Covid-19: Poverty and Mass Evictions

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 22nd April 2021 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Bird]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the risk of mass evictions resulting from COVID-19-related poverty; and what steps they will take to prevent such evictions.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful for this chance to talk about something which has caused me a lot of sleepless nights. Thirty years ago, I started the Big Issue. In the past 30 years, including through the Covid period, we have been working with in the region of 7,000 to 9,000 homeless people a year. With some notable exceptions, they are people who were socially prepared, almost from birth, to fall into some kind of crisis. The most common thing among them—apart from the fact that a lot of them have depression, drug and drink problems, social problems such as the breakdown of relationships or come from the working poor, the long-term unemployed or broken homes—is that they did very badly at school. We have 7,000 to 9,000 people. It used to be a bit more in the days of Mr Cameron, but it seems to have gone down a bit, which is a good sign because I do not want one vendor of the Big Issue, to be quite honest. Those people have been socially prepared, and I mean that in the nicest sense of the word; I am not blaming anybody. I am just saying that if you meet them you know that their circumstances are often wretched but they come from wretchedness. Often their family are working poor and their grandparents were working poor and all that, so you could say they have been socially engineered to become the army of people who are homeless.

Last year, when in the region of 35,000 people were taken in from the streets it was wonderful—absolutely marvellous. It was enough to make you cry, and I say that with full sincerity. The way that the Government put their arms around homeless people was incredible. I have never known anybody do that in such a large and manifest way. The figures were that something like 3,000, 4,000 or 5,000 people were expected but it turned out to be nearer 35,000 people. If you look at the profile of where they come from, you can expect the result that could lead to the streets. As an ex-street person, I was socially prepared from a very early age. This does not mean that everybody born into poverty has to end up as a John Bird sleeping rough and in the prison system and all sorts of things like that, but a majority of people come from that profile.

Covid-19 has introduced us to a much more frightening reality. We have those people—quite a small number in the region of 50,000 to 60,000—who are rough sleepers throughout the United Kingdom but there are in the region of about 250,000 to 300,000 people who fall into what is called homelessness, whether they are sofa surfers, in hostels or temporary accommodation, with a small cohort to be found on the streets. So you could say that there is in the region of about 300,000. I am not one of those persons who is going to stick with any figures because I have heard contradictory figures from all sorts of people and organisations. If you believe some of the figures, you get up to nearly 300,000; if you believe another lot, you would think that it was 500,000. Anyway, the point I am trying to make is that you have socially prepared people who have failed at school and failed in many ways. They have all sorts of problems around drink and drugs—a cocktail of problems.

Covid-19 has thrown up a completely new group of people. If 2 million people are expected to lose their jobs—we know that the Government are trying to do wonderful things there—and a large amount of people fall into homelessness because of Covid-inspired evictions, you have a completely different group of people. In many senses, it will include middle-class and professional people—people who have had all sorts of support in their lives and should never have become homeless but for the problem of Covid-19. Now, not the socially prepared people—the people I come from; you could say that we kind of half expected it—but people who are not prepared, and whose families and children have fallen into depression, are in this group.

The Government’s response, especially in moving the goalposts, so to speak—that is, moving the eviction ban back to the end of May—has been a series of stopgap actions. We all know that we are in the middle of an emergency; we are not out of it yet. When working in an emergency and trying to move on, saying “We’re going to do this for a bit longer, we’re going to do that for a bit longer” actually undermines the well-being of the people who as yet have not manifested as homeless and presented themselves as such.

We will potentially have hundreds of thousands of homeless people. If we take the 400,000 people living in rented accommodation, not to mention the people who are behind with their mortgages and have had a number of mortgage holidays, and the nearly 400,000 people who are at least nine months behind in their rent—if they pay £1,000 a month, they are £9,000 behind —we could have hundreds of thousands people presenting themselves as Big Issue vendors. I certainly could not handle an enormous amount of people like that.

We have to move beyond the emergency. We have to have a road plan from the Government because it is unnerving people who are caught in this position. We also have to take account of the fact that 60% of people who live in rented accommodation are renting from people who have only one or two flats or houses, and letting is their pension or income. All the big landlords cover the other 40% but it is mainly backbone people in the community and all that.

Today, we have launched a campaign. We are making a film for the 30th anniversary of the Big Issue and it will be about this crisis. We hope the crisis does not happen, but we have to find a way of convincing the Treasury that, for all the money it has spent, if it does not spend money now on preventing people falling into homelessness, the cost could be anywhere between £20,000 and £100,000 per person who does. The cost to the National Health Service if we let hundreds of thousands of people slip into homelessness is untold. So, now is the time for the Government.

I and all the other people working in homelessness prevention will do whatever is necessary to help the Government through this sticky situation. I know, and everybody knows, this is not easy. We have to keep people in their homes, we have to pay their rent or mortgage and we have to support them through the emergency. The emergency might be over in three weeks, it might be over in three months, it might be over in three years, but we have no alternative. Otherwise, the cost will double and treble because it is sometimes four times more expensive to keep people in homelessness than to prevent it. That is what I am asking the Government to do.

I realise that a lot of people will say that we cannot dump this cost on the future generation. I was born in 1946, and I, with many of my contemporaries, finished paying for the Second World War in 2007. Let me tell noble Lords: this is very similar to the Second World War.