Lord Bird (CB)

I agree with the Minister 100%. We should never, ever abandon people who are in an emergency. But, if that is what we are doing, and if that is what most of our efforts go into, we will never come to the day when we dismantle poverty. My problem—I have talked about this on a number of occasions in the House—is around social housing. I had an argument with a leading Member of this House, who was in social housing for many decades. I made the point to him, “Isn’t it interesting and damning that, if you give somebody social housing in current times, there’s a distinct possibility that their children and their children’s children—and, probably, their children’s grandchildren—will live in poverty?” Because social housing produces only in the region of 2%, 3% or 4% of the social mobility of finishing your levels and getting into university or an apprenticeship. Social housing is not a route out of poverty; it is, in a way, a stumbling block. We will not move forward until we revolutionise social housing and go back to the kind of social housing that I had when we moved from the slums of Notting Hill and into a Catholic orphanage. We then left that and went into social housing in Fulham, where we had sociable housing: the people there included police officers and a trainee teacher. I have talked about this on countless occasions. We had our first parking warden; we did know what to do with him, because most of us did not have a car. The point is that there was a social element, including the disabled and the old. The problem is that, because social housing has lost its sociability and has become a place of refuge and deep need—which we cannot turn against—we have people who remain for ever in an emergency. I thank the noble Lords, Lord Storey and Lord Hampton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, because they argued for targets far more eloquently than me—this is my first amendment, so I am getting used to it and learning on the job. The point is that targets will get us thinking about those kinds of levels. What do we have to do next to get people out of poverty? We have to go beyond the food, the uniforms and the social housing. We have to get to the enemies of the people who pass through poverty, because they are “mind-forg’d manacles”. I am not decrying this, but I had an argument a few years ago when they were saying, “Why don’t we list all the ingredients that go into a Mars bar, a KitKat, a Twix or a bottle of Coca-Cola?”, so that people would read them and say, “I’m not going to eat that”. The “mind-forg’d manacles” of poverty mean that you will go for the Coca-Cola whether or not it is good for you. These are the things that we need to do to dismantle poverty. One of the simplest ways is to concentrate the Government by bringing in all the philosophical, intellectual, cultural and social reasons why people are caught in poverty.