Rt Hon Dominic Raab MP: Resignation Letter

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 27th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I think almost no Secretary of State has been as successful as my noble friend, and he has helped here as well by joining the Front Bench. What we debate in this House is a matter for the usual channels, but we are getting on and work is under way on the complaints process.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My experience, having spoken to a number of Ministers, is that a couple of them have said things like, “You won’t get this past the Civil Service”. What does that mean?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I do not dare to speculate on what the thing in question was. The Civil Service has a fundamental principle of political impartiality so, in considering proposals, that is something they have to look at. If something is improper, then the good civil servant—I used to be one—will point that out to the Minister of the day, and it might be that that is what was meant. Obviously Ministers are advised by civil servants on matters of policy, and it is clear that civil servants sometimes disagree with Ministers.

Public Service Ombudsman for England

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 10th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

As the noble Lord says, the war in Ukraine has caused problems as well. We also face a challenging demography in this country. All these things have an effect, but this Government are determined to improve public services. That is a very important objective and I am trying to help with it from the Cabinet Office; I am trying not to make difficulties worse by, for example, inspiring changes that will potentially cause substantial difficulties for the flow of casework, which is so important. I come from a business background. Dealing with complaints well is very important.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, is it also possible to look at the fact that, if you have a financial complaint, you can wait over a year to get it sorted? I know a number of people who are finding that the financial problem they brought is very pressing, and waiting over a year is not an answer.

Cross-government Cost-cutting

Lord Bird Excerpts

Wednesday 21st December 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Bird]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what estimate they have made, if any, of the savings that might be realised by their cross-government cost-cutting exercise.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I will take a leaf out of some of the interesting ways that noble Lords begin discussions in this House. Recently, there was a big discussion on railways and someone—I will not mention who, because I cannot remember their name—described a particular train journey. They were talking about something very big, the railway crisis or whatever you want to call it, but using a little anecdote to tell the whole story. I want to start with that idea, so please bear with me.

I am going to talk about a young woman I met three years ago. She was a librarian in a prison that specialised in sex offenders. She was doing a very important job; she was trying to give something to a group of people, some of whom were banged up for life and some were in and out, who everybody else would rather shy away from. None of us likes sex offenders and people who do things like that, but she was working away. This young woman had four children. On top of that, she was paying a mortgage on her house and was about £10,000 away from paying it off. She left that job and did other jobs, one of which was for Stoke-on-Trent City Council. On two occasions, the council overpaid her. The first time, she managed to pay it back, but the other occasion—the mistake was made by the council—will lead to this woman, at 4 pm on 6 January, being thrown out of the house that she has almost finished paying for.

I use this as an example of what I call a miscarriage of common sense. That is how I see it. You cannot really blame the council, which went through all sorts of rigmarole to get its £7,000 or £9,000 back. Unfortunately, the young woman had three deaths to deal with, almost all at once, including her own father. In the miasma of a life led in poverty, myopia took over. She put her head in the sand and just lost it every time there was a court case, a letter from a solicitor and all this sort of stuff. She was declared bankrupt and is now leaving her home. She and her four children will be homeless on the Epiphany. As the House knows, that is the day the three wise men visited—but there is a lack of wisdom here.

This miscarriage of common sense is largely because the young woman lost the plot. The reason I am interested in this is not just because I know this woman, but because it is exactly what happened to me when I was five and when I was seven. My mother lost the plot and did not pay the rent, and I was homeless at the age of five, along with my four brothers. I was homeless again at the age of seven, with my five brothers. We ended up in a Catholic orphanage in north London for two or three years. I really fell low; the others seemed to bounce back. I spent much of my life getting over those foundation stones of distress.

That is why I hate this idea and want to do everything possible. I am hoping to appeal to the Minister, because I know she has a good heart, to maybe ring up Stoke-on-Trent and ask if the council can stop the dogs, bailiffs or whatever you call them from going after this young woman and kicking out her four children. The council will not pick up the bill, because the house is in the neighbouring county of Staffordshire; she lives in Newcastle-under-Lyme. The council that is throwing her out is passing on a bill of maybe £30,000 to £50,000 a year. I do not know the exact figures to house a homeless family in that area, but that is an example. I do not blame the council. I am just asking it to rethink and not to make this a big issue. Do not destroy the lives of these children and this young mother.

Sorry, I must have a drop of water. Unfortunately, we had a Big Issue event and it involved a lot of drink. As I do not normally drink—well, God bless me. Anyway, I did get here at last.

There is a lovely printing term—it is not a rude term—called arsy-versy, so I would like noble Lords to look at my question upside down and asked themselves, “Is the noble Lord, Lord Bird, really interested in what estimate the Government

‘have made, if any, of the savings that might be realised by their cross-government cost-cutting exercise’”?

I am actually more interested in how much it will cost them socially to make those cuts. I do not believe that the Treasury says, “We are going to cut a bit here and cut that bit, and this is the effect it will have.” We could take £10 out the system, for instance, but it would actually cost us £20. When money is taken out the system because of austerity, as was demonstrated between 2010 and 2016, the problem bleeds into other areas.

I keep saying this and will say it again: when Covid came along, our hospitals were almost full, at 85%. You need 10% for eventualities. In that situation, all you do is pass on the problems. That is why austerity is too expensive. It is too expensive not to repair a few tiles in the roof but to let the roof fall down.

One of the major problems we have is the law of unintended consequences. I am appealing to the Government not to allow this injustice to happen, because it will harm people if we do anything that causes people to slip into poverty more. We need to protect our safety nets. We need to strengthen them and make sure that people do not fall into poverty and are not evicted because of the increase in the costs of living, fuel poverty and all sorts of things like that.

On the NHS, it is interesting that the BMA says that 50% of people who present themselves in hospital with a cardiac arrest suffer from food poverty—so there is a relationship between food and government cuts and what happened with austerity between 2010 and 2016. I have to end there, although I would love to have another 20 minutes—can I? No? Perhaps another time. God bless you all, and happy Christmas.

Boardman Report

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I agree with my noble friend, who talks very good sense. The issues are complex and are being reviewed at the current time: for example, the Government are reviewing the lobbying Act. Because the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee has set up an inquiry, which we are in the process of feeding into, we shall have to see what it comes up with. The issues are difficult, but I believe that inhibiting thought and expression, which is what I fear the noble Lord’s proposal would do, is a very bad idea.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Could we not look at a very simple way of approaching lobbying? That is, to ask, “Does somebody make a few bob out of it?” We could just ask whether somebody is likely to receive vast amounts of money out of lobbying or whether it is for the common good. Often, it is not for the common good; it is for the good of people who are running businesses and want to make money.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for his point. We need to distinguish between inappropriate lobbying, which we have sought to regulate since 2014, and other contributions to thought. In other countries, think tanks are very common; they exist to contribute to democratic debate. Indeed, in the US, they are very much better financed. I come back to my previous point: work is going on through the review by the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee and through the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists, who, for example, made some changes earlier this year to tighten up the definition of incidental exception. We need to be careful where noble Lords are taking us on the matter.

Public Duty Costs Allowance

Lord Bird Excerpts

Monday 21st November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I do not know how to answer that question. I return to the point I made at the beginning: ex-Prime Ministers have a special position in public life. This is not as it is in other countries, where ex-Prime Ministers often have substantial salaries, houses and things. I have been around the world and noticed that. We have a public duty costs allowance, which is incurred only when the former Prime Minister fulfils public duties linked to their former office. That is carefully reimbursed by the Cabinet Office, when it has evidence that the money has been properly spent.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Is it possible that we could get back some of the cost of running a Prime Minister when we realise that they can make millions of pounds after they leave office? Mr Blair and Mr Cameron are worth a few bob, and I know Mr Johnson will be. We could try to get 10% or 20% of that money back in the public coffers.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I do not agree with that, although I am a big reader of the Big Issue.

House of Lords: Appointments

Lord Bird Excerpts

Wednesday 18th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, if I may express an opinion, as I have already said, I am very aware of the feelings on the Benches of Her Majesty’s Opposition about the case for refreshment of those Benches. I will say no more than that, but I think it is a strong case.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Can I make a very unpopular suggestion? There is one way that we could really sort this out: that it does not matter how you get into the House; we should base it on what you do in the House. To me, that is the most important thing, and I think we have a lot of people in this House who do not actually engage. Why do we not ask them to move on, so that the other people who want to do something with this mighty House and this mighty democracy can get on with it?

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, the whole House has great affection for the noble Lord, Lord Bird, but I would say that there are many Members of your Lordships’ House who may not come frequently but, when they do, your Lordships listen very carefully to their voice.

Lobbying of Ministers

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Bird]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they will take to ensure there is transparency about the lobbying of ministers.

[The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Lord True) (Con)]

My Lords, the statutory register of consultant lobbyists ensures the transparency of those seeking to lobby Ministers and Permanent Secretaries on behalf of a third party. The register complements departments’ long-standing policy of publishing details of Ministers’ meetings with external organisations on GOV.UK on a quarterly basis.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

That is a very good Answer, my Lords. The only problem is that we have evidence over the past few months of ex-Prime Ministers, ex-Ministers and MPs trying to influence in a way that undermines democracy. If you really want to destroy democracy, destroy belief in the Government and their ability to hold their head up and not participate in the pork barrel. If you want to get on in this world, there is an old saw: “Get yourself a government contract”. The past few months have been abysmal.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, whom I respect greatly and who has been in my office a number of times advocating for causes in which he believes, makes some exaggerated charges. It is extremely dangerous to peddle around the view that there is endemic corruption in politics in this country, whoever is in office.

Devolved Governments: Public Expenditure

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 20th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My noble and learned friend is right that we need to remind Scottish citizens that a great deal of the funding that goes into Scotland comes from here. We now have a Minister for the Union, Michael Gove, and his job is to keep reminding all the devolved Administrations that we are one union. A very senior civil servant, Sue Gray—of whom some of you may have heard—is the Permanent Secretary for the Union, and we are encouraging engagement at, for example, local authority level on a much more frequent basis.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, we are talking about the spending of government money, and I congratulate the Government on the fact that, on 26 December 2021, although it did not get a lot of press, they decided to spend £360 million—for which I and others had been asking—on homeless prevention grants, so that people were not put out because they had lost their job due to Covid-19.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for his support. Homelessness is one of society’s most complicated problems and we are very committed to trying to minimise it.

Homes: Affordability

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2021 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Bird]

That this House takes note of the combined impact of (1) the end of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, (2) the reduction in Universal Credit, and (3) the upcoming rise in fuel prices, on people’s ability to afford to stay in their homes.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, it seems very apposite to try to bring together the things that we see at this moment that seem to be causing a lot of anxiety among people with very little—these are people who are on the edge, just about managing and just about coping—around fuel, the cost of heating, and the cutting of the universal credit top-up which, noble Lords will remember, was the cut that Mr Osborne made to the universal credit. The £20, in fact, was only trying to go back to an earlier time and therefore was not a top-up; it was a reintroduction of something that had been cut in the days of austerity. When you look at that and at the end of furlough, you have— and I am sorry to use the cliché that everybody talks about—a “perfect storm”. It is a perfect storm for hundreds of thousands—millions—of people who are caught in this kind of trap where their costs are going up.

I am not really going to dwell on that this afternoon, because I know that the forensic evidence will come from what I would call my “forensic posse”—the other people who are going to talk about this—and they are much, much better informed on that. What I would really like to talk about is why it is that, every now and then, we seem to have these arguments about the very difficult circumstances that many people—the poorest among us—find themselves in. Why is it that, post Covid, we are still in an emergency but are trying to pretend that we are in a recovery?

On Monday of this week, I was on a TV programme that dealt with all of these issues, among other things. It was mainly lots of people complaining to the programme—I was on the panel—about the fact that they were just about managing. In one way, they could pay their rent, but it might mean that they could not feed their children; or they could feed their children but they could not turn on the heating. That was the kind of situation. Anyway, I was on this panel, but I did not particularly like it because it was a very rigid piece of television, and I thought, “Give me ‘Question Time’ any time”—because then you can overtalk and interrupt people and be a big mouth, which I obviously relish the opportunity to be.

I got home at about 11 pm and somebody had sent me a letter. I do not want to upset the House, but it was a “Dear f-off John” letter, if noble Lords will forgive me for using that phrase. It was one of those “John, who the hell are you?” letters. It was a long litany of complaints about the programme and our avoidance of the major issue. The major issue was that if we actually educated people; if we gave education to everybody in Britain from the first moment to the last moment; if we gave it free to everybody; then we could educate people out of poverty; we could raise people out of poverty; we could, in a sense, get rid of the whole idea of people just about managing. Anyway, at the end of the letter, I had to agree, because it is exactly what I believe.

I believe very strongly that we are always going round in a circle, dealing with the problems of people in need. The reason for that is that we never take our social money and spend it wisely. We always spend the social money to just about keep people in a kind of permanent state of emergency, where they are just about managing. We live in a low-wage economy; our banks are frightened of lending to businesses, so that is why our banks lend 80% of their money for the buying and selling of property. They lend only 20% for the creation of new businesses, new opportunities and new investments, which would lift a whole slew of people out of poverty and into opportunity, hope and a better world, where they would not have to keep worrying about whether they can feed their children or turn on the gas or turn on the light.

We live in an underinvested world, and it is about time we woke up to the fact that the only reason that there are people on the edge like this is that we did not invest in their social education; we did not invest in their early education. When we fail 35% of our children in school, where do we find them? We find them down among the lowest paid. You only have to have a £5 benefit change and those people are in great need. Twenty pounds means nothing to me and nothing to anybody else in this House, but it means a shedload if you are on universal credit. If you look at the people who are stuck on universal credit, they will be the people who have not been invested in to get them out of poverty. They have not been given the skills or opportunity; they have not been given the chance to move away from need and poverty. That is why £20 means so much to them.

Returning to the letter, I thought to myself, “The cheeky git, he’s stolen all my lines”—but he inspired me once again to return to the House and say that the real, important thing to me is how we can stop this cycle. How can we stop the fact that, in a year’s time, or two years’ time or five years’ time or 10 years’ time, we are always going to have to address the problems faced by the most impoverished and, often, the most uneducated people? These are the people who did not get the educational chances, the social chances, or the hope given to many people who pass through school and get the chance of moving on.

The problem with Governments—and every Government have done this; I have been at this now for 30 years, from the days of Margaret Thatcher and John Major to the days of Mr Boris and Mr Sunak—is that they all do exactly the same thing. They give you a small amount of money—a token—and say, “This goes towards solving the problem”. Every Minister has said this to me. I say, “What are you doing about that?” and they say, “Well, we’ve got an initiative going—we’ve got this brilliant initiative. We do know that this problem is really deep—but here’s a fraction of the money to solve the problem”.

I said on the television this morning, when I was asked what one of the problems was, “One of the problems is that we have hundreds of thousands of people—500,000 people—who haven’t paid their mortgage or rent and are likely to be the new homeless”. And what do the Government give us? God bless them, they give us £65 million—and it has to pass through local authorities, which probably want to spend it in a different way—to address another problem. The other problem is that there is £650 million of arrears in the country, and it is going up.

I love Governments—they are wonderful human beings who know how to throw a dog a bone. But they do not give the whole meal. It is a bit like arriving at a forest fire and getting out your little fire extinguisher. We need to move beyond that. We need to get Governments to be a bit more honest and stop saying, “I tell you what: we’ll put on some initiative and we’ll be able to say at the end of the debate that we are addressing that problem, even though we’re addressing only 5% of the problem”. That is one of the problems. There are many, many problems.

As I have said in this House before, I think we are very much like we were in 1940 when Winston Churchill had to borrow the future—an enormous amount of the future—to defeat the Nazis. Imagine what it would have been like if in 1940 the Government had said, “We can’t do that; we cannot cause future generations to carry our debts”. Every change that has taken place in the world in the time of our democracy has always been about people borrowing the future. We borrowed the future in 1940 and paid off the last bit in 2007. I was 61 when we stopped paying for a war that I was not in and that ended a year before I was born. And that goes for most of us. It was an enormous amount of money but, if we had not done it, we would have dismantled society and created enormous problems for ourselves. We would have created Nazis over here, with all their racist rubbish. But we decided that we would stand and fight, and with our Russian cousins and our American allies—cousins as well—we took them on and defeated Nazism.

Now we have to defeat poverty. We cannot poodle around with poverty. Poverty is coming our way in a way that is much bigger than it has ever been before. It will not just be the people I have been working for during the last 30 years: the people who have been socially engineered to fail; who had a bad beginning at school; who had poor parenting or, when they went to school, whose parents did not realise it was a great opportunity for them to move away from poverty and who ended up at the end of their school lives and you would not know they had been to school—people like me. The only job they could get was picking up a shovel and digging a hole or laying concrete—and then those jobs disappeared, and a lot of those people who failed in that welfare state experiment became the underclass, the poor, and then passed it on to another generation. That is where you normally get your homeless from.

I work with 17,000 people a year. My organisation is all over the country and the world. It works with hundreds of thousands of people. Very few of them are in homelessness just because they do not have a home; it is largely because all sorts of other things have gone wrong before they got there.

In my opinion, if we do not recognise that we are in a continuing emergency and are not yet in recovery, or are in only a partial recovery, and unless we invest in saving them, people will slip en masse into homelessness over the next year or two, as soon as the courts can process those half a million people who are behind in rent and will possibly be evicted. Perhaps I should not say it, but the Rowntree Trust thinks the number is not half a million but 1.5 million. So I am actually trying to be nice by saying that it is only half a million. I am trying to be nice to the Government and say, “Come on, lads, give us enough money to keep people in their homes, because if they slip into homelessness they will cost you twice or three times the amount of money it would cost to keep them in their homes”. That is the kind of stuff I am talking about.

Looking at these indications that, once again, we are dealing with those people, I would say that, if I were in the Government, the first thing I would do is step back and look at what works, do an audit of it and then step back and work out how we can spend our social intervention money not on keeping people in crisis for the whole of their lives but on getting them out. It cannot be done by simply slinging £64 million at a problem that needs £640 million. We have to get away from that tokenism, because that is one of the most dishonest things that every Government I have known have done. I will not tell your Lordships how many Prime Ministers I have spoken to who have thrown crumbs in the direction of the poor and not delivered.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I thank the Minister for his response. He makes me feel a bit like the young woman who I encountered in Trafalgar Square recently. She asked me for some money and I opened my wallet and handed her a tenner. She saw I had another tenner and she took both of them and ran down the road. I did not manage to catch her. The Minister is making me feel very much like that today and I am sorry that I have to assume that posture.

I have just realised that all we really need to do is to invent a new ministry. I propose that I become the Minister. We will call it the ministry for those who fall through the safety net. If we had a ministry that addressed those people who fall through the safety net then we could see that whatever the Government do, however clever and astute they are with their money, an enormous amount of people fall through the safety net.

At the end of this year or when a suitable time comes, I really would like it if people pointed to me and said: “John Bird, you are an idiot because you cried wolf and you didn’t have to. The Government were going doing everything and everything was going to fall into place and Lord Bilimoria’s wonderful new Great Britain or—whatever we call ourselves now—the UK, was going to happen.” I would love that, but the indications are that the £64 million that the Government have given to support people in arrears has been given to local authorities. Local authorities will spend some of that on existing housing and on people who are having problems with housing. The £360 million—or in that area—which is going to be spent is once more going to be spent on people who are already homeless.

The problem we have is that we have two kinds of homelessness. We now have the carefully social-engineered homelessness—people living on the streets and in desperate need. The Government have shown, in the same way as the Administration that the noble Lord, Lord Young, was a member of did 30 years ago did, that they are beginning to seriously address that. I think there is evidence of that.

I am not talking about the people who have been socially engineered, like me, to fall homeless at some time in their life. I am saying: what do we do with the half a million who are behind with their mortgages and their rent? They are going to be presenting themselves at local authorities at some stage because they will have been through the courts, which will evict them because there is no impediment to them being made homeless even though they were made homeless by Covid-19. I will end there.

I should like to conclude on one point. You could accuse me of being a little snidey here, or a bit of a simpleton. In 2009, I was asked by Mr Cameron, by a circuitous route, to stand for the Mayor of London. I debated that: did I have to join the Conservative Party, because I have always been a Cross-Bencher? No—I decided I would not. When I did so, a particular gentleman who now runs the Cabinet and is the premier member of the Government, a Mr Boris Johnson, jumped in the air because I was the last person between him and becoming the Mayor of London—and you know that if it was not for him becoming the Mayor of London, he would not be in the position he is in now. We know that. When I saw Mr Johnson immediately after he was elected, he came and put his arms around me in the green room—unfortunately there were no witnesses—and said, “Thank you, John, for the job”.

[Noble Lords]

You were responsible!

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bird (CB)]

It is my fault. Sorry about that. What did I say? I said, “Do me a favour then”. He said, “What’s that?”. I said, “Remember the homeless”. Now I want Mr Boris Johnson to remember the homeless —but not just those who have already manifested themselves on the streets and in the hostels already, who are suffering and having a horrible life, but the 300,000 children who are going to come down the road. That is what I want him to address. He owes me, and I am calling it in.

Motion agreed.

Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill [HL]

Lord Bird Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 25th June 2021 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Bird]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, I would like you to imagine how you would approach a Government, any Government, who always say, when you speak to them—they have to say it, God bless them—that they take the future into account. I spoke recently to quite a number of MPs and members of the Government. As always, they said, “Actually, what we are doing is probably enough”. I come along with a Bill that is nicked—stolen from our Welsh colleagues and made slightly different—and I say, “Well, actually we have to do more with the future, because the future is always being postponed.”

This is the problem that I have. How do I get the Conservative Government to look seriously at the future, in the way that the Welsh are seriously looking at the future, at the same time as trying to keep them onside, befriending them, being nice to them, being kind and thoughtful and never, ever telling them off? We know that as soon as you tell a politician off, they close their ears, in the same way that I close my ears when people tell me off—I am no different from anybody else. So, I have a problem. I want this Bill to go through and to be about the future today. I do not want the future to be continuously put off.

In my journeys around the United Kingdom, I talk to MPs, to charities and to local authorities—I talk to everybody. I am a bit like the Queen Mother; I go around shaking hands. I do not open supermarkets—nobody has asked me to do that yet—but I am a busy little lad and I go around. On one occasion quite recently, I was with a new MP—someone who came in in 2019 somewhere in the north of England, with a strong political record and a complete commitment to the well-being of their constituents. This young lady said to me, “What is your Bill going to do for my constituent who comes up to me in absolute terror or with an absolute problem? What is your Bill going to do?” I said, “Nothing”, and she said, “Well, why would I support your Bill, why would I vote for your Bill?” I said, “Ah! What would have happened if your predecessor, or your pre-pre-predecessor, had addressed the problems in the first instance that your constituent has to face now?”

Many of the problems that people face in their constituencies, and I face in my life, did not come from the future; they came from the past. In a way, had we had a future generations Bill 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago, we might have hesitated before we did certain things. In fact, we could rename my Bill. It does not have to be the Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill; we could just call it the “Hindsight Bill”. Why do we not have a Minister for Hindsight? Very clever—somebody who can read the future or who can say, “Hang on, why are we always doing things that come back to bite us in the rear at some later stage?”

For instance, would we have charged our children to go to university? Would we have done that almost beautiful act of them and us-ism, increasing the divide between them and us? Many people I meet would love to go to university but are frightened because they do not have what the public school boys or grammar school boys have, or whoever it may be, whose mum and dad have got a bit of money put aside, maybe property and all that. Now, university is not everything, but the message was sent out, just after we rescued the banks, just after 2010, at the time of the coalition. Had there been a future generations Bill on the statute book then, maybe we would have said, “Hang on, what are you doing here? You are trying to solve an immediate problem, but you are being oppressed by the needs and demands of today and you are throwing tomorrow away.”

Would we, for instance, have closed down our mental health institutions in the mid-1980s? People like me, even before the Big Issue, were saying “Hang on, do you know what is going to happen? If you close the mental health institutions and have care in the community”—it looked as thin on the ground then as it does now—“you will have an enormous increase in people on the streets; the streets will fill up and the prisons will fill up.” If you go into a prison, you meet people who, 30 or 40 years ago, probably would have been in the mental institutions. That is a major problem. Being mentally ill now, you are worse off than in the days of the mid-19th century when the poet John Clare was locked up. He was first put in a private institution and then a public one.

You have people wandering around the streets. When the Big Issue started, we were inundated with Jesus Christs and Napoleons on the streets. We even had a few admirals as well, I assure you—I do not know whether they were admirals; they did not look like admirals, and they certainly did not look like Napoleon or Jesus Christ. I had people coming up to me and telling me that they were angels. That was probably about 50% of the people we were working with in 1991, because in 1987, I believe, the institutions were closed down.

With a future generations Bill, you would have something that I find missing in modern politics. When I came into the House of Lords—forgive me for saying this—I was chased hither and thither by Barons and Baronesses who said, “Look, there’s this problem, and this problem, and this problem. What will you do about this? What will you do about the homeless sleeping in stations?” All the time I was being pushed and pushed. I said, “Look, there are millions of people in this world obsessed with the crisis of now. They will continue to be obsessed with it, because the crisis of now never gets solved, because we do not think about the future.” I have come into the House of Lords to do nothing more than prevent poverty forming in the first instance, and not be controlled by worshipping again and again at the altar of the accomplished facts—that you have to do this. Of course, because we are always responding to emergencies, we think that that proves our humanity, but actually it does not. We cannot just keep responding to the emergencies; we must do much more.

I apologise, I realise that I have 10 minutes and I have only started. How are your Lordships? I hope that you had a nice Friday. I walked here. I walk everywhere; that is why I am so young and fit—and only 75. If you sit in the House and are not really a politician, you notice that we spend an enormous amount of time untangling legislation from former times. We are always undoing it. If you look at the facts, about 70% of the time of the House is spent unravelling the damage done by poverty—why have we never done this?—the damage done by lack of biodiversity and by industrialisation, and the damage done by closing down the mines, steelworks and heavy engineering jobs, largely up north, without putting anything in their place. Forty or 50 years later, we are still suffering the damage from the fact that we did not look at how the future would pan out when we did these things. The most graphic example was when I stood with many people who were mentally ill and brought them into the House of Commons 20 years ago. It was incredibly moving to be here and meet people who said, “I wish we had not done it.”

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

Before I call the next speaker, I remind all noble Lords that I clearly stated that all of us in this Chamber, when we are not speaking, should be wearing face masks. I ask noble Lords to respect the House and everybody else and to wear masks when not speaking. I call the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I thank noble Lords for getting behind this debate. It has been very interesting; I have learned an awful lot. I learned that I am anti-democratic in nature from my good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. I remind him that those railways that were built ran into the sand in 1936, when Stanley Baldwin had to rescue them and nationalise the railways, the first big industry that was nationalised. I am also really glad that the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, brought in Lenin, because I can now remind the House that Lenin said—appositely, in my opinion:

“The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them”.


There is an element—is there not?—that if we rely on the market in the way that things go, we will move inexorably towards a much worse world, in which we fail 37% of our children at school and fail when it comes to biodiversity. Our consciousness of the environment over the past 50 years has increased enormously, yet 50% of all the damage ever done has been done in the past 50 years. It took us thousands of years, up to 1970, to do half the damage. In spite of our having committed Governments, reports and thousands of organisations created to look at saving the world for our children, we still have a situation where things are getting worse for our children and the quality of life they lead. A lot of them, including my own children, are led by the domination of their digital separation from each other. There are all sorts of problems like that, and I do not think we can leave it simply to a Government—any Government—to put on a kind of patina, a surface of future.

I have spoken to Ministers and I can tell noble Lords that they nearly always say, “We take the future into account”, and I say, “I’m sorry, I don’t believe you’re really embracing the needs of today”. What is happening with the people I work with, the homeless? I am sorry to return again to something I keep bringing up in this House, but we are facing one of the biggest crises of homelessness we have ever seen. Some 800,000 people are facing eviction because they are behind on their rent and 200,000 children are sofa surfing. That was not the case 30 years ago, when I started the Big Issue. Things got better, and then they got worse. Maybe we are going to leave it to cycles.

I just want to say that I think there is an urgency. I wanted this brought forward with urgency. What my organisation will be doing, and what I will be doing as an individual, is going around the country and stirring the people up, so that we have extra-parliamentary arguments as well as parliamentary arguments, because it is not working. When I go up north, I see the damage that was done because we did not replace the industries we destroyed. Then I look at the mental health situation. I am no defender of mental asylums—I have been to many of them, with members of my family and people I have worked with, and I would never defend them—but it is indefensible to close something and provide nothing to replace it. We did that in the north, we did that in the Midlands, we did that with the coal mines and we did it to our mentally ill. I am sorry to say that we have done it to our children. If a child today presents with mental problems at school, they may wait three, six or nine months to be handled, because there is no real provision for children with mental health problems.

I am also a very badly beaten child; that subject was returned to. I have spent the whole of my life struggling with the problems of what happened to me as a child. I meet ever more children who are going through that now, and that is what I want to avoid. I beg to move.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.