Poverty in the United Kingdom
Lord Bird Excerpts(5 years, 7 months ago)
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Baroness Buscombe
My Lords, I am disappointed that the noble Baroness thinks that the Government are not listening. Only last week, she heard directly from front-line staff at the Department for Work and Pensions—I am grateful to her for coming to the department—about the vital work they do 24/7 to ensure that claimants receive the right support. In turn, I listened to the special rapporteur on Radio 4 say that people receive no funds for between five and 12 weeks when they enrol on to universal credit. That is just plain wrong and, frankly, undermines the credibility of this report.
Lord Bird (CB)
My Lords, will the Government supply us with a plan for how they are going to rescue that wonderful thing, which is that work gives social mobility and social opportunity, at a time when it is obvious that in-work poverty is increasing at a greater rate than out-of-work poverty?
Baroness Buscombe
My Lords, I greatly support what the noble Lord has always said—we believe in giving people a hand up, rather than a handout, which is about empowering people and giving them the right support. Each universal credit claimant has a caseworker and a work coach who gives them the right support in their family or personal surroundings and then, through little steps at a time, helps and encourages them into work to support them, their family and their children. They are empowered, given confidence and lifted out of poverty.
Poverty and Disadvantage
Lord Bird Excerpts(6 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Bird (CB)
My Lords, it has been a bad morning. A few miles down the river, a commemoration of the Grenfell Tower disaster has been taking place at St Paul’s Cathedral. It is good that we commemorate what happened there and bring justice to those who lost their lives and give them the opportunity to be remembered. I hope that we can move forward to a different situation, where the likes of Grenfell Tower will never happen again. Unfortunately, the social housing end of the economy is where many of the problems that we associate with life and death, and health and safety, are to be found. I do not know that this is the end, but I would like to think that we will come to some conclusions and that Grenfell Tower will be a beacon to us to continue the fight to bring justice to the question of social housing. People in social housing should not be living almost in a third world, where their safety and well-being are not accounted for or supplied by the local authorities and the superabundant number of people who are rushing around keeping us safe in our beds at night.
Last week I had to bury a cousin down in Chatham. I was very fortunate to be picked up at my hotel by a gentleman who came from Pakistan or northern India; I was not quite sure which. He took me to the crematorium and on the way back he pointed out the grammar school and the private school. As we were going along I asked whether he knew those schools. He said, “Yes, my daughter is at the grammar school and my son went through the private school, at £14,000 a year, and is now something big in the City”. He was not sure what he meant by “something big in the City”, but it obviously meant that he was making a shedload of money. It is interesting that that is one of the stories that we all love to hear—about the indomitable spirit of people who do not accept poverty simply because they have no money and very little chance. An immigrant gentleman comes to this country and prospers in a very modest way—because all he does is drive a cab and you cannot make a shedload of money doing that—but he puts all his eggs in the educational basket so that his children can move on. That is absolutely brilliant compared with my own family, who came over from Ireland, who knew how to drink and smoke cigarettes and avoid paying the rent. It is totally different. So there are different immigrations: not all immigrations will lead to a situation where you can tax their prosperity.
I joined the House of Lords just over two years ago, and what I am really interested in is dismantling poverty. I am interested in calling the bluff on poverty, because one problem with poverty is that we have an enormous amount of people involved in measuring it. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, for instance, has been measuring poverty for more than 100 years. We have organisations such as Shelter, Crisis, St Mungo’s, the Children’s Society and the NSPCC. We have a superabundance of people involved in poverty. We have Governments who come into office and swear that they will turn the tide when it comes to poverty. We have organisations such as the Big Issue—I have to declare an interest as the person who started it with Gordon Roddick—where we go out into the streets and offer succour and help to homeless people. We give them the chance of making their own money; we try to get them away from the streets because we believe very strongly in the work that we are doing. Because these people have fallen through the normal safety nets, they end up on the streets in absolute desperation.
All of us are involved. Dare I say—and I do not want to say it in a horrible way—that we are all involved in an industry? The industry involves people writing reports; the BBC ringing me up early in the morning to go and comment on those reports; the Times and the media involved in promoting the reports; people collecting money ad nauseam—ad infinitum—for people in need. It seems to me that we operate on a principle around poverty which is called “emergencyism”. Around 80% of social money is spent in and around the problem, once the problem has become a problem. Very little money is spent on the prevention, and as for the cure, it might happen, but mostly it does not.
I am sorry that I got caught on the rails today, so I am only just here; I say, “Bring back British Rail!”. That is another debate. Earlier today, I thought to myself, “What can I say that is different to what everybody else will say and what has already been said in this House? What can I say to the Government?”. The first thing that I can say to the Government is that they are not doing enough and they never will do enough. To do enough would involve tearing up all the accepted frameworks for doing enough. I say to the last Government and also to the next Government—my argument is not with the Conservatives, Labour, the Lib Dems or any coalition—that it is time to make a major change in the way that we deal with poverty, an absolutely miraculous change. We need an intellectual revolution. I came into the House of Lords to stir that concern up.
I have been involved in the Big Issue for 26 years. Before that, I was working with homeless organisations and before that, I was in poverty and crime myself. Before that, I was born into the slums. You could therefore say that there have been 71 years, which is enough to say to this Government, “When are you going to come and talk to people like me, who say, ‘Let us end this conspiracy of dunces’?”. Forgive me, I include myself among the dunces. When are we going to say that enough is enough?
I do not read every report. I have not read the last 10 Rowntree reports because presumably they were like the previous 10 Rowntree reports. I do not keep myself up to date with the facts and figures about poverty, because all I need to do is go out into the street and talk to people there at 2 am or 3 am and see that they have mental health problems and are outside society. It does not matter how much money the Government give: we have a self-fulfilling prophecy—this self-fulfilling failure on the streets. We need to stop and say, “Let’s work on the diagnosis and go forward to the prognosis”.
The biggest problem is that everybody has a favourite project. I can tell the House about the wonderful gentleman whom I met in the cab, and we could have a little chat and then go away, and poverty will still be there. There is a poverty of spirit—the poverty of responses to poverty—and the worst thing about poverty is that many people who are helping the poor are often themselves suffering an impoverishment. We need to enrich them, and I include myself in this, because I do not have all the answers. All I know is that we need to move forward to a stage where there is a co-ordinated, joined-up plan, where we converge our energies. Why is it that, when I started the Big Issue 26 years ago, there were 501 homeless organisations in London alone? Today, why are there thousands of social interveners that do not work together or try to lock in and dismantle the problems? Why is it that every Government who we have promise the earth and deliver a flowerpot?
Poverty
Lord Bird Excerpts(7 years ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Buscombe) (Con)
My Lords, tackling the root causes of child poverty and disadvantage includes taking action on parental worklessness. New analysis carried out by the Department for Work and Pensions shows that children living in workless families are significantly more disadvantaged and achieve poorer outcomes than other children, including those in lower-income working families. Improving Lives: Helping Workless Families, published on 4 April, provides a framework for a continued focus on improving children’s outcomes now and in the future.
Lord Bird (CB)
I thank the Minister very much for her reply. I would like to make the obvious statement that prevention—
Noble Lords
Lord Bird
Oh! I am sorry. I will not make a statement; I will ask a question. Forgive me. Could Her Majesty’s Government move inexorably towards a situation where we could put prevention right at the centre of all the work we do? We know that prevention pays off. We know that when money is spent on prevention, it reaps enormous benefits. Could Her Majesty’s Government look at the possibility of creating a prevention unit across both Houses and all parties, so that we could at last make sense of the need to prevent people falling into poverty because too many people are stuck in poverty and are not getting out?
Baroness Buscombe
I thank the noble Lord very much for his question. I entirely agree that the focus must be on prevention. We strongly believe that it was right to replace the income-related child poverty targets, which we had until 2010, with statutory measures of parental worklessness and children’s educational attainment—the areas that can make the biggest difference to children’s outcomes. We believe that the way to help people out of poverty is through employment. A great deal of progress has been made and employment is now at a record high level. However, although record levels of employment are great, one in eight children across the UK still lives in a workless family, and we need to tackle that. A prevention unit is a great idea but the reality is that we can perform that function by working across government, as we are doing, on the strategy that we have now developed within Work and Pensions.
Child Poverty Unit
Lord Bird Excerpts(7 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Henley
My Lords, I am terribly sorry to say this, but I think I did answer the Question directly. What was the purpose of the child poverty unit? Its purpose was to measure the income-related targets set up by the previous Government. Those targets were a waste of time and we got rid of them. We have now set up something better—the Social Mobility Commission secretariat, based in the Department for Education. As I said in my original Answer, the appropriate measure for these things should be parental worklessness—a responsibility of the Department for Work and Pensions—and children’s educational attainment, and those are the two that we will look at.
Lord Bird (CB)
Have the Government measured in any way the impact on people who fail at school and their relationship to child poverty? Are there any facts and figures so that we can chart whether the policies that the Minister is talking about actually work?
Child Poverty
Lord Bird Excerpts(7 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Bird (CB)
My Lords, I remind noble Lords, if they were not aware of it or have forgotten, that I came into the House of Lords because of my work in and around dismantling poverty in people’s lives as much as possible. I am back here again banging the old drum on what we can do about poverty. The longer I am in the House, the more I realise that poverty is at the base—I hazard a guess here—of about 70% of our work, perhaps even more. The laws of unintended consequences mean that changes we made in the economic system 10, 20 and 30 years ago are coming back to bite our posterior.
I say once again that I am here to dismantle poverty. When I am approached by many noble Lords to get involved in defending the poor and tackling the problems that they face, I say, “I am sorry, you are doing a pretty fine job, but I do not see many people wanting to prevent Johnny, currently in school, from selling the Big Issue in 20 years’ time”. I do not see many of the difficult issues of finding the roots of poverty and ways to dismantle its sources and causes being tackled. One of the reasons for that is because there is a lot of confusion around poverty. The biggest confusion arises from the fact that people do not realise that there are two kinds of poverty. There is a poverty of spirit and opportunity, a material poverty and a poverty of social literacy—all those sorts of things. However, there is another kind of poverty. My uncle, an Irishman, who died at the age of 102 in Notting Hill, came over here in 1936 and worked as a postman and a fireman and lived all his life in a kind of poorness. When he came over, he did not have two pennies to rub together. He looked after himself, his wife and his children and has endowed his grandchildren in some senses. He was poor but he never lived in poverty. He went to church and participated in the British Legion, went on holiday and did all sorts of things. He was a poor man who developed the ability, at home in Ireland on the farm, of making a very small amount of resources go a long way. That is poorness. Then there is poverty. Unfortunately, we have seen the demise of poor people who know how to make ends meet, as opposed to the people who are lost in the fog of poverty.
I am being very personal here. My uncle, Paddy O’Regan, had one child, and that child had one child. He lived within his means. If he could not afford something, he did not have it. We mistake that for poverty but it is really just a question of being poor. Unfortunately, his sister-in-law—my mother—had six children and always lived beyond her means. She lived in a miasma of poverty, never participated in democracy or did anything other than her job as a night cleaner, and her day job, and take her six children to school. She lived in absolute poverty, which was made even worse by her inability to cook. She was one of the world’s worst cooks; she could make nothing out of something. Those are the two sides of an Irish family who came over here.
In this debate about dismantling poverty and finding the roots of poverty, I want to focus on the dignity of people who get out of poverty. A friend of mine from Jamaica came over with his mother on the “Windrush” and now owns enormous tracts of Norfolk. He educated all his children and knew how to live within his means. He was an example of the old-fashioned poor. We have created an enormous number of problems through destroying people’s ability to get out of poverty. If the parents of Mr Ed Miliband, who arrived here in 1944 as refugees from Nazi Germany, Poland, or wherever it was, had been given a council house and money on which to live, would he have ended up running the Labour Party? Generosity can cut off people’s opportunity to morph their way out of poverty. That is one of the reasons why we need to look very carefully at what we can do to help the poor. We need to help them by enabling them to get out of poverty. However, there are too many stumbling blocks to doing that, the biggest of which is the fact that 30% of our schoolchildren go through school and come out the other end but you would never think they had been to school. There are people like myself— I learned to read and write in a boys’ prison, as I have said before. Those children go on to form 80% of our prison population and 50% of our long-term unemployed, fill up the hostels and sell the Big Issue. Some 80% to 90% of them come from a failed background of poverty because they failed at school.
We need to do something about the roots of poverty rather than deploy a scattergun effect of initiating a wonderful project here and a wonderful project there which do not converge to dismantle poverty. If we do not do that, we will be having this discussion for many decades. When nearly 3 million children in this country live below the poverty line, we have to do something about poverty, but we must fight it philosophically, culturally and socially. We need to measure the effect of social security in enabling people to rebuild their lives. Social security is one of the most wonderful ways of helping people through difficult circumstances and enabling them to move on but we must not put them in warehouses, as it were. We should not do what was done to some members of my own family—I will not mention them because they will probably get their lawyers on to me—some of whom have not worked for 30 years and whose lives are getting worse and worse because somebody decided way back in the time of Margaret Thatcher that it was all right to open the sluice-gates and allow people to get benefit without checking whether it was any good for them. Those are the kind of things that we need to talk about.
In my time in the House of Lords, I am desperate to get to the roots of poverty. However, if you scratch the surface of the average Member of the House of Lords, you will probably find that earlier generations of their families had to work very hard at the coalface. Somebody suffered and burned the candle at both ends. I have a problem in that I sometimes think that we do not want the poor to burn the candle at both ends because it is a safety risk.
Poverty
Lord Bird Excerpts(8 years ago)
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Lord Bird (CB)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the many noble Lords who have put their name down to speak on this Motion, which is very simple. It asks whether we are going to identify the causes of poverty and, by implication, what we are going to do about ending that poverty.
I sent a very simple letter to the noble Lord, Lord Freud, which I hope he will let me share with noble Lords if they want a copy of it. In it I ask whether, when we spend our social pound, it is possible to identify whether the money that we spend, given by the Government, gets people out of poverty or whether it is a device for helping people to be comfortable in poverty and stay in poverty, and therefore not get out of it.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Big Issue. I have spent those 25 years trying to answer a question that affects the lives of thousands and thousands of people, not just in the United Kingdom but all over the world: how do you assist people to move on from poverty so that they can start to have a full life? Unfortunately, even that question moves into complexity, as I shall set out.
The Department for Work and Pensions, which operates our social security system, has to do two things at the same time, and that leads to enormous confusion. One thing that it has to do is to make sure that people who are entirely dependent are looked after. That means ensuring that, because they have no means of providing for themselves due to their physical or mental health, their age or any of the other reasons that lead people to being dependent, they are not shifted into work or into another situation. That is a really significant job and we do it pretty well, but we do not do a good enough job, because many people are stuck in a dependent life and live in poverty. Why must dependency necessarily lead to poverty?
So my first question is: why do we need to give people so little that they cannot even have a full life? In fact, what the DWP needs to do is give them more money. A friend of mine has absolutely no life because he is looking after his wife, who has MS. He cannot go on holiday or repair his car and so on. Would it not be wonderful if we gave them another £1,000 a month, or £13,000 a year, so that he could have a quality of life? One reason we do not do that is that there is confusion and complexity surrounding people who move into social security, and it has been like that since the days of Margaret Thatcher. We are told that she very much espoused small business, although not small government. In fact, when she was asked by Willie Whitelaw, “What do you do with nearly 1 million people out of work?”, she did not turn round and say, “Let them have cake”, although she might as well have done; she said, “Let them have benefits”. With that, the sluice-gates were opened and the welfare state—that wonderful, beautiful and profound system that was invented in 1948 and, in its original form, was full of dignity—was totally and utterly destroyed and anybody could be shifted into social security. Therefore, instead of investing to get people out of poverty, an enormous number of people were parked up and warehoused. The DWP therefore has the difficult problem of how to establish whether a person is dependent and what it should it do about it, and how can it move people forward and out of poverty.
When I ask this very simple question of how we move people out of poverty, the simple issue for me is whether we can find a way of dividing it so that we do not have what I call the Toynbee/Dacre syndrome. If you read the Guardian and those articles by Polly Toynbee and people on the left, they will tell you that we do not do enough for the poor, and they will go on and on for decades about it. They never, or very rarely—I am a Guardian reader and I love it, like we all do—seem to ask the question: “How do we get people out of poverty?”. And then of course you have the Paul Dacre school in the Daily Mail, which believes that people on social security are all scroungers. That is a mirror of what needs to be faced up to, when the interesting thing is that we could get together as a House and as a Parliament and begin the process of dismantling poverty.
I am involved in a conference next year, to which I hope all your Lordships will come, based on what we call the PECC principle, which is prevention, emergency, coping and cure—it is as simple as that. I have my lovely children up in the Gallery. What I do with them is prevent them falling into poverty, so I give them ballet lessons, violin lessons—you name it, they get it all; they go all over the world; their lives are enriched; I do not leave it just to the school. That is prevention and we do it. The house we live in is full of people whose parents have prevented them falling into poverty or, if they have been in poverty, have helped them get out of it.
Lord Bird
I am sorry. If somebody falls into an emergency, which is the “E” of PECC, and they end up in prison or on social security, they are often stuck there. Then there is the “C”, which is coping—so you have prevention, emergency, coping and cure. Eighty per cent of the money that the Government and charities spend is on emergency and coping. We do not get the big bucks in prevention and we do not get the big bucks in cure. I have joined the House of Lords because I am very interested in the idea that we should be a Chamber that not only looks carefully at the causes of poverty but begins to change the way in which we work with the poor and we give them support. If we could get the able-bodied, like certain members of my own family, out of social security, we could give more money to the people who are stuck and who need us.
We need also to start looking at the way in which the Government budget. I have asked the noble Lord, Lord Freud, whether he would consider doing our budgets in a different way. Why do we have this rather strange thing? We have these government Budgets and people balance their budgets but often, by balancing the budget, they are simply passing the problem on to another budget. I suggest that we develop an almost holistic view of budgeting, so that we can begin this process of dismantlement.
We must recognise the problem. If I had a wonderful chance tomorrow to help Theresa May with her upcoming work, I would say to her, “What are you going to do about the fact that we spend, and have spent, billions and billions yet we keep people isolated and lost in poverty?”. Millions of people in Britain love the idea that anyone on social security needs to be supported, and I agree with that. However, let us support the people who desperately need us and get the other ones mobile and moving. When we give a social pound, let us ask whether it gets people out of poverty or simply leaves them poor. I beg to move.
Lord Bird
My Lords, thank you very much for the past two and a half to three hours. It has been an absolutely wonderful experience for me, a new Lord, who is obsessed with the tyranny of poverty and the life sentence—the death sentence—it often gives the people I come from, who have experienced so much poverty. I think I can outdo even the noble Lord, Lord Ouseley—we can compare notes afterwards—on who has had a more rotten life, or a more rotten beginning.
Some people get me wrong when I say that there is too much emphasis on keeping the poor comfortable or making them more comfortable. I do not mean that I want to get rid of the social security system. I want to help people who need help to get out of poverty, and to help those who are incapable of getting out of poverty to do so. Just because people are dependent on the state, they should not be in poverty. It is absolutely criminal that we have people who are dependent and do not get enough.
Anyway, God bless all your Lordships. I have never met the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, but she comes from Guildford, which is just around the corner from where I was banged up for three years, so we have a connection. I really wish her the best, so God bless her and her husband.
Poverty
Lord Bird Excerpts(8 years ago)
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The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)
The Government have set out a new life chances approach which will include a set of indicators to measure progress in tackling the root causes of poverty, such as worklessness, educational attainment and family stability.
Lord Bird (CB)
My Lords, I think I may go down in history as the person who asked only one question of this House—how do we begin the process of dismantling poverty? When we have a situation where 34% of all the money received by the Chancellor of the Exchequer is spent on and around poverty; when we spend 12% of our budget on education and yet we fail 30% of our children in school, who then become 70% of the prison population, who then become 50% of the people who use A&E as a drop-in place, when will the Government and the House get behind the idea that we need a different form of intervention in poverty in order to begin to dismantle it? We are pussyfooting around. We are not dismantling poverty in the way that it should be done. Let us be honest and accept that keeping people in poverty is incredibly expensive.
Lord Freud
We are trying to move away from the income transfer approaches that we have seen for some time, to try to handle the fundamental causes of poverty. I agree with the noble Lord that that is where the effort has got to go. It is difficult, but that is the only real way to tackle this problem.
Poverty Programmes: Audit
Lord Bird Excerpts(8 years, 2 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)
We have a range of programmes across government to transform lives, from the troubled families programme and the pupil premium to our flagship reform, universal credit, and we audit the majority of these. Work is the best route out of poverty and this Government are committed to transforming lives by providing people with the support they need at all stages to get into work.
Lord Bird (CB)
Is it not a verity of poverty that one of the big problems with poverty itself is that a lot of the support goes to enabling people to live in poverty and very little is spent on dismantling poverty? So I ask the Minister whether it is possible to create a new way of measuring poverty statistics that asks the question: does this get people out of poverty? There is too much emphasis on keeping people in poverty.
Lord Freud
My Lords, that question goes along exactly the lines that we are going along in trying to transform the welfare system. We aim to create programmes that promote independence among people and the centrepiece of that is universal credit. Within universal credit we have developed what we call a test and learn approach, which monitors the behavioural responses very closely.