Policy-making: Future Generations’ Interests — House of Lords, 2019-06-20
Topic: Housing
John Bird (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I should like to begin this discussion about future generations with an observation about myself. I started my social intervention work very much in the world of emergency responses to a social crisis called homelessness. I spent an enormous amount of time working on trying to perfect my ability to be a damn good intervener in the crisis of homelessness as it presented itself on the streets of London and other cities, and subsequently in other parts of the world. I began at the sharp end of things, where the problem presented itself at its most acute. People were on the streets for myriad reasons. I would say, "Let’s remove them from the streets but, first of all, let’s stop them committing crime". We had to get them away from wrongdoing through shoplifting, prostitution or aggressive begging. That is where I started, and that is important because I want to take the House on a journey to show why I ended up with the future when, at one stage, I was very much in the present To some extent, the only reason I was in the present was because the past had failed. The people you met on the streets were those who had accumulated all sorts of problems in their pasts. That presented itself as an inability to find a place to live and an inability to function in the economy, have a family with children and to lead a rich and healthy life. The crisis was where I began: in a very myopic, small-minded but essential place to be, because that is where the crisis is. You could say that I was a kind of one-man Médecins Sans Frontières. I revolted against many other people who were working with the homeless as though they were very difficult—almost as though they represented a cocktail of social failure. They were dealing with that, but I said that the first thing we had to do was get them out of the sticky stuff. We had to get them away from crime and wrongdoing. We had to take them away from violating other people to violate themselves because many of them had drink and drug problems As I reported in the article I wrote for House magazine, I was asked by the Times what I was going to do after 10 years of the Big Issue. I said that I was kind of sick of continuously mending broken clocks. What I wanted to do was to prevent those clocks breaking in the first instance. That is a bit of rhetoric because it was so difficult to talk to anyone about prevention. It was very difficult to talk to Her Majesty’s Government, of whatever political shade, when you said, "Why do we not move more towards prevention? Why do we not put an enormous amount of money and effort into prevention? Why do we not try to prevent the problem happening so that we do not have to clean it up?" Anyway, after many years I developed a methodology called PECC—prevention, emergency, coping and cure. It was the simplest and dumbest methodology; all it meant was that when you encountered a social intervener, you could say, "What are they? Are they a preventer, are they emergency, are they coping or are they cure? Or are they all of those?" Very few organisations cover them all. Some 80% of the money spent on social intervention goes on emergencies. Human beings are brilliant when things go wrong. We are so clever, but our entire philosophical thinking is based on responding to the horse when it has suddenly left the stable I am sorry about this rather long and turgid introduction—noble Lords will know all this about me—but I was cheesed off by that. When I entered the House of Lords I said that I had come to this place to dismantle poverty. That is a bit like saying that I came here to give us a permanent summer and we will all live wonderful lives. I came here to prevent poverty and to dismantle it. I can tell noble Lords that no Administration has ever got that one right. Most Administrations are always ducking and diving, bobbing and weaving. I sit on the Cross Benches and take my Cross Bench-ness very seriously. All my friends are rank Tories—sorry—or divine Labourites. I mix and match with everyone. I do not really care about the nomenclature of people’s political positions, largely because in my work I have been hurt and helped by the right and hurt and helped by the left. It comes and goes, but I came here to dismantle poverty If you analyse the work of this House and the other place, you can see from the figures, which are not mine, that around 70% of our time, effort, energy and resources goes into the question of poverty. When we look at poverty, in this country we might be talking about between 20% and 22% of adults and 33% of our children. We are talking about a minority, but an incredibly large one. The world works for quite a number of people, certainly the majority, but that section—we are hyper- ventilating about how large it is—takes up 70% of our work. It ties every one of us up in one way or another. We worry about the size of that minority I do not think we can find a way of doing anything about poverty unless we reinvent the future and bring it forward to today. Unless we can find a methodology and the laws to go with it, I do not think we are going anywhere. If anybody asks me, "Having started in poverty, why do you now go on about climate change and all sorts of erudite things for the person on the streets suffering?", I say that if we want to stop having our streets filled up with the most needy, we need to embrace tomorrow now as well as doing the Médecins Sans Frontières thing—creating brilliant emergency responses. We have to engage with the future I was blessed by wandering around on many occasions and sleeping—rough, I have to say—in virtually all the shires. That is how I got to know Great Britain, as it was then, before it became the United Kingdom. I spent quite a bit of time in Wales. I like Wales, because—