Sustainable Development Goals

Lord Bird Excerpts

Wednesday 10th July 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I welcome the opportunity to talk in this debate, but I am sorry to say that I come as a sheep in wolf’s clothing. I am very much here to promote the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015. I have been itching to mention my interest in this Act at every opportunity.

I am very pleased to see in the voluntary national review of progress towards the sustainable development goals published by the Government that the Welsh Act,

“provides a robust legal framework for policy coherence on sustainable development”.

The report says this on 15 occasions about the Act. I would like to see it become available to the rest of the United Kingdom. I am very pleased that the Government recognised on 15 occasions in the report that the Welsh are doing something very clever in bringing together the ideas on the environment, education, and the fight against poverty and for social justice. Next year, after its fifth year, we will see how well it has done. The proof of the pudding is still in the eating.

I am inspired to promote much of the work that Wales has done. There are 17 sustainable goals—we all know them—but we could get rid of 16 of them immediately. We could throw them away because we really need only one. Goal 1 is poverty, and would it not be wonderful if we got rid of poverty, because we would be getting rid of poverty of spirit, poverty of mind, poverty of delivery and poverty itself? We do not need the other 16, because they are variations on the fact that we have not put our time and effort into getting rid of poverty.

We have not dismantled poverty. Much of the work that is done in and around poverty is a kind of handholding. It is about getting people through the day, the week, the month and the year: it is not about dismantling poverty. Eighty per cent of all the social intervention money spent in the world is spent in and around emergencies and coping, and very little in prevention and cure.

I look at this issue differently. I would like us to kick a hole in poverty because, by doing that, we could take on all the questions that have come about because of the poverty of spirit that dominates many of our political debates and the other things that we do. I keep saying—I will say it until the day I leave this place—that this House and the other place spend about 70% of our time on the problems that are thrown up by poverty. We fail 33% of our children at school and 30% of many other areas in the world. About a third of the world’s population have problems in and around poverty, which leads to despoliation.

In the poorest countries people are living in trash. I have worked in Africa, India and the Far East and have seen the relationship between poverty and the poverty of spirit. If you are in poverty, you can never lift your eyes above the horizon. You are like a meerkat, waking up every day, looking around and saying, “How can I feed my children? What do I do? Do I have to prostitute myself? I’ll have to do anything”. If we want to achieve these 17 goals, let us put more effort into dismantling poverty rather than just making the poor comfortable and putting it off until another time.

I started with Wales—trying to make the UK Welsh is my big thing—because I have never seen legislation that so uniquely covers all the considerations, especially around the SDGs, in a way that enables us to say at last that we can put behind us all the rather nasty, limited political debates we have had; all the short-termism that is dominant in this House and the other House and in many of our discussions, the handholding of the poor and not getting people out of poverty.

I will come forward again and again until I get a Bill through the House. I am pleased that the VNR report praises the work of a Future Generations Commission. I hope that the Government and the Opposition will take up this issue so that we can all look forward to the day when we can put aside all the stop-gapism, tokenism and box ticking and concentrate on destroying poverty. Poverty destroys lives. It makes us cheap and makes the lives of the poor the cheapest.