Council Funding

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 4th June 2019 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Bird]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Institute for Fiscal Studies report English council funding: what’s happened and what’s next?, published on 29 May, what steps they are taking to provide additional resources to councils to enable them to (1) continue to provide, and (2) extend and improve, their existing services.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and Wales Office (Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth) (Con)]

My Lords, the Government are committed to supporting councils and recognise their efforts to deliver critical services for communities. The 2019-20 settlement confirmed that core spending power is forecast to increase in cash terms by 2.8%—a real-terms increase in resources. This allows councils to deliver the services that residents need. The upcoming spending review is the vehicle for agreeing funding from 2020-21 onwards for the sector, and the department’s preparations are well under way.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I think that any of us going around most of our communities would agree that they are being hollowed out. If you look at what is happening with homelessness, libraries and youth services, you will see that there is a lot of feeling in the community that the Government are not standing behind local authorities, so I am sorry but I have to contradict what the Minister says. Any of us walking around will see what is happening. Is it possible that we could raise taxes so that we could give more money to the local authorities, or is it possible that we could give them the right to raise the money locally so that they could improve their communities? The way things are going, the hollowing out and the problems will carry on, and we will be the recipients of very bad anti-social behaviour.

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, the noble Lord’s Question refers to the Institute for Fiscal Studies report, which I have read. The authors of the report, Neil Amin-Smith and David Phillips, are fair in acknowledging some of the things that we have done with regard to local government spending—for example, they cite a 10% increase in children’s social services. But the noble Lord is right in that there has been a reduction in other areas. The report canvasses the possibility of a local income tax, but I do not think that that is the way forward, and nor does my party. However, I am sure that the noble Lord would want to acknowledge that there is much innovation. He referred to libraries—a subject which I know is close to his heart. In Warrington, for example, hubs provide library services with other services, which is an innovative way of improving the service. That has also happened in Leeds and in other areas. I think that that is the way forward.

Homelessness

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, the noble Lord raises a fair point. He is right about the issues around child poverty and child homelessness, which is a particular concern for the Government. That is why, in relation to welfare spending, we are keen that money is directed to those households with children, to make sure that they are able to gain a home. It remains a key priority. If I may, I will write to him on the suite of policies to tackle this across other government departments, because it is an area where we have concerns.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that there are an enormous number of mental health problems on the streets, and that we should see young people—and not-so-young people—on the streets as an extension of our A&E department? As soon as we try to direct some energy towards the health issues of those people, we will be able to get them off the streets.

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, as I indicated in one of my previous answers, there is very much a link between homelessness and mental health. I am pleased that as a general provision we are looking much more seriously at mental health. We marked Mental Health Week recently. This pervades all government policy, and certainly pervades housing spending. The noble Lord will know because he serves on the rough sleeping advisory panel—I thank him for that—that we are keen to address this issue. We have referenced this with various charities, local authorities and metro mayors—Andy Street and Andy Burnham serve on that panel—to try to get advice on some of these issues.

Homelessness: Local Authority Spending

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 2nd May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, the noble Lord and I did indeed exchange views on this previously. The difference in the way spending is dealt with is that the ring-fence was taken off in 2009—actually under the Labour Government. It carried on like that through the coalition years, with which the noble Lord will be familiar, and still remains the case. We need also to focus on the fact that money is spent centrally, in addition to what is spent locally. The £100 million announced in August last year is beginning to have an effect. To take an example of an authority, in Brighton and Hove there were 178 rough sleepers in 2017; in 2018, there were 64. Admittedly there are nuances of difference in the way the figures are calculated, but not enough to account for that significant difference. That spending is going on, and we have a Minister dedicated to this area of activity.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister will agree that one of the most important things with regard to homelessness is churn. If people fall homeless then they should be moved on. Has the Minister looked at the possibility of adopting the PECC method, which I have talked to him about? It is about prevention, emergency, coping and cure. He could then look at the money spent on the projects: is it keeping people lingering in the limbo of homelessness, preventing them becoming homeless or helping them to get out? We have to use something like the PECC method. It is free to the Minister—I invented it; there is no cost.

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

It is good to hear from the noble Lord. I pay tribute to what he does on the rough sleeping advisory committee; I know that he is doing very worthwhile work. There is much to commend PECC, as he says. Yesterday, I was in Redbridge, which is adopting Project Malachi, which we are helping to fund and which is connected with work. This sort of thing is the way forward. It is not the total answer, as I am sure the noble Lord will agree, but it certainly makes a big difference.

Local Authorities: Essential Services

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great honour to speak to the Motion in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Scriven. I have no local authority credentials other than that I have been a road sweeper for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and a dustman, and among other things I was the meals-on-wheels driver for a very big round supported by the borough of Westminster. Therefore, I do not come to your Lordships with wonderful arguments, understanding and insights as to how we need to change the way in which we fund our local authorities, but I can talk about some things. Before doing so, I want to say that I was always well treated when I lived in Sheffield as I hid from the London police in the early 1970s. I love to go back to Sheffield to look at all those places where I was made to feel at home—thank you very much indeed.

When 800 local authority libraries have been removed from the world since 2010, and when you understand that we in the House of Lords spend 2.4% of our budget on the Library but the average local authority spends under 1%, you must ask why it is so important for this House. Why are the Government not saying that we are spending too much on our Library? It is because they know that it is essential to the running of things; they know that libraries create what I love to call mental wealth, which means well-being, opportunity and all the other things that bring people out of the mire.

Whenever we talk about a local authority, we are talking about how we deal with the people who have failed in life—we have heard that this morning and we will hear it more today. How do we deal with those who are homeless or those who suffer domestic violence as was used on my mother, at a time when unfortunately there was nobody in the borough of Westminster to help us? All those who are caught out end up on the doorstep of local authorities.

I am old enough, along with a few others among us, to remember those days when it was not the local authority’s responsibility to look after our old. Back in the 1960s, it was not the local responsibility, although some people were looked after. Something has happened. Local authorities have had to pick up a lot of the grief that is happening in other parts of society. For instance, the National Health Service is so overwhelmed that it cannot process people and they end up on the need register. On one occasion, when we did a survey of Big Issue vendors, we found that 87% of them—I am not saying that the same is true now; this was about eight years ago—had passed through local authority care and come out at the end as vendors, it having cost more than £1 million. I said at the time in an address to the right honourable David Cameron, “Isn’t it interesting that it cost about a quarter of a million pounds to produce you, but more than £1 million to produce a Big Issue vendor?”

I am concerned that local authorities are increasingly called on by the community. We need to rebuild the community and take the weight off the local authority. But it is not an alternative. We know well that, in the days of the 2010 coalition, an attempt was made to use the idea of the big society as a cover for local cuts. Lots of people in many parts of the country made the point then that it was a terrible soft-shoe shuffle. We have to find a way to take the weight off local authorities, but at the same time we have to admit that, with cuts of 49%, austerity has hit local authorities and stopped them being able to provide libraries or for people who have been caught out in emergencies. If those people are not caught in the early stages of emergency, the emergency becomes heavier, deeper, wider and longer. Therefore, you will never save the money that you need to save. That is why I and many others, in this country and around the world, have always said that you need a shedload of money for austerity. Most of us cannot afford austerity: it is too expensive.

I want to give noble Lords a quick outline of some of the stuff I have been doing—I have not been sitting idle in the three and a half years that I have been here. I have been beavering away in a number of communities and looking at ways to work with them and with local authorities. At the end of November, we had a big conference in Northampton. We did not choose to work there because the “something” hit the fan; we chose Northampton and then afterwards the “something” hit the fan, if you know what I mean. We went there with a particular purpose: we wanted to know how we could support the local authority or local government. How could we support all those people who are working away in the community? We came up with a concept we called “social echo”. We looked at estate agents, housing associations, the local authority and the library, and we looked for ways in which we could stitch their work together to take the weight off the local authority and off those profoundly important charities such as the Hope day centre, which works very well with people caught in homelessness and long-term unemployment. We are trying to stich the community together.

I recommend that every authority in this country should look carefully at how to reinvent the local community and take some of the pressure off local government. At the same time, I castigate everybody who says that there is not enough money for local authorities. You may not have the money now, but you are going to need to spend it later on. As I said in this House a few years ago when we were talking about libraries, if we want to close our libraries down, let us close them down; let us build higher fences around our properties and more prisons. In the end, if you do not make the investment at the right stage, you will have to make it at some other stage.

I have to declare an interest. I am a product of the generosity of the taxpayer, who had to put a shedload of money into me because, in the first instance, they did not spend an awful lot on me.

Housebuilding: Target

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 20th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend very much indeed for referencing the success of past Conservative Administrations, under Macmillan particularly, I think. I reassure him that, if I find that I am getting bored over the Christmas period, I will indeed pick up that manifesto, but I have to say that I have other plans.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

In the process of building social housing, can the Government try to return to the old days of social housing when it was sociable housing? The early council houses had a social mix, not just people who were in absolute deprivation, which creates social ghettos outside society.

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

The noble Lord makes an important point about the mix that there used to be in council houses and I am sure that that point will have been heard by housing associations, builders and local authorities. It is also important that we consider some of the earlier designs of council housing, which were probably much more commensurate to happy living than some of the more recent designs, but I remind noble Lords that design is now a factor in the National Planning Policy Framework, so that should carry us forward in that respect.

Housing: Prefabricated Council Houses

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, my gaze does not go quite that far back, but I am well aware of what happened in that Government. Some very good work undoubtedly did occur and has occurred since then. We are a very innovative nation. The modern methods of construction is a constructive way forward. The noble Lord is right about standards; they apply across the piece to all types of housing, as does the design competition that is being launched, which will be open to both the public and private sectors.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Is it possible to also extend the argument around council housing towards transitional housing? There are some incredibly big developments being made on things such as geodesic domes. Why can we not build houses for 20 or 30 years, as we did after the Second World War, that can then be picked up and moved somewhere else? Of course, we would have to use some of the land, without having to buy it, for a transitional period of 10 or 20 years. We could sort out social housing and the lack of housing overnight if we put in some transitional housing.

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, that certainly sounds ambitious. We talked about being innovative and forward-looking, and the noble Lord is. I am happy to take that idea back and to speak to the noble Lord about some of the ideas that he has just outlined.

Housing: Short-Term Lets

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 19th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that under the European Commission, Airbnb is in contradiction of consumer rights? Is he prepared to tell us what the Government’s stand on that is?

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for what he does in this area and more widely on homelessness and housing issues. I am not quite sure what he is getting at when he says that the European Commission has drawn attention to Airbnb being in breach of a particular provision. If it is, I am sure it will face the full rigour of European law in so far as it would apply. I am convinced that Airbnb is acting totally within our laws, as are other short-term accommodation providers. We are trying to ensure that they can share information; as I say, that is an issue relating to the Data Protection Act. If they are unable to do that and if the lawyers cannot crack the problem, we would have to look at the necessity of amending the law. From what I hear, I believe we will not need to do that.

Homelessness: Temporary Accommodation

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Can Her Majesty’s Government look at the human rights abuse that allows people to sleep on the streets? Maybe we need to revisit the old legislation whereby we do not allow people to sleep on the streets but provide places for them off the streets, rather than putting them in prison as we used to. We have an emergency on our hands; we need to remove people from the streets and put them in a place of safety. That should be at the top of the Minister’s list.

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord very much indeed for his contribution in this area—not just in the House but very much outside it. I take his comments seriously. As he rightly says, prevention is at the heart of this complex issue. It is clearly not a simple issue: this country has faced this problem over a period of time. As I say, it is very much at the centre of the Government’s thinking and all agencies contribute to it. We have trailblazer areas looking at this, and Crisis and Shelter, for example, are on our advisory committee. Rough sleeping is something that the Government are very much committed to ending.

Homelessness: Emergency Housing

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 7th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I am not acquainted with the case that the noble Lord mentioned, but I would be very happy to have a look at it if he wants to share the details with me. We are spending an awful lot of money on homelessness prevention, which is important in this regard. We have trailblazing areas—I think from memory that Newcastle may be one of them. Certainly Gateshead is—but that might not be music to the noble Lord’s ear. I will gladly look at the case that he refers to if he would like to share it with me.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Is it possible that we could do something more along the lines of an emergency? Wherever you go in our cities, and whatever Crisis and Shelter do, there are people out there who are distressed and many of them are mentally ill. It is an absolute disgrace and it has nothing to do with human rights. We really have to move very quickly because these people are dying before our eyes.

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, first, I pay tribute to the massive work that the noble Lord does in this area. He and I visited Sheffield together to see some project work that was going on there—the Cathedral Archer project and others are considerable projects. I agree that there are complex problems attached to this; it is not straightforward. Some of these pilots will look at the complex nature of the problem, with wraparound help for example for people who have left the armed services, who are often homeless. We are working with the Ministry of Justice as well in relation to ex-offenders who have a homelessness problem and are often rough sleeping. The noble Lord is absolutely right in the points that he makes.

Inequalities

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 30th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to be speaking in the debate secured by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle. I am a Londoner and I was born in Notting Hill, but I have always tried to escape from London and have, on occasions, lived in other places, such as in Scotland and in Sheffield, Yorkshire.

I have always been aware of what you might call metropolitan imperialism. I call it that because everything seems to want to shift south. I started the Big Issue on the double yellow lines of the West End of London, but very quickly realised that virtually all the people I was working with did not come from London. They were not locals, or London-Irish gits like me from Notting Hill, but were from Scotland, Ireland and, increasingly, Europe. Everybody was being pulled in by gravity: people who had problems as well as those who came to seek their fortune.

The United Kingdom is a very strange beast. It is one of the few major countries where there is only one really big place where you can go and make it. For example, in Germany, you can make it musically, intellectually, culturally or philosophically in all sorts of places, but here you have to come to London. That kind of weirdness, that draw, is behind it all. We really need to start moving some of the institutions, and not just government ones. For instance, that beautiful place, the Barbara Hepworth gallery up in, I forget where—

[Noble Lords]

Wakefield!

[Lord Bird]

Wakefield, forgive me—I have only been there once. It is an absolutely brilliant place, and what an effect it is having on the community. Then, in Margate, there is the way in which the new Turner gallery has helped create a totally new kind of economy, with a 37% to 47% increase in the number of people going down on the train to Margate. There are similar figures for those going up to Wakefield. We need these cultural shifts to help us grow—for instance, the stuff that is happening in Gateshead—as they draw people from other places not just into the UK but further on.

Look at the effect on Edinburgh. I used to live there when it was a poor little place, but an enormous wealth of opportunities has been created by the Edinburgh festival. This has happened in my lifetime: 50 years ago, when I was sleeping rough in Edinburgh, you could not get a penny off anybody, but now you can live quite comfortably on the streets, and probably put a bit away for a bad day. These kind of considerations need to be there to address the interest that we have to show in the fact that we have a very lumpy and strangely formed economy.

When I was the printer for the Victorian Society, I took a great interest in looking into British society. By 1851, for instance, Britain had lost its role as the workshop of the world and was becoming the sweat-shop of the world. Over 100 years later, Margaret Thatcher—the late Baroness Thatcher—closed down all these industries and added to the major problems that we have in this very lumpy economy. I do not know that she had an awful lot of choice, because most of those industries had been on government subsidy since the First World War. The car industry was the only new industry.

We have a very weird way of investing in the future. When we have a situation in Britain where the average bank lends 87% of its money for the buying and selling of property, what is left for the development of new industry? What is left for the development of new educational superstructures and all those things? I was very struck by the wonderful term that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, used when he said it was time for a British Marshall plan. I believe that we need to dig deep and find out a way of doing this. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, in that I have been looking at all these plans over the years and thinking, “When are they actually going to stop talking about it and deliver it?”. We need to do something very profound.

I am doing something quite interesting called social mapping. We are going to cities, towns and villages and finding out who is there, who is doing what and what organisations are there. I can tell your Lordships there is one city that is desperate for help and change. It has 200 different providers who provide social businesses, work and all sorts of things, and they do not even know each other or talk to each other. So we are brokering a relationship between them. Why can we not have communities, like in Carlisle, where there are at least 100 providers in the community providing for the well-being of that community? Why can they not start working together? Why can they not start doing things such as sharing each other’s facilities? Why can they not do that?

I believe very strongly that one of the ways that we can overcome many of the problems that we have with this very lumpy economy is to involve the community in bringing about changes. We cannot rely on government. Governments think in big strategies, and Governments and Ministers change. I remember that when I was dealing with the DWP at the time when the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, was in office, I dealt with four, five or six different Ministers over a period of about eight years. There is this weird situation where Governments change. However, if we go back to the community and start putting the community together and trying to broker social change, we will be able to build on the generosity, local opportunity and local talent that exists. So I would say that if the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, wants to do something in Carlisle, he wants to find out who is there, and neither the local authority nor national government will know. It is only by going back to the community that we can bring about those changes.