Poverty

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2016 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Bird]

That this House takes note of the case for tackling the causes of poverty in the United Kingdom.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the many noble Lords who have put their name down to speak on this Motion, which is very simple. It asks whether we are going to identify the causes of poverty and, by implication, what we are going to do about ending that poverty.

I sent a very simple letter to the noble Lord, Lord Freud, which I hope he will let me share with noble Lords if they want a copy of it. In it I ask whether, when we spend our social pound, it is possible to identify whether the money that we spend, given by the Government, gets people out of poverty or whether it is a device for helping people to be comfortable in poverty and stay in poverty, and therefore not get out of it.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Big Issue. I have spent those 25 years trying to answer a question that affects the lives of thousands and thousands of people, not just in the United Kingdom but all over the world: how do you assist people to move on from poverty so that they can start to have a full life? Unfortunately, even that question moves into complexity, as I shall set out.

The Department for Work and Pensions, which operates our social security system, has to do two things at the same time, and that leads to enormous confusion. One thing that it has to do is to make sure that people who are entirely dependent are looked after. That means ensuring that, because they have no means of providing for themselves due to their physical or mental health, their age or any of the other reasons that lead people to being dependent, they are not shifted into work or into another situation. That is a really significant job and we do it pretty well, but we do not do a good enough job, because many people are stuck in a dependent life and live in poverty. Why must dependency necessarily lead to poverty?

So my first question is: why do we need to give people so little that they cannot even have a full life? In fact, what the DWP needs to do is give them more money. A friend of mine has absolutely no life because he is looking after his wife, who has MS. He cannot go on holiday or repair his car and so on. Would it not be wonderful if we gave them another £1,000 a month, or £13,000 a year, so that he could have a quality of life? One reason we do not do that is that there is confusion and complexity surrounding people who move into social security, and it has been like that since the days of Margaret Thatcher. We are told that she very much espoused small business, although not small government. In fact, when she was asked by Willie Whitelaw, “What do you do with nearly 1 million people out of work?”, she did not turn round and say, “Let them have cake”, although she might as well have done; she said, “Let them have benefits”. With that, the sluice-gates were opened and the welfare state—that wonderful, beautiful and profound system that was invented in 1948 and, in its original form, was full of dignity—was totally and utterly destroyed and anybody could be shifted into social security. Therefore, instead of investing to get people out of poverty, an enormous number of people were parked up and warehoused. The DWP therefore has the difficult problem of how to establish whether a person is dependent and what it should it do about it, and how can it move people forward and out of poverty.

When I ask this very simple question of how we move people out of poverty, the simple issue for me is whether we can find a way of dividing it so that we do not have what I call the Toynbee/Dacre syndrome. If you read the Guardian and those articles by Polly Toynbee and people on the left, they will tell you that we do not do enough for the poor, and they will go on and on for decades about it. They never, or very rarely—I am a Guardian reader and I love it, like we all do—seem to ask the question: “How do we get people out of poverty?”. And then of course you have the Paul Dacre school in the Daily Mail, which believes that people on social security are all scroungers. That is a mirror of what needs to be faced up to, when the interesting thing is that we could get together as a House and as a Parliament and begin the process of dismantling poverty.

I am involved in a conference next year, to which I hope all your Lordships will come, based on what we call the PECC principle, which is prevention, emergency, coping and cure—it is as simple as that. I have my lovely children up in the Gallery. What I do with them is prevent them falling into poverty, so I give them ballet lessons, violin lessons—you name it, they get it all; they go all over the world; their lives are enriched; I do not leave it just to the school. That is prevention and we do it. The house we live in is full of people whose parents have prevented them falling into poverty or, if they have been in poverty, have helped them get out of it.

[Baroness Manzoor (LD)]

My Lords—

[Lord Bird]

I am sorry. If somebody falls into an emergency, which is the “E” of PECC, and they end up in prison or on social security, they are often stuck there. Then there is the “C”, which is coping—so you have prevention, emergency, coping and cure. Eighty per cent of the money that the Government and charities spend is on emergency and coping. We do not get the big bucks in prevention and we do not get the big bucks in cure. I have joined the House of Lords because I am very interested in the idea that we should be a Chamber that not only looks carefully at the causes of poverty but begins to change the way in which we work with the poor and we give them support. If we could get the able-bodied, like certain members of my own family, out of social security, we could give more money to the people who are stuck and who need us.

We need also to start looking at the way in which the Government budget. I have asked the noble Lord, Lord Freud, whether he would consider doing our budgets in a different way. Why do we have this rather strange thing? We have these government Budgets and people balance their budgets but often, by balancing the budget, they are simply passing the problem on to another budget. I suggest that we develop an almost holistic view of budgeting, so that we can begin this process of dismantlement.

We must recognise the problem. If I had a wonderful chance tomorrow to help Theresa May with her upcoming work, I would say to her, “What are you going to do about the fact that we spend, and have spent, billions and billions yet we keep people isolated and lost in poverty?”. Millions of people in Britain love the idea that anyone on social security needs to be supported, and I agree with that. However, let us support the people who desperately need us and get the other ones mobile and moving. When we give a social pound, let us ask whether it gets people out of poverty or simply leaves them poor. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bird]

My Lords, thank you very much for the past two and a half to three hours. It has been an absolutely wonderful experience for me, a new Lord, who is obsessed with the tyranny of poverty and the life sentence—the death sentence—it often gives the people I come from, who have experienced so much poverty. I think I can outdo even the noble Lord, Lord Ouseley—we can compare notes afterwards—on who has had a more rotten life, or a more rotten beginning.

Some people get me wrong when I say that there is too much emphasis on keeping the poor comfortable or making them more comfortable. I do not mean that I want to get rid of the social security system. I want to help people who need help to get out of poverty, and to help those who are incapable of getting out of poverty to do so. Just because people are dependent on the state, they should not be in poverty. It is absolutely criminal that we have people who are dependent and do not get enough.

Anyway, God bless all your Lordships. I have never met the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, but she comes from Guildford, which is just around the corner from where I was banged up for three years, so we have a connection. I really wish her the best, so God bless her and her husband.

Motion agreed.