Homes: Affordability — House of Lords, 2021-10-28
Topic: Housing
John Bird (Crossbench, Unknown): 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".