Spring Budget 2024

Lord Bird Excerpts

Monday 18th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I want to talk about the 9 million people who the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, spoke of as being economically inactive—I think it was 9 million or just over, if I got that right. It is interesting—is it not?—that, if you look at what a bank does with its money, you will find that 80% of its transactions are all about the buying and selling of property. That means that 20% is about business. These are the high street banks. That is where we keep our family jewels. It is where we keep all the property. All the prosperity seemingly has to pass through owning property. In Germany, it is the opposite: 20% of what banks spend is on the buying and selling of property. So, we have this really weird world.

What I want to talk about is social housing. Some 19% of people in the UK live in social housing. We do not have enough: 1.5 million people are waiting to be put into social housing if it comes along. We need to build social housing, and affordable housing, so that we can break the situation where housing seems to be everybody’s obsession, whether it is the children of the middle classes or the people who inherit poverty from their parents. I find that so interesting.

The other thing I find interesting is that only about 2% of people who get social housing ever have social mobility. Only about 2% will get their school leaving certificate and go to college or university or get a job such that they can skill themselves away from poverty. We have this enormous problem: we do not have churn in social housing. The Government need to look at why, while we invest in social housing, it is not the basis of building a life for a family; it is about building a life to guarantee that for the next 100 years, the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren will be living in poverty.

If we are talking about creating a growing economy, we need to look at what is actually happening in social housing. Statistics today show that about 60% of people who use A&E come from social housing and from poor housing stock. Some 50% of NHS costs are spent on trying to keep the poorest among us as healthy as possible.

I am not an economist, but I am determined to raise the question again and again. If we are to have social housing, it has to be on the basis of accommodating potential. It should not be simply warehousing people: putting them into social housing where they then become hard on themselves, less and less able to live full human lives.