Child Poverty Unit
Lord Bird Excerpts(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Henley
My Lords, I am terribly sorry to say this, but I think I did answer the Question directly. What was the purpose of the child poverty unit? Its purpose was to measure the income-related targets set up by the previous Government. Those targets were a waste of time and we got rid of them. We have now set up something better—the Social Mobility Commission secretariat, based in the Department for Education. As I said in my original Answer, the appropriate measure for these things should be parental worklessness—a responsibility of the Department for Work and Pensions—and children’s educational attainment, and those are the two that we will look at.
Lord Bird (CB)
Have the Government measured in any way the impact on people who fail at school and their relationship to child poverty? Are there any facts and figures so that we can chart whether the policies that the Minister is talking about actually work?
Child Poverty
Lord Bird Excerpts(8 years ago)
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Lord Bird (CB)
My Lords, I remind noble Lords, if they were not aware of it or have forgotten, that I came into the House of Lords because of my work in and around dismantling poverty in people’s lives as much as possible. I am back here again banging the old drum on what we can do about poverty. The longer I am in the House, the more I realise that poverty is at the base—I hazard a guess here—of about 70% of our work, perhaps even more. The laws of unintended consequences mean that changes we made in the economic system 10, 20 and 30 years ago are coming back to bite our posterior.
I say once again that I am here to dismantle poverty. When I am approached by many noble Lords to get involved in defending the poor and tackling the problems that they face, I say, “I am sorry, you are doing a pretty fine job, but I do not see many people wanting to prevent Johnny, currently in school, from selling the Big Issue in 20 years’ time”. I do not see many of the difficult issues of finding the roots of poverty and ways to dismantle its sources and causes being tackled. One of the reasons for that is because there is a lot of confusion around poverty. The biggest confusion arises from the fact that people do not realise that there are two kinds of poverty. There is a poverty of spirit and opportunity, a material poverty and a poverty of social literacy—all those sorts of things. However, there is another kind of poverty. My uncle, an Irishman, who died at the age of 102 in Notting Hill, came over here in 1936 and worked as a postman and a fireman and lived all his life in a kind of poorness. When he came over, he did not have two pennies to rub together. He looked after himself, his wife and his children and has endowed his grandchildren in some senses. He was poor but he never lived in poverty. He went to church and participated in the British Legion, went on holiday and did all sorts of things. He was a poor man who developed the ability, at home in Ireland on the farm, of making a very small amount of resources go a long way. That is poorness. Then there is poverty. Unfortunately, we have seen the demise of poor people who know how to make ends meet, as opposed to the people who are lost in the fog of poverty.
I am being very personal here. My uncle, Paddy O’Regan, had one child, and that child had one child. He lived within his means. If he could not afford something, he did not have it. We mistake that for poverty but it is really just a question of being poor. Unfortunately, his sister-in-law—my mother—had six children and always lived beyond her means. She lived in a miasma of poverty, never participated in democracy or did anything other than her job as a night cleaner, and her day job, and take her six children to school. She lived in absolute poverty, which was made even worse by her inability to cook. She was one of the world’s worst cooks; she could make nothing out of something. Those are the two sides of an Irish family who came over here.
In this debate about dismantling poverty and finding the roots of poverty, I want to focus on the dignity of people who get out of poverty. A friend of mine from Jamaica came over with his mother on the “Windrush” and now owns enormous tracts of Norfolk. He educated all his children and knew how to live within his means. He was an example of the old-fashioned poor. We have created an enormous number of problems through destroying people’s ability to get out of poverty. If the parents of Mr Ed Miliband, who arrived here in 1944 as refugees from Nazi Germany, Poland, or wherever it was, had been given a council house and money on which to live, would he have ended up running the Labour Party? Generosity can cut off people’s opportunity to morph their way out of poverty. That is one of the reasons why we need to look very carefully at what we can do to help the poor. We need to help them by enabling them to get out of poverty. However, there are too many stumbling blocks to doing that, the biggest of which is the fact that 30% of our schoolchildren go through school and come out the other end but you would never think they had been to school. There are people like myself— I learned to read and write in a boys’ prison, as I have said before. Those children go on to form 80% of our prison population and 50% of our long-term unemployed, fill up the hostels and sell the Big Issue. Some 80% to 90% of them come from a failed background of poverty because they failed at school.
We need to do something about the roots of poverty rather than deploy a scattergun effect of initiating a wonderful project here and a wonderful project there which do not converge to dismantle poverty. If we do not do that, we will be having this discussion for many decades. When nearly 3 million children in this country live below the poverty line, we have to do something about poverty, but we must fight it philosophically, culturally and socially. We need to measure the effect of social security in enabling people to rebuild their lives. Social security is one of the most wonderful ways of helping people through difficult circumstances and enabling them to move on but we must not put them in warehouses, as it were. We should not do what was done to some members of my own family—I will not mention them because they will probably get their lawyers on to me—some of whom have not worked for 30 years and whose lives are getting worse and worse because somebody decided way back in the time of Margaret Thatcher that it was all right to open the sluice-gates and allow people to get benefit without checking whether it was any good for them. Those are the kind of things that we need to talk about.
In my time in the House of Lords, I am desperate to get to the roots of poverty. However, if you scratch the surface of the average Member of the House of Lords, you will probably find that earlier generations of their families had to work very hard at the coalface. Somebody suffered and burned the candle at both ends. I have a problem in that I sometimes think that we do not want the poor to burn the candle at both ends because it is a safety risk.
Poverty
Lord Bird Excerpts(8 years, 4 months ago)
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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.
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.
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.
Poverty
Lord Bird Excerpts(8 years, 4 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)
The Government have set out a new life chances approach which will include a set of indicators to measure progress in tackling the root causes of poverty, such as worklessness, educational attainment and family stability.
Lord Bird (CB)
My Lords, I think I may go down in history as the person who asked only one question of this House—how do we begin the process of dismantling poverty? When we have a situation where 34% of all the money received by the Chancellor of the Exchequer is spent on and around poverty; when we spend 12% of our budget on education and yet we fail 30% of our children in school, who then become 70% of the prison population, who then become 50% of the people who use A&E as a drop-in place, when will the Government and the House get behind the idea that we need a different form of intervention in poverty in order to begin to dismantle it? We are pussyfooting around. We are not dismantling poverty in the way that it should be done. Let us be honest and accept that keeping people in poverty is incredibly expensive.
Lord Freud
We are trying to move away from the income transfer approaches that we have seen for some time, to try to handle the fundamental causes of poverty. I agree with the noble Lord that that is where the effort has got to go. It is difficult, but that is the only real way to tackle this problem.
Poverty Programmes: Audit
Lord Bird Excerpts(8 years, 6 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)
We have a range of programmes across government to transform lives, from the troubled families programme and the pupil premium to our flagship reform, universal credit, and we audit the majority of these. Work is the best route out of poverty and this Government are committed to transforming lives by providing people with the support they need at all stages to get into work.
Lord Bird (CB)
Is it not a verity of poverty that one of the big problems with poverty itself is that a lot of the support goes to enabling people to live in poverty and very little is spent on dismantling poverty? So I ask the Minister whether it is possible to create a new way of measuring poverty statistics that asks the question: does this get people out of poverty? There is too much emphasis on keeping people in poverty.
Lord Freud
My Lords, that question goes along exactly the lines that we are going along in trying to transform the welfare system. We aim to create programmes that promote independence among people and the centrepiece of that is universal credit. Within universal credit we have developed what we call a test and learn approach, which monitors the behavioural responses very closely.