Homelessness

Debate between Lord Bird and Lord Young of Cookham

Wednesday 7th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, for raising the issue of homelessness and ask the Government to put their mind to the problem. It is something that every Government in the last 25 years since I started the Big Issue have dealt with; every Government have had their favourites and particular twists on the situation of homelessness. I declare an interest in that I am a person who makes a living out of homelessness; if it was not for the homeless, I might well be homeless. Twenty-five years ago, I started something to help the thousands of homeless people who were sleeping in the West End of London. We are not back there. If you listened to politicians in opposition today you would think that we had arrived there already, but you must be aware of the fact that we could arrive there—so it is a very good idea for us to enter the fray again and say, “Let’s not return to 1991”.

One of the reasons why there were so many homeless people in 1991 was that at the end of the Thatcher Administration the social security laws had been changed and children of parents on social security from the ages 16 to 17 were refused social security. So social security was withdrawn, and the noble Lord, Lord—sorry, I have forgotten your name, forgive me.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

Young.

[Lord Bird]

When the noble Lord, Lord Young, was Sir George Young, as he will remember, there were thousands of young people filling our streets, because of the change in government policy. When I look at what has happened with homelessness over the years, I am probably in a minority, in that I do not believe that Governments are capable of making major changes by one policy followed by another and another. In a way, that is avoiding the major issue, which in Britain today is the fact that we fail 30% of our children in school—and those 30% of our children become 70% to 80% of our prison population and become 60%, 70% or 80% of the people on social security. You get a situation where families are broken, where our children are not given places of safety, where social security is not used as a place of security, and so what happens is you produce another generation of people who become homeless.

The noble Lord, Lord Cashman, says that we could all be homeless—we could be—but the chances are that, if you were failed at school, if your parents are on social security, if you live in a council flat on social security, you are more likely not to go to university and you will in fact have to rely on the university of the streets or the university of the social security office. Most of the people I have worked with over the past 25 years, 95% of them—with some notable exceptions, such as the man who went to school with Prince Charles—come from the same social background as those people who were failed in school.

After 25 years of the Big Issue, I have come into the House of Lords to help to dismantle poverty, not to make the poor comfortable, not to parry with the Government over this, that and the other; I have come into the House of Lords to find methods of changing the way in which we produce another generation of people. I am sorry, but all my knowledge leads to the fact that we spend £19 billion a year on education when we should actually be spending £50 billion a year on education. We should be breaking open the issue of those 30% of children who will go on to fill our prisons, our hostels, our streets and our social security queues.