National Risk Register

Lord Bird Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My noble friend touches on a very important point. In all candour, I think that one is never satisfied with anything; one always wishes to learn from what happens to do things better the next time. However, I assure him that, to support their planning for emergencies, local resilience forums are provided with full support to develop local resilience plans. They have direct contact with the Cabinet Office, should specific questions on risk assessment be raised—I assure the noble Lord that this ongoing dialogue is strong and will be strengthened.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Should the national risk register be about risks that are longer than two years and those over the next 10, 20 or 30 years? Also, the committee that was supposed to look into pandemics was closed down six months before the pandemic started: is that not a sign that perhaps we are a bit closed and not looking out in a real way to the great risks that face us now? Of course, the greatest risk is that of poverty.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord makes a strong point with which I agree, having chaired one of your Lordships’ Select Committees that looked into longer-term planning. His point is important. The NSRA certainly takes into account the impact of risks on the most vulnerable in society in its methodology.

Economy Update

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 10th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

The noble Baroness is right that QE is providing a level of financing for the interventions that the Government are taking at the moment. I think that she will understand that those interventions are having to be made extremely quickly to protect lives and livelihoods across the whole country. Long term, I absolutely agree with her that we need to get businesses to invest more in the economy. One initiative that I am exploring is to try to encourage local government pension funds to allocate a greater proportion of their investments to infrastructure; at the moment, it is a very low figure. I am sure that there is more we can do to loosen the rules without, of course, putting those pension assets at undue risk.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I declare my interest as a founder of a social business, which is on the register. From where I am sitting, I am very impressed with this Government, who have pushed aside all the austerity measures that we were expecting. I think most of us expected that we would return to a Cameron-type, Clegg-type austerity. That involved laying the stones, filling up our hospitals and cutting social support to such an extent that, when we arrived at Covid-19, 85% of our hospitals were full of people who were troubled, poor and broken, largely because of the effects of austerity.

I am a self-appointed historian. I was born in 1946 and I stopped paying for the Second World War in 2007, when Mr Blair signed a cheque for the last time. Did your Lordships know that in 1832 we raised £30 million to pay off the people who had to give up their slaves? We only finished paying that off last February. This generation is paying for previous generations, and those generations paid for generations before them. If this generation turns its back on its responsibility and does not do as the IMF said—spend, spend, spend, and keep the receipts—then we will have no economy and no society, and we will have an enormous amount of problems.

I am really blessed. I am grateful for the bounce-back loan and for the chance of having the furloughs so that I can look after my staff and still help those people who I have appointed myself to help on the streets of the cities of Great Britain.

I shall end on another problem. I know many self-employed people, including my brother, who cannot find their way through the intricacies of what is being offered by the Government; some 3 million to 5 million people are falling outside it. I suggest that we need to fine-tune ways of how we can help those people. News came through yesterday that 1 million people, the backbone of Britain, doing all their self-employed jobs, are now giving up on self-employment and trying to find jobs. That is because they are not getting the support that the Government are offering.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for his supportive comments. I completely agree with him that intergenerational solidarity is vital as we come through this crisis. I worry about the cliff edge of debt that we are generating, but I accept his point that we need to be here today for all those very vulnerable people who we have tried to help over the past six months. I hear what the noble Lord says about the complexity of eligibility. I am pleased to confirm to him that we are working to make clearer eligibility criteria. They have been introduced for the third SEISS grant, and we have committed to there being a fourth grant early next year.

Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill [HL]

Lord Bird Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 13th March 2020 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Bird]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, it is very strange idea, us trying to bring a Bill to the House that is, if anything else, about looking at how we can improve the way that we make laws in this country.

As I came into the House of Lords today, I saw over in the corner of the station many destitute people—10 or 12 of them. If you analyse the reasons why they are destitute, you will probably find that it is because, at some time, some law or some government intervention removed their well-being and reduced their ability to function in society, so they ended up there as a result of the law of unintended consequences. I will give a few examples of such former laws because I would like this to lead to a change in the law. I am of the opinion that, over the past 40 years, every side of House—left, right, centre—has, through the law of unintended consequences, created Bills and Acts that have added to many of the problems we now face.

I will not pick on anyone in particular—I am a Cross-Bencher but not a gloating one. I have made many mistakes; not in this House at least, but before I came here I spent 25 years trying to help the homeless to help themselves. I spent 25 years trying to lift people up who were in crisis. It was only three or four years ago that I realised what I should have been doing was preventing them falling in the first instance. One of the reasons I petitioned to join this House was so that I could begin the process of preventing people falling down and ending up in places like Westminster tube station.

I am not unguilty; I do not have the moral high ground. I have spent 25 years on this and, by the laws of unintended consequences, I should have spent 10 years doing that and then the next 15 years working very hard on preventing the clocks breaking rather than repairing them. I am not alone.

In the mid-1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s Government—I am not here to slag off Margaret Thatcher, by the way; I know a lot of people are for or against her, but as a Cross-Bencher I have no opinion—decided, they thought wisely, to close down our mental institutions because they were not working very well. Our asylums were not working well, because there was not a lot of science or psychological help there. I went into these places to see members of my family, and they were horrible.

In 1987 the asylums were removed; they were very primitive and Victorian but had a number of advantages. Instead, the Government came up with this very nice-sounding thing called “care in the community”. I was one of those saying, “This is ridiculous.” The reason I was saying that as a member of the public—I had not even started the Big Issue then; at the time I was a Marxist-Engelist-Leninist-Trotskyist, trying to prove that capitalism was not working—was that this was a clear sign of that, because I and a number of others said that if you close down the mental institutions, the streets, prisons and A&E departments will fill up. Lo and behold, 40 years later we have the unfortunate situation where some of the most wretched people are on our streets—an extension of A&E.

We have all these problems because of the laws of unintended consequences. I do not think Margaret Thatcher and all the other Conservative Members at the time were thinking, “You know what we’ll do? We’ll turn the United Kingdom into a place where the most wretched are offered nothing.” I do not think that they intended that. I think they thought, “Tell you what, we’ll modernise it, save a few bob and have this ‘care in the community’”, which did not even happen.

That was thinking translated into laws. Why do I want a Bill where there is a commissioner looking at the laws of unintended consequences and the well-being of future generations and people yet to be born, preventing people becoming Big Issue vendors or sleeping in the streets? Because, actually, we do not have a very sustainable situation. If we go to JPMorgan or somewhere similar—those places that fiddle around with figures and statistics—and say, “Could you tell us how much of the time of both Houses is spent repairing the damage created by previous laws which have been a bit here and a bit there?”, we might come up with some interesting statistics. I have been told by local authorities that 70% of their time is spent on making up for the problems that are caused by poverty.

When you look at the law of unintended consequences, if there had been a commission looking at the well-being of future generations at the time, it would have said, “Hang on, you can’t do this, because if you do, you will be condemning people.” We need to look at the mental health provision and create therapeutic communities so that when people go in with illnesses that are curable, they come out at the other end feeling a lot better because they have had the psychological and social help they needed.

We have got a Conservative Government giving us many of the problems of today. Last year I spoke in this House about what I considered to be one of the problems of social housing. This is now my chance to have a go at the left. I have had a go at the right, so now I am going to have a go at the left. I was born in the slums of Notting Hill and about 10 years after I left, a guy called Rachman moved in and bought the houses. He took people’s doors off and did all sorts of things. Previously, the Conservative Government had said that when someone leaves the lease, the property could go on to the open market, so Rachman was driving people out. He would then divide the apartments into two and all sorts of things like that. This caused consternation. A threepenny bus ride away from where that was happening, here in the House of Lords and the House of Commons, people were really upset about it.

After the minority Government of Mr Harold Wilson came in in 1964, he cleverly brought in the Rent Act 1965. It said that from then on the protection of the tenant was paramount and above the protection or the interests of the landlord. That was absolutely brilliant because rent tribunals were brought in. As a 19 year-old young father, I could go to the tribunal and say, “I dispute this rent.” Nine months later they would settle, by which time I would have moved on. That led to a real problem for social housing with people living in poverty and in the most need. The landlords removed most of their property from providing accommodation to people who were poor and it started to be sold. That is when the middle classes started to buy a house in Fulham for £5,000 and sell it two years later for £50,000. Then in the late 1960s there was an enormous rush into social housing. I witnessed that. Then the bar was raised. You could no longer get social housing unless you could prove some local connection or the fact that you were prepared to pay the rent. Suddenly, you had to be the most desperate of people to get into social housing.

Housing estates used to be sociable housing—the sort of housing that I moved into when I was 10 after we got out of the slums—where there were all sorts of people such as police officers, trainee teachers, the old and infirm and the long-term unemployed, and there was a great social mix. It was sociable housing. It was not a house where the local authority and housing associations had to raise the bar so much that you had to be desperate to get in, and then put you with a lot more desperate people. What was actually happening was that we were breaking something. The laws of unintended consequences had led some very well-intentioned people to stop the slum landlords knocking their tenants around, unfortunately, left right and centre.

We can look at what Mr Clegg did in 2010 when he jumped in with our friends from the Lib Dems and put together the coalition. I bet he has often thought, “Maybe I should have stuck with the students. Maybe I should have been more critical of austerity.” The noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, said yesterday in the debate that I took part in, “If only in 2010 the coalition had realised the damage caused by austerity was not simply a question of saving money but that the effect would go on and on.” I am trying to give examples—and including myself—of where you do something and you screw it up for the future.

The Bill that I propose is based very much on the Welsh Bill. In my opinion, it looks much more grown-up, together and thoughtful than anything we do now. We have to put up with all sorts of things. The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, alerted me to this problem 10 years ago. She said that she had spent the early part of her life as a young lawyer campaigning to protect the rights of the accused, only to find 20 years later that people who were accused of rape were using all those defences so that in the United Kingdom to get a rape case through the courts is like pulling teeth. She said in the Observer, “I am so sorry that I did that.” That is bravery. That is someone saying that we have to change the laws of unintended consequences.

I cannot think of a way in which we can tackle this issue any better. I going to refer to my notes at this point. I have written down what I must ask for because I am not very good at that. We should have a UK commissioner for future generations; preventive spending; working towards well-being goals for future generations; and tests for new proposals. I would also love to thank all noble Lords who have come along and given up their Friday for participating in this debate. I would like to find a way of getting the Government to wake up to the need. We cannot leave this unsustainable thing where laws are created and then the damage is passed on to other generations. We cannot leave the damage and the despoliation that that socially and environmentally leaves to the well-being of the generations of people who are not yet born. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bird]

I thank noble Lords for what has been a very moving and exciting afternoon for me. I join the rest of your Lordships in saying this, but it is interesting that we are doing this in the middle of the debates around health and the coronavirus—where we are and where we are going to be. It is a very interesting thing that we are building. I am standing on the shoulders of other people. As the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, says, it is brilliant that we should bring something forward that has been road-tested. It is being road-tested in Wales—and Wales, as we know, is responsible for many innovations such as smoking bans or opting out for the kidneys.

Anyway, I am just a pretty face and not a parliamentarian. Perhaps I am a parliamentarian in the making; I hope to improve with the passage of time. I am very pleased that I have a good team. I have the Big Issue to help me, and many charities and social groups behind me. We intend to turn this into a large movement, which we hope will sweep the Government along with us in a groundswell. We think that this is the beginning of really grown-up, cognitive thinking around how we prevent the future being a repetition of many of the mistakes that we made in the past. I made some comments on those earlier.

The noble Baroness, Lady Massey, talked about young people. We will be engaging young people and bringing them into the argument. The noble Baroness, Lady Brady, talked about business. When I started the business of the Big Issue, I did not do so as a charity; I started it as a business response to a social crisis. I am incredibly inspired by all my friends, in the City and other places, who have led the battle to improve the lot of those in the future by investing in social and environmental change. I would like that argument to go on. The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, has done us all a big favour—sotto voce, as they say in Italy, go easy, and do not beat anybody over the head.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord True, very much for his comments. I was not expecting him to roll over and take it, so to speak. We will begin the process and look upon what we are doing as a menu, in a way. It might not be possible to take everything from it but I believe that this Government have a unique opportunity. They can turn and put a line in the past, and say, as in the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Collins, “Let us all work together”. Thank you very much.

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

Housing: Permitted Development Rights

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

On the case concerning Watford which the noble Baroness mentioned, the borough council may appeal against the planning inspector’s decision within the next few days, so she will understand if I put that to one side. I make two general points: first, I hope all noble Lords will agree that, if you have redundant office or industrial buildings in an area where there is a severe shortage of residential accommodation, it makes sense to convert the one to the other. That is why the coalition Government in 2013 issued the permitted development order, which said that if you have planning permission for an office, you have planning permission for residential. That policy has produced 46,000 new homes, the vast majority of which are of good quality. Secondly—here, I agree with the point the noble Baroness made in a debate last week and which the noble Lord, Lord Best, raised yesterday—there have been some very unsatisfactory applications of that policy and some homes of very poor quality have come on to the market. That is why we have announced the review. We want to learn from Watford. The review is scheduled to complete by the end of the year. I take what she says about urgency: we want the policy to produce properties of a decent quality.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, can the Government not take this wonderful opportunity to praise the borough of Watford for not slipping us back to the 1940s and 1950s, when many of our poorest people lived in appalling conditions?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I hope the noble Lord will understand if I do not praise the London borough of Watford, as it may be about to take the Government to court—that might get me into difficulty. However, I agree with the thrust of what he said. It is worth reminding the House that the Prime Minister said last month that,

“I believe the next government should be bold enough to ensure the Nationally Described Space Standard applies to all new homes”.

I agree with that.

Future Generations

Lord Bird Excerpts

Wednesday 26th June 2019 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Bird]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Young of Cookham on 26 November 2018 (HL11361), by what means, if at all, they require public bodies to act, and to demonstrate how they act, in a manner which seeks to ensure that the needs of the present generation are met without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, public bodies operate in the context of an overall framework of government policies and guidance that ensure financial and environmental sustainability. Fiscal rules implemented have meant that the Government are forecast to meet their fiscal targets early, with debt falling as a proportion of GDP in 2020-21, reducing the burden on future generations. Government guidance, such as the Green Book, ensures that public bodies consider monetisable and unmonetisable value, including environmental impacts on air, water and climate change.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

It is interesting that today we have a “The Time is Now” demonstration outside; it is interesting to us all to realise that we are moving towards many big problems. The thing about the Welsh commission—which I am very pleased the Government want to look at—is that it tries to bring together poverty, education and so on, so that we can look at the problems coming down the line. I would like the Minister to agree to meet me so that we can look at what has happened over the last five years with the Welsh commission. I am guilty of banging on about the Welsh; I am not a Welshman, but I do love this Act.

Social Housing

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I welcome this opportunity to talk about social housing and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for tabling the question for debate. Harold Macmillan responded to Rachman, who had died a few years before, by having a unified House that brought in the rent tribunal. The rent tribunal meant that people like me could rent a flat, disagree with the rent, go to the rent tribunal and spend three or six months playing around so that the landlord did not get his money. This led to a 40% fall in the amount of cheap housing in the private sector. Until that point, only 30% of the population of the UK was in social housing. Enormous pressure was put on social housing, which meant that local authorities, and then the increasing number of housing associations, dealt only with the desperate. That ended social housing once and for all. You then have a new form of social housing, full of ghettos of profoundly needy people, instead of it being sociable housing, as it was before, with a mix of tenants, including working people.

I was born in a London Irish slum. We eventually got a council flat in Fulham in 1956. In the block of flats that we lived in, there were policemen, teachers, our first parking warden, caretakers and lorry drivers, and mixed in with them were the needy—people who were disabled and so on. It was sociable housing. We lost sociable housing when, with the best will in the world, the Rent Act took out of circulation a large amount of private housing, putting enormous pressure on local authorities. The local authorities, unable to meet the housing need, said that people had to fulfil the most dreadful criteria to be given social housing. So the next generation of my family, who lived in Fulham, never got social housing. We have to avoid that situation.

We also have to avoid what happened in the 1970s and 1980s, when we pulled down the crap put up in the 1950s and the Ronan Points that went up in the 1960s. We have to be very careful how we do this. We can call for all the social housing that we want but let us make it sociable. When only 0.5% of children living in social housing will get to university, it means that we have the worst form of social engineering possible.

Taxation: Digital Publications

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

The noble Lord makes a forceful case for equalising the VAT rate on e-publications and conventional publications. He rightly says that, on Tuesday, the EU decided that countries now have the freedom to make that equalisation, so we could now move to a zero rate instead of a standard rate on e-publications. Tuesday was apparently “eVAT Freedom Day”. I can tell him that the Professional Publishers Association is pursuing this with the Chancellor and the Treasury, and on 29 November the Financial Secretary wrote back to it saying: “The industry’s arguments and economic analysis are welcome to enable the Government to determine the benefits and risks both for digital business and high street retailers associated with extending the zero rate of VAT to e-publications”. I note the forceful arguments made by the noble Lord to support that case.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Is it possible to follow the examples of Italy and France, which have just removed VAT on the basis that it is a tax on learning and intellectual rights? Perhaps this is the moment we can jump in and show that, whatever happens, we will not tax our children, who have to pay through the nose for their digital materials.

[Lord Young of Cookham]

The noble Lord makes the same case as made by the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath. On Tuesday, all countries within the EU had the freedom to change the rate from 20%, the standard rate on e-publications, down to zero. We have had that freedom for only two days, so both noble Lords are very prompt in urging us to use it. As I said, negotiations are now under way between the interested parties and the Government to assess the case. If the case is made, I am sure that the Chancellor will look at it favourably.

Prisons: Rehabilitation

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2018 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Bird]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to ensure that prisons and young offender institutions are safe and able to meet the rehabilitative needs of those imprisoned.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, “appalling” was the word used by the Prisons Minister about what was happening in Birmingham over the summer. It is a very interesting expression: it was in “an appalling state”. There had to be an enormous amount of effort moving prisoners around out of Group 4’s prison. We cannot deny that. The five prisons run by Group 4 have a relatively good record on rehabilitation. There are pluses and minuses. On average, if you are in a Group 4 prison, you will cost the state about 25% less than if you were in an ordinary prison and about 45% less than if you were in a public/private investment programme prison. If you look at Group 4 and what it has brought to the table, on average it has increased the quality, to some extent, at a cheaper price.

We must commend the Government and Group 4 and thank the Prison Service because, if it has done one thing, it has kept our boys and girls locked up. It is pretty good at that. You have 83,000 very clever, thoughtful people, who on average are very astute, and you have managed to keep most of them banged up. That is an enormous achievement and we should thank Her Majesty’s Government for it. The problem is, of course, that since 2010 we have lost more than £500 million of investment in prisons. This year, we have had a 26% increase in attacks by prisoners on staff and a 19% fall in staff numbers in this difficult area.

What do we do with our young men and young women, our children, who fall by the wayside and get involved in crime and wrongdoing? In a civilised society, you do not just bang them up. If it was just about banging people up, we would have the best record in western Europe. We have a lot of people banged up— more than anywhere else in western Europe. We should congratulate the Government because, if you were to ask a victim what they would like to happen to the person who mugged them at the ATM, some would say, “Execute them,” and some would say all sorts of things. If you said, “Look we can’t do anything, but we can bang them up”, that person would probably—I certainly would—say, “Bang them up, hurt them, take them out of their family, make them suffer for what they have done to me”. Let us be honest: an eye for an eye works in certain circumstances. But then you have an even bigger problem, because the person goes in bad and comes out worse.

When they come out, because the investment in their transformation has been niggardly, small and shrinking over the years, you have a rather difficult situation. They often end up homeless, lost and broken with their family. They often end up a drain on the rates and the taxpayer. What we save in keeping them in a cheap jail is immediately destroyed because we have to pick up the cost socially and in other areas. If you take somebody who comes out of prison with no future, no education, no social training and no way forward, then you can probably look on them appearing in the public record again and again over many years. And they might end up costing over £1 million.

So what can the Government do about it? There has been a doubling of the prison population since 1993. We must remember that our friends on the Labour Bench introduced 3,600 new offences in the course of their time in government, so one reason why there might be more prisoners is that there are more reasons to bang people up. But let us not get into a party-political squabble. Since 2006, we have halved the number of community sentences, but we know that community sentencing works pretty well, and we know that short sentences do not work well—they are almost an introduction to a university of crime. Yet, since 2006, we have cut the number of people and look for an answer beyond custodial sentencing. We cut the link and the possibility of restorative justice and getting somebody who has been a naughty boy or a naughty girl to participate in the community. We have done that and brought in more short sentences, even though we know that they are not working.

We can play around with the facts and figures and throw around percentages. We can do all those things, but I am not here to do that. I came into the House of Lords to dismantle poverty. That means looking at the causes of poverty. Where does poverty come from? What can we do about poverty? If we take the boys and girls who were banged up and magnetise them and then get a big map of the UK and we magnetise the various cities where most of the crime, poverty, indolence and social failure is and we threw them up in the air, they would come down in particular pockets. We would have a social crime map of the United Kingdom. What are we doing as a nation, as a Government, as a political system to question the predictability of failure if you come from Moss Side? I bet a pound to a penny that there will be more criminals from Moss Side than Knightsbridge, although there is a different kind of criminal in Knightsbridge, obviously—they will not hit you with a stick, but they might get their hands on your pension. But we will not go into that because I do not want to be geographically snobbish.

Why do we always worship at the altar of today, and tomorrow is going to be another day? It will look just like today but worse. We need a Government who are involved in the full process of stepping back and saying, “Where do the problems come from? Where do the social illnesses come from?”. I heard the end of the NHS debate. Is it not wonderful that we could form a new super-government department made up of the NHS that would have prisons and unemployment in with it? Because they all figure together. They all bounce off each other. When on average 70% or 80% of people who end up in prison have mental health problems, is it a question of crime, social preparation, parenting, the street that you live in, or having a mum and dad earning at most £6, £7 or £8 an hour, who are run ragged and cannot give you the kind of guidance and opportunity you need to move away from crime?

We need not just a few clever little tricks; we need to rethink crime. We need to rethink prisons as opportunities for transforming naughty boys like me, who may even end up in the House of Lords. Thank you.

Intergenerational Fairness in Government Policy

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 26th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to be talking on this subject and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, for the opportunity. I am interested in it because when I decided to apply to become a Cross-Bencher—and was accepted—it was because I realised that all the work I was trying to do around social intervention was always passing through the prism of government. For instance, in the early 1990s I could give homeless people an opportunity to stand on their own two feet, earn their own money and morph their way out of poverty, while at that very moment—this is not a party-political point—Mr Blair started to put a shedload of money into giving people who were on the streets social security and got rid of a whole group of people. We were trying to turn them into workers while they were turning into beneficiaries. That is one reason there is such a clogging-up in areas of social housing even today. I decided that I would try to get into government and do something, and the thing I want to do is to prevent poverty happening.

I am very happy that the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, raised the case for intergenerational fairness forming a core part of government policy. I would like to add to—or maybe subtract from—that and put the case for prevention across all government departments, so that they are charged with preventing things happening, rather than being very clever and astute, which is what they do. As I have said in the House, we have so many clever people who are very good at fixing the stable door after the horse has bolted.

If we look at the National Health Service, it is an absolute abomination that we are not all asking: when are we going to fulfil what Nye Bevan said in 1948? He said that within 50 years the people of Britain will be a lot healthier, live a lot longer and be in control of their own health. Yet we have a situation now where we have lost the prevention budgets of those early days when, because they did not have so much money, people went into the schools and taught people like me not to get ill. We have destroyed all that, destroyed all social medicine, and now we have to spend ever more on people who are not really unwell at birth or in the early stages of their lives, but become unwell because they are eating the wrong stuff, drinking the wrong stuff and not having the right exercise. When are we going to have a National Health Service, rather than a national “let us get back to health” service? We could send a coach and horses through all the budgets we have talked about today.

The other reason I came into the House of Lords was to be practical. I notice that 64% of the younger generation, those between the ages of 16 and 24, are stuck in rented accommodation and this figure will go up and up. What can we do to help them have a better life? Noble Lords will know that I have been working on the Creditworthiness Assessment Bill, which is a very simple thing. Why are we ruling out those people who have a rent record and not a mortgage record? Why are they paying more for credit? Why can we not bring those people into the property market by giving them the chance of not paying so much for their credit, so that they can then start enjoying some of the largesse that others of us have enjoyed? My Bill is soon to have a Second Reading; I am sorry to promote it but I hope noble Lords will jump in and enjoy it. We have cross-party interest.

When you look at Britain, 87% of all money lent by banks is lent in and around property—the buying and selling of property—we have a real problem. Where is the money to build the new generations of work? Why are we going to have baristas? Why do we have to have people with cheap jobs—the £8 an hour or £10 an hour jobs? Where are the real jobs going to come from? I want to know when we are going to start spending on the new generations. When will we start spending on the industries and new investment? If we do not get that right, we shall be in a situation where, increasingly, we will just get poorer and poorer.

It is interesting to consider a sum of money in the region of £50 trillion: it is the largest amount of money in the world and it drives capitalism, Goldman Sachs and all the big operators. That £50 trillion is the world’s pensions. Is there a way that we can tap into that enormous wealth and get it creating the new work for the new generations? I would like those kinds of things to be done. Most of all, however, I would like social security to be turned into social opportunity, because those people who are left behind are costing us an arm and a leg as they tread water. What we should be doing is freeing them up so that they can participate in society as well.