Lord Bird: I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, on this very simple—you could almost say dumb, in the best sense of the word—concatenation of a Bill, which brings together things that should have been brought together hundreds of years ago, or certainly since the creation of the welfare state. I will give an example which is not from the area we are talking about. About 20 years ago, in...
Lord Bird: While we are talking about poverty and children, can I ask a very cheeky question? Why is it that the Government are punishing seven members of the Labour Party who have put the party behind the interests of the people? Why are they doing this? This is a very disgraceful thing to be doing so early in their Administration.
Lord Bird: I welcome the new Government. It is a great relief, I have to say. We all need a change, and we hope the change will lead to the kind of delivery that we need socially in this country. But I have a problem. My problem is that over the years I have dealt with many Governments who have come in with many promises, and most of them leave not as new brooms but as old brooms. Therefore, I worry and...
Lord Bird: I do not want to be a pain in the rear, but I feel like one because I want to talk about history. I wish the Americans, the British, the CIA and all that had not screwed up Mosaddegh, overthrown him and brought back the Shah. That led exactly to where we are today. When will we start learning from our history? We seem to forget it. We are the products of these problems.
Lord Bird: My Lords, would the Government agree with me that there is a direct relationship between crime and poverty? What are we doing, really, about all the things that are happening in the countryside that are stripping people of jobs? It is very, very difficult to get a job in the countryside that pays enough for you to live on the wage. It is a low-wage economy.
Lord Bird: I am not against social housing—I am for social housing—but I want to break out of the situation whereby, if you get into social housing, you tend to fall behind everybody else. On what the Minister is saying about how they are going to change the requirements on social landlords, social landlords should be turning their tenants into people who can have a larger life and can get out of...
Lord Bird: I just want to say that I used Sure Start. In spite of appearances, I was a very young father, and it was the most wonderful thing. I lived on the largest housing estate in south London and Sure Start was absolutely brilliant, so I am 100% behind it.
Lord Bird: I agree with the noble Lord. Children do need a secure home, but the real problem is that all the conditions that lead you to need social housing mean that you never have a full life. I say to anybody in this House: try living in social housing, and then try to get to university or into a skilled job. That very rarely happens; that is the only problem. For me, the problem is not that social...
Lord Bird: To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to address the root causes of child poverty across the United Kingdom.
Lord Bird: I welcome the chance to sort out the problems of poverty in an hour and a half. I welcome the idea that, in such a short amount of time, we can sort out the problem that a third of all our children are in or around poverty—that is 4 million children in the United Kingdom. I alert people to my belief that, in the seven or eight years I have been in the House of Lords, I have never come to a...
Lord Bird: God bless you, because I was running out of time.
Lord Bird: I love democracy. I was born in the London Irish slums of Notting Hill, but we moved to Fulham. On my road, I fell into being a friend of a guy whose family, like mine, came from Ireland. His father had accumulated a number of jobs. He was a very clever guy, even though, like my family, he was ill educated. He became very wealthy and bought his house, so he had a house in Fulham Broadway at a...
Lord Bird: Forgive me—I am now going to stop—but I wanted to move on to say that this is why I am campaigning to change the way we deal with poverty. We have a situation in which eight government departments are dealing with poverty, but we do not have a convergence to dismantle it. Some 40% of government expenditure is spent on poverty; we really need to change it. I am calling for the creation of...
Lord Bird: While we are at it, can we congratulate PwC for taking people from prison? I think that is a great sign. We must remember that people from ethnic minorities are overrepresented in the prison population.
Lord Bird: Surely the point is that a Labour Government created the right to buy, and all the work was done under a Labour Government, and then it was implemented by the Tories, but they cut it in half and did not allow the replacement of social housing, meaning that we have the present crisis that we have.
Lord Bird: With eight different government departments dealing with poverty, is not it time that we actually co-ordinated our dismantling of poverty by bringing in a government department that deals exclusively with poverty prevention?
Lord Bird: I want to talk about the 9 million people who the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, spoke of as being economically inactive—I think it was 9 million or just over, if I got that right. It is interesting—is it not?—that, if you look at what a bank does with its money, you will find that 80% of its transactions are all about the buying and selling of property. That means that 20% is about business....
Lord Bird: I want to make a few comments. The renaissance should actually start somewhere else. It should start—I have certain experience with this—with all the naughty boys who later become naughtier boys and men; they should be addressed and supported. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, and I have talked about this. What we are largely doing with our young now, although there are some...
Lord Bird: I do not meet many people in the course of my life who are not influenced by what is happening in Gaza. I can honestly say that most of the people I meet and talk to, people from all walks of life, are appalled at what Israel is doing. Is somebody going to tell Israel about the damage it is doing not only to its own people but to people throughout the world? Jewish people throughout the...
