Housing Supply and Homelessness
Lord Bird Excerpts(2 weeks, 3 days ago)
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Lord Bird (CB)
I thank the noble Lord very much for that wonderful introduction. My family are Irish, and I think they are even more verbose than the Welsh, but we will not have an argument over that.
I should explain why I am not going to bamboozle your Lordships with loads of statistics and why I can probably make very little contribution to what we have been talking about. Ten years after I started the Big Issue, I was asked by the Times what I was going to do for the next 10 or 20 years. I said, “For the last 10 years I’ve been mending broken clocks, and for the next 10 or 20 years I’m going to try to prevent the clocks breaking”.
In 1991 when we started the Big Issue, 501 homeless organisations were with us. They supplied every conceivable thing for a homeless person, from a condom—not a girlfriend, a condom—all the way through to a place where you could clean yourself, sleep and all that. But not one of those organisations ever asked the question that I wanted to ask: when is somebody going to turn the tap off?
Why do we often see homeless people as homeless? I have never met a homeless person whose problem was homelessness. I met someone who, like a social iceberg, had homelessness just above the water where you could see it, but underneath I could see all sorts of things—abuse, social isolation, mental health problems. I saw 90% of the people I have worked with, who I come from, inheriting poverty.
I was with Prince Charles once, as he then was, at a meeting in our building. He said that anybody could fall homeless. I thought to myself, “That’s not quite right”; I could not imagine him homeless. He was trying to create the idea, as so many people do, that anybody can fall homeless. The noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, mentioned a PhD student who could read Hungarian. Brilliant—I could bring you dozens of them, but I could bring you thousands upon thousands of people who have inherited poverty. Because those people inherited poverty, there is a predictability of failure that none of us has ever really addressed.
We tried to address it 75 years ago when we created the welfare state. We tried to address the fact that there were people who were unwell, ill educated, doing jobs that destroyed their bodies and caught in poverty. But did we ever really put the effort, the energy, the drive and the wonderfulness of our intellectual ability into saying, “Why is there no science for breaking people from poverty or a government department especially looking to prevent poverty”, so that we do not have a situation where the only inheritance people get is that they are poor? I believe we live in an age of dunces. Unfortunately, the dunces are the people making the decisions.
I am astonished that poverty costs us so much. I reckon that, of every £1 paid by the taxpayer, about 40p goes into poverty. We, in a sense, leave poverty. The Conservatives are great believers in leaving poverty to work itself out because there are so many examples of people two or three generations away from the coalface, or even one generation, so they think poverty should just be sorted out by leaving the system. Then Labour believed in inventing a methodology that created social housing but did not answer the problem. Only 2% of people whose children are brought up in social housing ever get out of poverty. Only 2% ever get to university or even finish their A-levels. In my opinion, we have these big contradictions. Until this House and that House embrace the idea of finding a way of turning the tap off, we will just have a lack of social housing as a forerunner for getting out of poverty.
Social Housing: Awaab’s Law
Lord Bird Excerpts(2 months ago)
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Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)
The consultation received over 1,000 responses. It is important that we consider these responses in full before confirming the requirements of Awaab’s law. We intend to publish the Government’s response to the consultation and lay the statutory instrument for Awaab’s law in Parliament this autumn. Alongside it, the Renters’ Rights Bill will ensure that we have similar legislation for the private rented sector. The noble Baroness is right that we want to get this done as fast as possible. No one should ever have to lose a child because of the condition of their home. No one should have to suffer appalling living conditions. Nor should anyone feel powerless in the face of landlords who will not listen to them or who make them feel like they are the problem when they ask for help.
Lord Bird (CB)
Do the Government agree with me that one of the problems we have now is that many social housing associations are behaving like private landlords? Many of the problems that happen for tenants, including mould, are happening in the public housing sector. Maybe we need to think again about whether we need more council houses and fewer housing associations.
Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)
On enforcement, seeking redress is important and tenants should challenge their landlords, whether it is a private landlord or the social housing sector. There are important ways to address this through the courts, but there is also the Housing Ombudsman. Tenants can challenge their landlord and if they do not get a satisfactory response, the Housing Ombudsman can address the issue, whether it is in the private or social sector. The noble Lord makes a valid point about the problems being widespread and not just in the private rented sector.