Policy-making: Future Generations
Lord Bird Excerpts(5 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Laming (CB)
In the absence of my noble friend Lord Bird, who cannot be here, I ask the Question in his name on the Order Paper.
Mental Illness: Job Security and Inequality
Lord Bird Excerpts(5 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Bird (CB)
My Lords, it is good that we have a report from the UN rapporteur Mr Dainius Puras. I shall refer to it very briefly because it is part of the reason why I asked for this debate. Many of us are working on mental health, but Mr Puras alerts us to looking at it not simply as a thing in itself but as an expression of all sorts of other things. If you want to sort out somebody’s mental health, you need to do things other than look at it simply as a medical condition.
Apparently 16%, or one in six, of people in the UK—I do not know whether this goes for other countries—will suffer some form of mental well-being issue or have mental health problems, acute anxiety or an inability to function in life at some time in their life. That is an incredible figure. We know that with the austerity cuts that have been hitting us since 2010 there is more evidence of people suffering from mental well-being problems. We need to address that, so all of us who are involved in the fight against poverty—it is related to poverty—are asking the Government about it. If one in six people is going to hit the mental health or mental well-being barrier, as a society we will have to up our interest, support and need to dismantle all the things that bring about lack of mental well-being.
I shall briefly talk about myself. Wherever I read about mental well-being and all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune thrown at the poor, I am astonished that I have managed to survive all the slings and arrows thrown at me and all the slings and arrows that I threw in response. I shall mention a lovely quote:
“You are who you are because of other people”.
That is from the work of Julie Hannah, I think quoting Mr Dainius Puras, but I am not so sure about that. You are who you are because of who you know. It is a brilliant quotation. I was very fortunate that every now and then I met somebody who behaved in an adult way towards me, such as my probation officer. I am so glad to hear that we are bringing probation back inside and not leaving it to the ne’er-do-wells who do not seem to be able to handle probation in the commercial sector. Probation was the service that stopped me behaving strangely in a way that would harm my mental well-being. I survived because of the people I met, such as my ex-wife. I would like to praise my ex-wife, who took me in, looked after me and helped my mental well-being. The problem is that most people are not lucky enough to be a ducker and a diver and a bobber and weaver and a cheeky chappie like John Bird. I am very fortunate, but there are a lot of people out there who do not have the succour, support and opportunities that came to me. It was lucky, but it was mainly the fact that there were people who looked at me in a particular way and helped me into work, education and sociability.
One of the good things that the rapporteur, Mr Dainius Puras, has said is that you cannot always look at mental health with a medical response. You cannot think that it is a National Health Service problem. It is not simply a National Health Service problem; it is a problem for all of us because it is a tangential series of things that need to come together. We need to ensure that people can get out of poverty because poverty is the big killer when it comes to holding people back in society. We know that there is a direct relationship between mental health and well-being and what you are doing in life. We know that the poorer the food and standard of living, the more enormous threats there are to your mental well-being. I do not think the Government need that proved once again. All we need to know is that the Government are going to up the tangential belief, not simply the medical belief—the pharmaceutical road that you take to sort out people’s mental well-being. If you have a good job, it increases the chance of you having a stable mental health existence. If you have a good job, you can pay your own way and take your family on holiday, to a museum or to the seaside and have a general sense of purpose in your life. If you are living on the edge, you are like somebody with permanent toothache. You are stuck there and it will affect your mental well-being, which will go out of the door.
Over the past six months, we have been working on a very interesting project in Northampton. We chose Northampton before the council went belly up; there was no relationship between the two; that was to do with somebody else. We chose Northampton because we wanted to do something very simple. We accepted the idea that if you want to address the questions of mental well-being, you need a supportive, stitched-together, functioning community, not a series of holes where people wander from hither to thither without any sense of purpose. We did something very simple. We got people in Northampton to start to trade together. We got the housing association working with the estate agent and the hospital working with the local bread company. We pulled them together. We were trying to lay down the first stages of re-engaging with a healthy community so that it could then move on and have the mental well-being, the jobs and all the other things that you need when you have a community.
Northampton is very interesting because we have managed to create what we call a social echo. A conference is coming up there. It is wonderful. It is an inspiration on our part, but it has been taken up by local people. A social echo is how you create businesses working in the community—for instance, providing work for long-term unemployed people who were suffering enormous mental health problems. How do you manage to get them back into work? The way you do it is by looking around the community and asking whether the housing association’s services can be sold to other players in the community so a job comes out of it.
I am an incredibly practical person. I have never done anything complex. I always describe my work as very dumb. When it came to working with homeless people, I did not address their mental well-being or the fact that they had been troubled and harmed in their early lives; I addressed the fact that they were getting themselves into trouble and into crime. I created a crime prevention programme so that people would stop committing crimes because I thought it was important to remove crime from their lives, and then you could address the mental well-being issues and all the other issues. You could start pulling them together in other ways.
I have now got to sit down.
Child Poverty
Lord Bird Excerpts(5 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Buscombe
My Lords, of course we take the issue of poverty very seriously, although inequality has fallen. Tackling disadvantage will always be a priority for this Government. We have already taken steps to tackle food inequality by providing free school meals and our Healthy Start vouchers. We are also investing up to £26 million in school breakfast clubs along with £9 million to provide meals and activities for thousands of disadvantaged children during the summer holidays, which is something that has not been done before. We continue to spend more than £95 billion a year on working-age welfare benefits.
Lord Bird (CB)
My Lords, if we were to tackle the low-wage economy and the low social security economy that goes with it, we would lift people out of poverty. There is no way that young people can go to school and lead a full life if their parents are on, at best, between £5 and £9 an hour.
Baroness Buscombe
My Lords, we have taken strong action to support working families. We now have the national living wage and so on, but I agree entirely with the noble Lord that it is incredibly important to look closely at low pay and issues around debt. The Government are doing this, and indeed it is something that is close to my heart. Sometimes debt goes to the heart of why people are in poverty. We need to get much closer to this issue and in the coming months we will be introducing a breathing space to help people out of debt. We are also keen to ensure that children learn how to cope with money because that, as well as a low-wage economy, is often at the core of where things go wrong.
Poverty in the United Kingdom
Lord Bird Excerpts(5 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Buscombe
My Lords, I am disappointed that the noble Baroness thinks that the Government are not listening. Only last week, she heard directly from front-line staff at the Department for Work and Pensions—I am grateful to her for coming to the department—about the vital work they do 24/7 to ensure that claimants receive the right support. In turn, I listened to the special rapporteur on Radio 4 say that people receive no funds for between five and 12 weeks when they enrol on to universal credit. That is just plain wrong and, frankly, undermines the credibility of this report.
Lord Bird (CB)
My Lords, will the Government supply us with a plan for how they are going to rescue that wonderful thing, which is that work gives social mobility and social opportunity, at a time when it is obvious that in-work poverty is increasing at a greater rate than out-of-work poverty?
Baroness Buscombe
My Lords, I greatly support what the noble Lord has always said—we believe in giving people a hand up, rather than a handout, which is about empowering people and giving them the right support. Each universal credit claimant has a caseworker and a work coach who gives them the right support in their family or personal surroundings and then, through little steps at a time, helps and encourages them into work to support them, their family and their children. They are empowered, given confidence and lifted out of poverty.
Poverty and Disadvantage
Lord Bird Excerpts(6 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Bird (CB)
My Lords, it has been a bad morning. A few miles down the river, a commemoration of the Grenfell Tower disaster has been taking place at St Paul’s Cathedral. It is good that we commemorate what happened there and bring justice to those who lost their lives and give them the opportunity to be remembered. I hope that we can move forward to a different situation, where the likes of Grenfell Tower will never happen again. Unfortunately, the social housing end of the economy is where many of the problems that we associate with life and death, and health and safety, are to be found. I do not know that this is the end, but I would like to think that we will come to some conclusions and that Grenfell Tower will be a beacon to us to continue the fight to bring justice to the question of social housing. People in social housing should not be living almost in a third world, where their safety and well-being are not accounted for or supplied by the local authorities and the superabundant number of people who are rushing around keeping us safe in our beds at night.
Last week I had to bury a cousin down in Chatham. I was very fortunate to be picked up at my hotel by a gentleman who came from Pakistan or northern India; I was not quite sure which. He took me to the crematorium and on the way back he pointed out the grammar school and the private school. As we were going along I asked whether he knew those schools. He said, “Yes, my daughter is at the grammar school and my son went through the private school, at £14,000 a year, and is now something big in the City”. He was not sure what he meant by “something big in the City”, but it obviously meant that he was making a shedload of money. It is interesting that that is one of the stories that we all love to hear—about the indomitable spirit of people who do not accept poverty simply because they have no money and very little chance. An immigrant gentleman comes to this country and prospers in a very modest way—because all he does is drive a cab and you cannot make a shedload of money doing that—but he puts all his eggs in the educational basket so that his children can move on. That is absolutely brilliant compared with my own family, who came over from Ireland, who knew how to drink and smoke cigarettes and avoid paying the rent. It is totally different. So there are different immigrations: not all immigrations will lead to a situation where you can tax their prosperity.
I joined the House of Lords just over two years ago, and what I am really interested in is dismantling poverty. I am interested in calling the bluff on poverty, because one problem with poverty is that we have an enormous amount of people involved in measuring it. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, for instance, has been measuring poverty for more than 100 years. We have organisations such as Shelter, Crisis, St Mungo’s, the Children’s Society and the NSPCC. We have a superabundance of people involved in poverty. We have Governments who come into office and swear that they will turn the tide when it comes to poverty. We have organisations such as the Big Issue—I have to declare an interest as the person who started it with Gordon Roddick—where we go out into the streets and offer succour and help to homeless people. We give them the chance of making their own money; we try to get them away from the streets because we believe very strongly in the work that we are doing. Because these people have fallen through the normal safety nets, they end up on the streets in absolute desperation.
All of us are involved. Dare I say—and I do not want to say it in a horrible way—that we are all involved in an industry? The industry involves people writing reports; the BBC ringing me up early in the morning to go and comment on those reports; the Times and the media involved in promoting the reports; people collecting money ad nauseam—ad infinitum—for people in need. It seems to me that we operate on a principle around poverty which is called “emergencyism”. Around 80% of social money is spent in and around the problem, once the problem has become a problem. Very little money is spent on the prevention, and as for the cure, it might happen, but mostly it does not.
I am sorry that I got caught on the rails today, so I am only just here; I say, “Bring back British Rail!”. That is another debate. Earlier today, I thought to myself, “What can I say that is different to what everybody else will say and what has already been said in this House? What can I say to the Government?”. The first thing that I can say to the Government is that they are not doing enough and they never will do enough. To do enough would involve tearing up all the accepted frameworks for doing enough. I say to the last Government and also to the next Government—my argument is not with the Conservatives, Labour, the Lib Dems or any coalition—that it is time to make a major change in the way that we deal with poverty, an absolutely miraculous change. We need an intellectual revolution. I came into the House of Lords to stir that concern up.
I have been involved in the Big Issue for 26 years. Before that, I was working with homeless organisations and before that, I was in poverty and crime myself. Before that, I was born into the slums. You could therefore say that there have been 71 years, which is enough to say to this Government, “When are you going to come and talk to people like me, who say, ‘Let us end this conspiracy of dunces’?”. Forgive me, I include myself among the dunces. When are we going to say that enough is enough?
I do not read every report. I have not read the last 10 Rowntree reports because presumably they were like the previous 10 Rowntree reports. I do not keep myself up to date with the facts and figures about poverty, because all I need to do is go out into the street and talk to people there at 2 am or 3 am and see that they have mental health problems and are outside society. It does not matter how much money the Government give: we have a self-fulfilling prophecy—this self-fulfilling failure on the streets. We need to stop and say, “Let’s work on the diagnosis and go forward to the prognosis”.
The biggest problem is that everybody has a favourite project. I can tell the House about the wonderful gentleman whom I met in the cab, and we could have a little chat and then go away, and poverty will still be there. There is a poverty of spirit—the poverty of responses to poverty—and the worst thing about poverty is that many people who are helping the poor are often themselves suffering an impoverishment. We need to enrich them, and I include myself in this, because I do not have all the answers. All I know is that we need to move forward to a stage where there is a co-ordinated, joined-up plan, where we converge our energies. Why is it that, when I started the Big Issue 26 years ago, there were 501 homeless organisations in London alone? Today, why are there thousands of social interveners that do not work together or try to lock in and dismantle the problems? Why is it that every Government who we have promise the earth and deliver a flowerpot?
Poverty
Lord Bird Excerpts(7 years, 4 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Buscombe) (Con)
My Lords, tackling the root causes of child poverty and disadvantage includes taking action on parental worklessness. New analysis carried out by the Department for Work and Pensions shows that children living in workless families are significantly more disadvantaged and achieve poorer outcomes than other children, including those in lower-income working families. Improving Lives: Helping Workless Families, published on 4 April, provides a framework for a continued focus on improving children’s outcomes now and in the future.
Lord Bird (CB)
I thank the Minister very much for her reply. I would like to make the obvious statement that prevention—
Noble Lords
Lord Bird
Oh! I am sorry. I will not make a statement; I will ask a question. Forgive me. Could Her Majesty’s Government move inexorably towards a situation where we could put prevention right at the centre of all the work we do? We know that prevention pays off. We know that when money is spent on prevention, it reaps enormous benefits. Could Her Majesty’s Government look at the possibility of creating a prevention unit across both Houses and all parties, so that we could at last make sense of the need to prevent people falling into poverty because too many people are stuck in poverty and are not getting out?
Baroness Buscombe
I thank the noble Lord very much for his question. I entirely agree that the focus must be on prevention. We strongly believe that it was right to replace the income-related child poverty targets, which we had until 2010, with statutory measures of parental worklessness and children’s educational attainment—the areas that can make the biggest difference to children’s outcomes. We believe that the way to help people out of poverty is through employment. A great deal of progress has been made and employment is now at a record high level. However, although record levels of employment are great, one in eight children across the UK still lives in a workless family, and we need to tackle that. A prevention unit is a great idea but the reality is that we can perform that function by working across government, as we are doing, on the strategy that we have now developed within Work and Pensions.