Queen’s Speech

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

It is wonderful to be able to talk about justice, home affairs and culture. Based on my own experience, if you want to sort out justice and all the problems of people who end up in the justice system—often people from poverty and need, people who have a predictable road to failure from the very beginning—you do not sort it out through courts, probation and all those things. You give them something to do.

My own pathway out of wrongdoing was to become involved in culture. I became a posh geezer because I started to go to art galleries and read books. As I have told this House exhaustively over the last four or five years, I learnt to read at the age of 16 in a boys’ prison, in a library supported by the local authority. We know that local authorities support 3,000 libraries in England and 350 museums.

In my humble opinion, if you want to change something, you have to change it tangentially. If you go on looking after the poor by simply giving them money—not giving them an opportunity to move on, social mobility or the chance to read, write and learn all the skills necessary to get out of poverty—you end up with this almost arithmetical, dead, dry belief in what justice is. Justice is often something that happens because you have given somebody the chance of some education, some social training, some culture and some arts along the way.

I declare my interest not just in that I used this cultural system to become who I am today but in that I am a VP of the Local Government Association—I think we are all VPs of the LGA; there seem to be a load of them. I am fascinated by the fact that we have an industry that is bigger than the automobile or aerospace industries, oil and gas or life sciences. It is called the cultural industry and it brings in circa £111 billion a year. That is where we need to spend our money. Pre-Covid, it was growing faster than any other industry in the United Kingdom.

What is so beautiful about culture, the arts and sport is that they create social mobility. We know it is not fashionable to like social mobility, largely among people who have social mobility. However, I assure noble Lords that if you do not have social mobility, what you need is social mobility—then you can say, “I don’t like social mobility, because I’m now socially mobile.” Is that not brilliant?

I want the House to recognise the role of local authorities. They are the bedrock— they are the libraries and galleries. They are providing the necessary services that grow this enormous tree in the United Kingdom called the creative industries.