Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2021-06-25
Topic: Housing
John Bird (Crossbench, Unknown): 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.