Poverty

Lord Bird Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2016 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Bird]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what long-term plans they have, and what action they intend to take in this Parliament, to prevent the underlying causes of poverty in the United Kingdom.

[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.