould; they asked what the Government were going to do about this. The Government have now introduced Awaab’s law through the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023, which gives the Secretary of State powers to set out new requirements for social landlords to address hazards such as damp and mould in social homes within fixed time periods. We are now analysing the responses to the consultation, and then we will publish a response setting out findings and bringing for secondary legislation as soon as possible.

What I should say, which think was alluded to by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, is that everyone has a right to a safe and decent home. Since 2001, the decent homes standard, the so-called DHS, has played a key role in providing a minimum quality standard that social homes should meet. We are currently reviewing the DHS to ensure that it sets the right requirements for decency, and we will publish a consultation on a proposed new standard soon.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I am not against social housing—I am for social housing—but I want to break out of the situation whereby, if you get into social housing, you tend to fall behind everybody else. On what the Minister is saying about how they are going to change the requirements on social landlords, social landlords should be turning their tenants into people who can have a larger life and can get out of poverty. For most of them, even if they get into work, it is always in the low-wage economy, and they stay there. What are the Government doing about breaking the low-wage economy that many people in poverty find themselves in, who are often in social housing?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

Indeed, I will allude to the cross-government work that is going on. It may be that it requires a letter to write on that point, but I shall allude to it later, if I have the time.

Altogether this year we will have spent £306 billion through the welfare system in Great Britain, including around £138 billion on people of working age and children. This includes additional support to ensure the best start in life for children. For example, we have extended free school meal eligibility several times and to more groups of children than any other Government over the past half century. They are now claimed by more than 2 million of the most disadvantaged pupils. In addition, healthy food schemes provide a nutritional safety net for more than 3 million children. For those who need extra help with essentials, as inflation continues to fall, we are providing an additional £500 million for the extension of the household support fund in England, for a further six months, including funding for the devolved Administrations.

While it is right that we maintain a strong welfare safety net, we know that having parents who work, particularly full-time, plays a key role in reducing the risk of child poverty. My noble friend Lord Effingham mentioned this. In 2022-23, children living in workless households were more than six times more likely to be in absolute poverty after housing costs than those where all adults work. This is clear evidence of why, with more than 900,000 vacancies across the UK, our focus is firmly on ensuring that parents get the right support to find work and succeed in work. Our policies include: our generous universal credit childcare offer for working parents; our in-work progression offer; further increases to the national living wage to £11.44 an hour; and national insurance cuts.

The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, asked about making the housing support fund permanent. The HSF is not the only way we are supporting people on lower incomes. April’s benefit uprating of 6.7% will see an average increase in universal credit of £470. Raising the national living wage will deliver an increase of over £1,800 to the gross annual earnings of someone working full-time on that wage. Uplifting the local housing allowance to the 30th percentile of local rents, as mentioned earlier, will benefit 1.6 million private renters by an average of £800 per year.

The noble Lord, Lord Bird, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Lister and Lady Bennett, asked whether we accepted that a strategy was now needed. I did promise to try to answer this. We have consistently set out a sustainable long-term approach to tackling child poverty, based on evidence about the important role of work in substantially reducing the risk of child poverty. I am very aware of the interest that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, takes in this, and I reassure the House that Ministers continue to work across and beyond departmental boundaries to ensure that we take a co-ordinated approach to supporting vulnerable and low-income households. This includes a cross-government senior officials group on poverty, as well as bilaterals and meetings with external anti-poverty stakeholders. The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, is right that Treasury input to this is vital.

I return to the question of childcare raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley. She asked what extra support we are providing to parents. The Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Education work closely together to ensure that there is a comprehensive childcare offer that reflects different family circumstances, covering children over a range of ages.

Earlier, I mentioned some of the problems families in poverty face which mean that they can struggle to move into work and improve their financial circumstances. This Government offer a range of programmes to help people address these complex underlying challenges, so that they can take their first steps towards securing better outcomes for their families.

I applaud my noble friend Lord Effingham for making a number of interesting points. The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, put it well when he said that they were interesting contributions to the debate. I agree with many of the points that he made.

The pupil premium funds schools to help improve educational outcomes and close attainment gaps for disadvantaged children in state-funded schools in England. Funding for this is increasing to over £2.9 billion in the year 2024-25. That is £80 million more than last year.

We are taking significant action to improve children’s health, which is another important point. This includes dramatically reducing sugar in children’s food, investing over £600 million to improve the quality of sport for children, and encouraging healthy diets for lower-income families through schemes such as Healthy Start. We are also investing £2.3 billion a year in mental health services.

The Money and Pensions Service’s UK Strategy for Financial Wellbeing is a 10-year framework to help everyone make the most of their money. It has set out five goals to be achieved by 2030, including to see 2 million more children and young people receiving meaningful financial education.

One example of the support that we are giving is the Supporting Families programme, which is now the responsibility of DfE. This has funded local authorities to help almost 637,000 families experiencing multiple disadvantages to make sustained improvements with their problems.

A network of 300 supporting families employment advisers, specialist DWP work coaches, work with the programme, providing employment support that is helping almost 10,000 families, resulting in around 200 job starts every month.

My noble friend Lady Bottomley mentioned Reducing Parental Conflict. This is very close to my heart—I am directly responsible for it in government—and we have £33 million-worth of funding available from 2022 up until next year, 2025. This programme has enabled local authorities to support couples to address conflict in their relationship, which has helped to deliver positive impacts for children over no less than three major evaluations at the end of last year. We are also looking to see how we can ingrain that in the Child Maintenance Service, which again is my responsibility. I feel very passionate about it, and the work we do, by the way, helps to take 160,000 children out of poverty each year, and there is always more to be done.

The noble Baronesses, Lady Janke and Lady Bennett, spoke about childcare, and I want to give a quick response. The department is aware that, for some universal credit claimants, childcare costs present challenges to entering employment. To support people to become financially resilient by moving into work and progressing in work, eligible UC claimants can claim back up to 85% of their registered childcare costs each month, regardless of the number of hours that they work, compared to 70% in tax credits.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lincoln is not in his place, and I am not sure why. I think I will write to him rather than answer him when he is not in his place. He asked about rural communities.

I shall conclude, given the hour, by reassuring the House again of the importance we place on this matter. The early years, as I am sure the noble Lord will agree, are vital to securing good outcomes for children, and that is why we continue to work across government to ensure the best start for all children, including through our early years childcare provision and funding for school breakfast clubs. We understand that many families still face challenges, we are not shying away from that, and we will continue to work to ensure that the welfare system supports families who need it. To conclude, with inflation falling towards target and the economy beginning to turn a corner—perhaps green shoots; I do hope so—it is right that we continue to support parents to meet their responsibilities towards their children by seeking employment opportunities wherever that is possible.

Household Support Fund: Children’s Bed Poverty

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

My noble friend is absolutely right. The House will know—and I shall say this again—that this is one of the ways forward. The most important thing is for people to be in work. She will know, for example, that we have brought the figure down for workless households very substantially since 2009-10.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

With eight different government departments dealing with poverty, is not it time that we actually co-ordinated our dismantling of poverty by bringing in a government department that deals exclusively with poverty prevention?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

I am very aware of the noble Lord’s interest in this area. I recall the debate that he led on about three weeks ago, which I was involved in. I have very much taken note of his view. We do not agree that there needs to be such a high level of focus on poverty. Having said all that, I think that he is aware of the huge number of initiatives that we are taking, particularly cross-government, in tackling poverty, particularly child poverty.

UNICEF: Child Poverty Rankings

Lord Bird Excerpts

Wednesday 28th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

We certainly know that it is prevalent, but I have already laid out the measures we have taken. There has obviously been quite a debate this afternoon about the statistics. The Government published The Best Start for Life: A Vision for the 1,001 Critical Days in March 2021. I reassure the noble Baroness that we recognise that the early start for children is incredibly important. There is a range of initiatives to help with that issue, which of course is linked to poverty.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Are the Government aware that most of the people we are talking about—the children—inherit poverty? It crosses the generations. When will we move a lot of the effort into breaking poverty passing from one generation to another? That is where the money really needs to be spent, to bring about social transformation in every sense.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

The noble Lord is of course right, and I was very pleased to wind up his debate last week. Perhaps I can be helpful by saying that, compared with 2010, there are over 1 million fewer workless households in the UK, the number of children growing up in homes where no one works has fallen by 680,000, and 1.8 million more children are living in a home where at least one person works. However, the point he makes is incredibly important: we have to stop this intergenerational worklessness issue.

Poverty Reduction

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 22nd February 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Bird]

That this House takes note of the case for aligning poverty reduction policy-making across Government.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, for me, this is probably one of the most important debates that I could ever be involved in, and I am glad we have managed to get time for it. This is largely because, in my opinion, poverty is the background to everything, from racism all the way through to inequality. Our prisons are full of people who never got a fair crack of the whip at birth—and I am one of them. I come from a London Irish racist, small-minded and self-harming working class in Notting Hill; I have spoken about that on many occasions.

Growing up in poverty, with self-harming, drink, violence, wife-beating and all that, what I found so interesting was that I never met an adult in that world that I came into. All I met was self-defeat and people who were harmed by poverty so abjectly that, in some ways, they could never translate themselves into being fully human. They could never savour the advantages, as I later did when I became a posh boy because every time I got arrested, I learned things in the prison system—so, by the time I was 18, I was the posh guy that noble Lords see before them. Those people never went to the National Gallery. They never knew the difference between the trecento, the quattrocento and the cinquecento—neither do some people here. The point is that they were never allowed to be fully human.

We have to embrace that. When we embrace it, we have to realise that if we seriously want to do something about it, we need to look at the way we handle poverty in government, in local authorities, in charitable work, in our thinking and in how we respond to the needs of others. The traditional way of responding to the needs of others is to feel sorry for them—to pity them, to feel guilty and that what you really need to do is give the poor more. I came into the House of Lords and was immediately overrun by people wanting me to participate in some projects that were about giving the poor more. I said, “I’m sorry. I’m here to dismantle poverty and turn the tap off. I’m not here to deal with the everyday crisis of poverty, because I have to stand above it”. Somebody has to stand above it and try to bring all the efforts together so that poverty does not continue.

Giving the poor more has been going on for thousands of years. You can go back to the Greek philosophers: people established their humanity by giving the poor more. Every religion always wants to give the poor more. When I worked in America, I was astonished at the amount of schoolchildren I knew or met who would put food into a charity dumpster so that they could give the poor more. I did not see people make much effort to say, “Hang on—what are we doing here? Are we decreasing poverty or are we responding only to the everydayness—the precious thing?”.

I am an emergencist. I started the Big Issue 32 years ago to respond to the crisis of poverty, because I was appalled at the way that people saw homeless people on the streets of London, and then on the streets of cities throughout the UK, Europe, Asia, North America and South America, so I got involved then in giving the poor more. After 10 years of that, I was interviewed by the Times, which said, “Johnny Bird, what have you been doing for the last 10 years? You’ve been doing this, but what are you going to do for the next 10 or 20 years?” I said, “Well, for the last 10 years, I’ve been mending broken clocks. For the next 10 or 20 years, I’m going to try and prevent the clocks breaking”.

I created a methodology which I called PECC: prevention, emergency, coping and cure. What it threw up to me was that, in the intervention of state Governments and charities—and personal intervention from the public—80% of all the poverty money was spent on emergency and coping, with very little spent on prevention and cure. Each Government who came through—at the age of 78, I have been through many—always said that they put the fight to defeat poverty right at the top. Yet not one of them stopped and asked, “How do we reconfigure our governance? How do we reconfigure what we’re doing so that we can do a better job and turn the tap off, rather than using a tablespoon to take the water out of the bath?”. Everybody is at it, as was I for the first 10 years of my life as the Big Issue proprietor.

When I came into the House of Lords, I said that I came here to dismantle poverty. To do that is incredibly difficult when every government department that has anything to do with social justice or social opportunity always has a number of initiatives. Whenever a Government say to me that they have an initiative, I think “It’s a cover-up”—I am not speaking against the current Government, because I have been dealing with this for 30 years—because they do a little initiative, learn something from it and then put it aside. In fact, someone should do a history of government initiatives because it would find that they have tried every damn thing. The latest one is levelling up. I do not know why they do not call it “Get rid of poverty” or something like that.

I came in, I am sorry to say, to revolutionise the House of Lords and the Government, but not to pull them apart and get upset about who is here or there. I came in to concentrate on how to get the convergence of efforts so that when we use “emergency” we do so efficiently and deeply, and bring about changes. There are people in this House and the other place who have done enormously rich and deep things for people in need. But how do you take that as part of a social apparatus and put prevention in front of it? How do you put cure at the end of it?

Forty per cent of all money spent by His Majesty’s Government is spent on poverty. I am sorry—I repeat these things often, and people say to me, “You told us that the last time”, but I am going to tell you it the next time as well. Forty per cent of the money spent by government is spent on poverty—yet, if you look at the intervention of this Government, the last Government and presumably the next Government, there will be a bit here, a bit there, and a bit here and a bit there. There is no convergence; there is no joining together the strengths that we need to defeat poverty. According to the BMA, 50% of the people who present themselves with cardiac arrests are people suffering from food poverty. The emergency work that we need to do is to respond to the emergency and, at the same time, make sure that we are not increasing it by allowing people to slip into poverty.

I have a Bill going through the House that will go nowhere—absolutely nowhere. No one is interested in it. Whenever I talk to a politician of whatever party, or to the aspirant ones who stop me in Portcullis House and talk to me kindly about what they are going to do when they get in office—I presume it was not your lot, because you are already there—they say that they are going to do all sorts of wonderful things about poverty. But if they use the same mechanisms and devices that are being used at the moment, they will not be going anywhere.

Before Tony Blair came in, I remember having discussions with him, and I thought he was one of the most impressive personal managers that I had ever met. He made me feel really important, and he told me all the wonderful things he was going to do. I am not slagging him off—this is not a party-political thing. He was going to do big things about getting rid of homelessness. What he did was to open the gates of the Treasury to lots of homeless organisations, which went from this size to that size. People built lots more temporary accommodation—hostels and all sorts of things like that—and they thought it was a wonderful thing. But, unfortunately, it was still about “them” and “us”, meaning “us” who run the system and “them” who receive our beneficence. That is one of the major problems that we need to deal with.

My Bill calls for the creation of a ministry for poverty prevention. Why does it do that? It does so because, if poverty eats into the aspirations and ambitions of virtually every government department, how can the NHS really deliver, and how can schools really deliver, when about 30% of their budget is spent on dealing with the problems of poverty that are vectored into the classroom? What can the Ministry of Justice do, other than tread water and make sure that somebody does not escape, kill themselves or kill a guard? Why do we create these ministries and then deprive them of the opportunity of supplying change, justice and social justice, because poverty eats away at and destroys their work?

In my opinion, we need a Ministry of Justice prevention. I have spoken to lots of people, and they say, “Well, we could all do with a ministry—you could have a ministry for everything”. But the thing about poverty is that it gets into our pores and, in my opinion, it makes us lost and, to some extent, dishonest. We think that, if we can just give a handout to someone, we have changed things and done our bit. Thank you very much—God bless you all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I thank the Minister very much. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole of that debate, which was wonderful. I shall gather it all together, read it and distribute it to my friends and people who I work with, because it covered everything, including the kitchen sink.

I welcome the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Hereford. I am surprised he did not report on the fact that, every year, hundreds and hundreds of people go to Hereford, to a little vipassana silent retreat. I was there for 10 days over the new year break and had a wonderful time in the countryside of Hereford—it is a great pleasure to go there. I have been there four times, and the only reason I can carry on in life is that I can go somewhere and be quiet for that time.

The figures I came up with on the cost of poverty are very much based on what I have been told: that 50% of the time that the NHS spends on health, for instance, is spent on trying to make the poorest among us as healthy as possible. Some 34% of the money that goes into our classrooms is spent on the damage of poverty that is brought there, and that 90% of our Ministry of Justice’s bill, and all bills for crime, are to do with poverty. If you had a ministry of poverty and could co-ordinate and bring everything together, you might be able to close down half of the NHS. You might also be able to close down the Ministry of Justice—or just call it the “Ministry of Middle-Class Justice”, for all the middle-class people who are increasingly doing wrong.

I thank all noble Lords for doing this. I was with a group last night who said to me, “The idea of creating a ministry of poverty prevention sounds very Orwellian”. I reminded these people that in 1948, when we created the National Health Service, it was described even in those early days as Orwellian. I would love everybody to look at the invention that I am hoping will happen in my lifetime: an NHS, but called a “MoP”. Let us mop up poverty and get rid of it. Let us apply everything to get rid of it, and use MoP to do it, because I cannot see it happening unless we converge all the energies that the noble Baronesses, Lady Lister and Lady Burt, the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, and everybody else has talked about today. God bless and thank you.

Motion agreed.

Department for Work and Pensions: AI

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 5th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

I will not be drawn into answering questions on that, but I can say that it is important that the scrutiny of the Bill is done in an effective way and, of course, this House is very good at doing that. As I have mentioned before, it is very important that there is trust in AI solutions; this must be a prevalent issue among all users of AI.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Will this AI enable people who are on social security to get a better deal and get off social security, so that we can tap into the skills and abilities of millions of people who are caught in the Bastille of poverty and social security?

Covid-19: Universal Credit

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

The noble Lord is right to raise the point about people who try to abuse the system with no right to do so. The situation with fraud and recovering sums is being dealt with in the department. To give the best response in the time I have available, I will write to the noble Lord and place a copy of the letter in the Library.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

When universal credit was first put together, one big thing was to cut through bureaucracy and waste. I would like to think that we have moved towards reducing the ways in which people can get on universal credit. Obviously, there are many problems for people who want to go on to it, and they are still having to wait a long time. My question is more about the long-term effect of universal credit. How much does it cost to actually deliver £1 of social support, because in the old days it used to be about a fiver to deliver that £1?

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

I not sure where the noble Lord gets his figures from; I do not dispute them, but I will have to go back and have a good look. The universal credit business case was agreed in 2018 and demonstrated that it remains deliverable and affordable, and provides value for money. In a steady state, universal credit will generate economic value of £8 billion per year, and it is doing a great job.